The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (8 page)

TOTO, for all of its failings, eventually made Bluestein and his colleagues famous beyond the science world. The device was the inspiration for the fictional machine “Dorothy” featured in the 1996 movie
Twister,
which made storm chasers like Bluestein (who was a technical consultant on the film) famous. The film prompted a surge in enrollment at OU, where suddenly everyone wanted to be a storm chaser. At the same time, tornadoes became a burgeoning tourist industry in Oklahoma, as guides led visitors from all over the world on storm-chasing expeditions across the state in the springtime.

Bluestein had mixed feelings about this sudden surge of interest. On the one hand, he loved the fact that the public had begun to engage in the important science of storms—which meant more funding for projects to better understand the genesis of tornadoes and to create better warning systems. But he was unnerved by tourists and amateur storm chasers. Suddenly the empty country roads in Oklahoma were as packed as the Massachusetts Turnpike at rush hour—and he suspected many of the weekend chasers didn’t appreciate how truly dangerous it could be to put yourself in the path of a tornado.

Bluestein wasn’t a daredevil, a fact that sometimes irked his young students, who were hungry to get as close as possible to the storms they chased. He’d had one close call in 1991, when he got within a mile of the tornado and suddenly it turned on him. He was so close he saw the vortex blow a house clean off its foundation right in front of him—sending a bolt of fear through his heart. He survived the storm and came out of it with valuable information, but he vowed never to get that close to a tornado again. He had documented a tornado with winds of more than 280 miles per hour—then categorized as an F5. Nobody had ever seen one with winds that strong before.

Over the years, Bluestein hadn’t slowed down in his never-ending pursuit of the storm. Every spring he and his students would travel as much as 10,000 miles, driving their mobile Doppler radar across Oklahoma and the central plains chasing ever-elusive tornadoes. He’d noticed that the storms seemed to be getting bigger and deadlier—though he wasn’t sure, since records had been virtually nonexistent until the late 1950s. Who knew what their ancestors had seen? Especially in Oklahoma, which had been a wide-open empty space for hundreds of years until the land run of 1889 put it on the path to statehood. While the Native Americans who lived there had amassed wisdom about how to pacify the demon clouds, as they thought of them, their sacred rituals had never been shared outside their tribes.

In 1999 Bluestein and his team were tracking the epic tornado that wiped out a large swath of Moore when they recorded winds of 302 miles per hour—the fastest wind speed ever recorded near the surface of the earth. Bluestein hadn’t recorded another tornado that strong since, but plenty of others were almost equally devastating. He began to notice odd things about the storms—how one year would produce dozens of strong tornadoes, followed by a year when there were almost none. But he couldn’t explain why this was. For all the time and money put into studies and equipment, scientists still knew remarkably little about what made tornadoes form.

Like others, he wondered about the effects of global warming. Could an increase in the earth’s temperature be responsible for creating ever-deadlier storms, especially in Oklahoma, where the warming of the tropical air coming off the Gulf of Mexico might create more instability when it collided with cooler air coming from Canada? But who was to say that rising temperatures up north, which were contributing to the melting of the ice over the North Pole, might not be weakening the cold blasts from the north? It was a question that Bluestein often debated with his colleagues. The truth was they just didn’t know how global warming was impacting the weather in Oklahoma—or whether it was the reason why tornadoes seemed to be getting larger and more inconsistent every season.

All Bluestein could do was press forward. That Sunday night he and his team had had a major breakthrough—right in their own backyard. They had driven their mobile Doppler radar truck with their RaXpol radar close to the tornado that had hit the ground northeast of Norman. It had produced the best data set they had ever gotten on a tornado—a full-scale X-ray of the funnel as it was born, capturing the evolution of the competing updrafts and downdrafts that contributed to the rotation and eventual development of the vortex. Those valuable clues could help unlock the mystery of why some supercell thunderstorms produced tornadoes and others didn’t. It could potentially boost meteorologists’ ability to predict storms and increase warning times in the future. It was a triumph that made the long days of chasing storms worth it.

