Field science deserves a better probe. Tim is now awakened to the possibility that he might be the guy who can build it. More than that, he thinks he could be the one to get it inside a tornado. It’s the kind of pipe dream that your average chaser might alight on in a moment of inspiration and then let smolder and fade.
That’s not Tim, though. The laboratory at work is brimming with the right technology. He has already learned how to measure the blast wave of an explosion. What’s so different about the wind? In fact, he realizes he’s been training to build just such a device since he was a little boy, hunched over old radios in his bedroom. The question isn’t “Am I capable?” The question is “What should I build?”
The answer arrives in 1998 in the form of an announcement in Commerce Business Daily, a clearinghouse for government contracts. Tim’s eyes skim over the page in the course of his work. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is seeking proposals for the development of a hardened instrument capable of obtaining measurements from inside tornadoes. This is it. With just a few column inches of print, NOAA has handed Tim the very pursuit he was looking for. It’s the project of his lifetime. The scientists who wrote this notice don’t know it yet, but Tim Samaras of Lakewood, Colorado—a guy who, in his words, “blows shit up for a living”—is the chaser-engineer they seek.
CHAPTER FIVE
CATCHING THE TORNADO
BY TAKING UP a task that seems like such a serendipitously good fit for a man with Tim’s background, he’s in fact taking up a mantle with decades of portentous history. If anything, building a device that can survive the obliterating tornado core—much less placing it there—is like walking up to Excalibur, plunged deep in stone, and giving it a hearty tug. Many have tried. All have failed.
If he knew in advance just how difficult it would be to take on the Black Wind—and how impossible it has been for his predecessors—he might think twice. To chase and watch is one thing. If you seek no answers, you court little danger. But prying open the tornado’s secrets is an altogether different endeavor.
Every fleck of insight science has gained into massive thunderstorms and tornadoes has been hard-won. Even seventy-five years ago, during the Second World War, as humanity was unlocking the inner workings of the atom, tornadoes were still considered nigh unknowable. That people like Tim can now, with a little luck, occasionally predict, track, and chase them is a testament to the line of tenacious researchers who refused to look at the storm and accept it as inscrutable. At each stage, researchers have had to chip at the limits of our understanding one basic question at a time—What is a thunderstorm? When can a tornado form? Can we ever hope to predict where it will strike? Every answer has revealed a more astonishing, more complex presence on the other side than its investigators could have expected. The tornado has proven a foe as worthy and wily as any fabled monster.
Now Tim hopes to join the lineage of those who’ve stolen away with its secrets. For all he knows—about chasing, about TOTO’s failings, about how to quantify extreme force—he still can’t make out the full shape of the undertaking before him. To grasp the sheer enormity of the quest he has chosen, and the foe he will face, requires understanding Tim’s predecessors, and the story of their fight to lure tornadoes out into the realm of the known.
Well into the twentieth century, the tornado still resided more firmly in the world of myth than reality. Towns in Tornado Alley seldom saw the vortex coming until it was already at the door, and survivors rarely even had the language necessary to describe the malign force they’d witnessed. Those who emerged from the worst modern tornado disaster, a 1925 monster that left a three-state trail of destruction, could only report that the culprit was a “smoky fog” or a fell “blackness” that had descended upon their towns.
Until the early 1950s, official policy forbade even the utterance of the word tornado in weather forecasts. The government was convinced that citizens were no more sensible than stampeding cattle, that entire cities would descend into hysteria upon hearing the dread word, resulting in far more fatalities than the thing itself. Tornado was a word of power: deadly if spoken; deadly if left unspoken. Better to leave it unsaid, decided the US Army Signal Services, and later the US Weather Bureau, since few within their ranks believed tornadoes were actually predictable. The forces causing the winds to coalesce were shrugged off as the acts of a jealous God. All that meteorologists could do was catalog their epidemiological particulars: deaths, injuries, property damaged.