It had been a late night, and Bluestein had woken up a little groggy. He checked the forecast and saw that they were in for another wild day of storms. As he prepared to meet up with the graduate students who would accompany him on the chase, he considered where to go. The forecast suggested some of the strongest storms would hit in the central part of the state, south of Oklahoma City, right around Moore. He dreaded the thought of trying to drive his mobile Doppler into the area. He knew the streets would be crowded with local news chasers and amateurs, who drove wildly and paid little attention to the rules of the road. Looking at the forecast, he saw there was a strong potential for storms to the south, and so he made the decision that his team should head south on Interstate 35. If it proved to be fruitless, they could always drive back and position closer to Moore.

W
hen I was growing up, it sometimes felt like Gary England was everywhere, an omnipresent, benevolent deity who popped up at the mere mention of a storm. His picture was branded on tornado safety brochures handed out at schools, libraries, and grocery-store checkout lanes and regularly plastered on billboards all over Oklahoma City and its suburbs, looming larger than life over the roads. His grin, so familiar one could almost hear his folksy twang and the happy chuckle that often interrupted forecasts on sunny days, was set against an ominous backdrop of storm clouds and lightning. “Oklahoma’s #1 meteorologist,” the ads read. “The most trusted name in weather . . . There when it matters most.”

To outsiders the billboards must have seemed an odd juxtaposition: the smiling weatherman seemingly giddy in the midst of the apocalypse, like the mythical Wizard of Oz behind the storms. He was such a cult hero in Oklahoma during my childhood that many found it hard to separate him from the storms he covered. To some he simply
was
the weather, the human face and voice of the atmospheric drama they were subjected to every spring.

England didn’t particularly like to be associated with terrible storms that killed people and left unspeakable damage in their wake, but he couldn’t deny that it was the weather and its mystery that truly animated him. He never felt more alive than when he was trying to outwit Mother Nature and keep people safe. He was almost always plotting and anticipating the next big storm. Being a meteorologist was more than a full-time job: It was his calling, a religion. The weather was his life—and in many ways that was what we had come to expect of those who dared to predict the path of the next big storm.

To be a television meteorologist in Oklahoma, it was not enough to be comfortable on camera or to possess the ability to deliver accurate forecasts. In a part of the country where people feared storms but were also mesmerized and thrilled by them, something more was expected of those entrusted with channeling the wild weather every spring. Our TV weathermen and weatherwomen had to have the smarts and drive of a scientist, the reporting skills of a journalist, and an acutely attuned sense of theater—because for most of us, the storms were a fact of life and a terrible scourge, but they were also a form of entertainment.

When a patch of bad weather blew up, all three major television channels in Oklahoma City would go live with uninterrupted coverage, partly by necessity, as deadly storms put their viewers’ lives at risk, but also driven by demand in a state populated by unabashed storm junkies. The wall-to-wall coverage often had the tense feel of a man-versus-nature disaster movie, a life-and-death battle between the weathermen and the storms they covered. It featured a cast of supporting characters who were part daredevil, part hero as they ventured deep into the violent heart of the storm to give viewers a rare glimpse of the monster at work. The head meteorologists anchoring the coverage back at the station were like Luke Skywalker to the storm’s Darth Vader, brave warriors on the side of good fighting the forces of evil.

England was revered as the founding father of modern-day storm coverage, but there were younger men nipping at his heels. KFOR’s Mike Morgan was his fiercest rival, followed by KOCO’s Damon Lane, the fresh-faced upstart weathering his first spring storm season as the head meteorologist at Channel 5. They were all wizards of the weather, shamans of the storm who could conjure an alchemical combination of wisdom and magic. In them one could detect varying degrees of the fire and brimstone of a Holy Roller preacher desperate to save souls from the blazing pits of hell—a character all too familiar to residents of Bible Belt Oklahoma. But there was also the authoritative tone of an unshakable action-film hero there to save the day, because viewers were looking not just for a forecaster but for a hero, one who would stop at nothing to save them from the storm.

To be a weather savior in Oklahoma took a mix of energy, grit, and courage, along with the ability to manage one’s emotions in the face of killer storms. Oklahoma’s weather gods also had to possess one essential skill that was even harder to attain: the art of knowing the weather so well that they could somehow collect the clues to anticipate its next move. To some of us it seemed almost like magic, though like all good magic it required a great deal of mastery. It was more than just reading radar data. It required an ingrained sense deep within, a gut feeling of what the storm would do.

 • • • 

After four decades and thousands of storms, Gary England was incontestably one of these storm whisperers. More than anyone, he appreciated how far weather forecasting had come, how much technology had changed his profession and added precious minutes to warning times. But as much as he relied on the new radars and technology, he was also a believer in that gut feeling he had about the weather, that suffocating sense he would get that something bad was coming. And as he drove to the KWTV studio that Monday morning, he had an uneasy feeling that this time the worst might happen close to home. A tornado was bad anywhere, but it was a nightmare scenario when it took aim at a city. As he tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and waited for the light to change, eager to get to work and check the radar, England hoped this time his gut was wrong. But it rarely was.

Over the years, he had come to feel a little like a battlefield commander. Most people were aware only of the hours he spent on air every spring warning of approaching storms and then diligently talking through them as they hit, tracking them down to the exact streets where people needed to take shelter or get out of the way. What they didn’t see were the hours he spent off air meticulously gaming out every possible strategy for how to cover the storms. He was not a man with many hobbies. Sometimes he played golf, but he wasn’t any good at it and he often found himself back home thinking about the weather, obsessing over the station’s coverage and considering what it should do differently in the future. His entire life revolved around anticipating that next big storm. And on the days when he knew bad weather was coming, he contemplated the station’s coverage much as a general analyzes the theater of war, plotting where to deploy his “ground troops,” as he called them. They were his army of storm chasers who raced toward a tornado on the ground and in the sky and got as close as possible—sometimes too close, England thought—to gauge its strength and direction so that he could warn the people in its path.

Radar projections often gave a good idea of where the moist, warm air off the Gulf of Mexico would collide with the dry, cool air sweeping down from Canada. The unstable atmosphere triggered by that volatile mix fueled the most ferocious thunderstorms, but the collision line often extended hundreds of miles across the state. England’s job was to determine where to position his chasers, who were outfitted with sophisticated high-definition cameras that streamed live images of what they were seeing in the sky around them back to the station—and ultimately to the world.

In those crucial early moments in the life of a storm, a radar could tell you only so much. It could tell you a tornado
might
be forming but not that it definitely was. While the National Weather Service had posted storm spotters in every county and city in Oklahoma, it was often the live pictures transmitted by storm chasers on one or more of the local television stations that gave the Weather Service the definitive evidence that it was time to declare a tornado warning.

England often pointed to this when critics mocked the station’s coverage as over-the-top or belittled it as nothing more than entertainment. While he conceded that some of his viewers were storm fanatics who loved the thrill of the chase—and sometimes his chasers got caught up in the adrenaline—he truly believed deep in his heart that what he and his team were doing was a genuine public service, and more often than not, people agreed. While it was easy to pinpoint where thunderstorms would erupt and which ones had conditions favorable to producing a tornado, no one knew if a funnel would actually hit the ground or where it would happen. All England could do was examine the storm projections and pre-position his team based on the forecast and his gut sense of what the weather might do. For all of the radars and technology, tornadoes, in some ways, continued to be as mysterious as they had been when he was a little boy.

 • • • 

Gary England was born in 1939 in a small wooden farmhouse with no electricity in Seiling, Oklahoma, the tiniest of tiny towns near the Texas border, where the seemingly endless short-grass prairie had been ravaged by the extreme drought of the Dust Bowl. His parents were farmers struggling to raise livestock off the dry land. The Great Depression had not made things easy. Cash was so tight that his parents paid the doctor who delivered him in the form of live chickens—a transaction that was not uncommon in those days.

Fewer than two hundred people lived in or around Seiling at the time, spread so far apart that one could go for days without seeing anyone. There was not much for a child to do beyond tending livestock and looking up at the sky. And as much as England liked his pigs, what he really loved was the mystery of the weather. There were wild blizzards that dropped what felt like yards of snow, followed by blistering-hot summers with blinding dust storms that could turn the day as dark as night. But it was the spring that most excited him, when ominous thunderheads would suddenly explode, unleashing terrifying winds, torrential rains, jagged zigzags of lightning, and gigantic clumps of hail. The storms were particularly dangerous on the wide-open landscape of the farm, where there was nowhere to escape if you were caught out in the open fields. On more than one occasion when he was a boy, Gary and his family were forced to run for their lives when a storm blew up.

Back then forecasting simply didn’t exist; you had to rely on folk wisdom and superstitions passed down through the generations. If you spotted more furry caterpillars in the fall or your cow’s hair was thicker than usual, a bitter winter was coming, his parents told him. Winds from the east and achy bones meant rain was on the way. In storm season people looked for even more peculiar clues, like flies congregating on the screen door. If the birds stopped singing, it was red alert. Later in life England still clung to those signs from nature, indicators that were often as accurate as any offered by technology.

His first memory of a tornado was in April 1947, when a twister made a direct hit on the nearby town of Woodward. Swirling to life 100 miles away in the Texas panhandle, it was said to be nearly 2 miles wide and had been on the ground for almost an hour as it approached the city just before 9:00
P.M
. Still, there was no warning, and the tornado leveled a hundred city blocks in Woodward, engulfing what remained in a terrible inferno. In all, at least a hundred people died—it was the deadliest tornado in Oklahoma’s history.

Gary was just seven years old at the time, but decades later he still remembered the sky that night before the storm—how the clouds had looked like fuzzy pink egg cartons as the sun set. He learned years later that these were mammatus clouds and those puffs, sinking pouches of air that were usually indicative of a severe thunderstorm. He and his parents had stood outside their home looking at the odd sight, and his father declared in a matter-of-fact voice, “Somewhere tonight, there’s going to be a bad tornado.” A few hours later, after the sun had gone down, Gary was lying in bed wide awake. A light wind opened his curtains, and through his open window he could see his hound dog, Cookie, nosing around the front yard looking for night critters. Suddenly Cookie went rigid, and a few seconds later he let out a low, mournful howl, a sound Gary had never heard before. It scared him to death. Not long after, he heard the sound of sirens screaming in the distance, coming closer and closer. It went on all night, and he barely slept.

Television did not exist in Oklahoma back in 1947, and news and weather coverage on the radio was almost unheard of. So it wasn’t until the next morning, once his father had gone out to investigate, that the family learned about the deadly tornado next door. Later he listened in horror as adults told stories of how its winds were so strong they had literally blown people’s clothes off and police had found naked people impaled on telephone poles. He saw pictures of the aftermath, wagons piled with dead bodies and devastation as far as the eye could see. And he heard terrible stories of how kids had been sucked up by the storm and dropped far away, miraculously alive but never to be reunited with their families. The stories scared him. It was the first time he realized that the weather, as fascinating as it was, could be ruthless.

A few summers later Gary and his father were cleaning out one of their livestock pens when they were hit by the fiercest winds he had ever felt in his life. With dirt and debris flying in the air around them, they both dropped to the ground and clawed their way toward a brick chicken coop, where Gary’s dad threw his body onto his son and grabbed a support beam buried deep in the ground. It seemed to be their only hope of not being sucked away. Hanging on for dear life, he heard the windows around him breaking and opened his eyes just as the building’s tin roof peeled away like the lid of a soup can. Chickens, squawking for dear life, were zooming past his head like “feathered bullets,” he later recalled, and at that moment he believed his young life was over. But then, with a flash of lightning and a ground-shaking crash of thunder, the storm was suddenly over—vanishing almost as quickly as it had come. Covered in a mix of mud, bird droppings, and feathers, he sat there shaking and terrified but thrilled by the storm. His father, who was by then no stranger to the random assaults, was not quite so excited. “Good Lord,” he said to his son. “Will we ever know when these darn things are going to hit?”

At that point the only warning system one could hope for was a police officer parked on the west side of town on stormy days to keep watch for funnels. If the officer spotted a storm coming, he would radio back to the station or, more often in those days, race back to town and blow the emergency siren himself. After that storm Gary and his family moved closer to town. As he grew up, he’d hear the siren go off seconds before the storms hit. He and his family would race to the storm cellar—crawling down into the dark hole in the ground that also served as storage for the dozens of mason jars his mom canned every year. Sometimes he wasn’t sure what was more terrifying—that roar in the distance or the darkness of the cellar, where snakes and black widows with their deadly venom lurked.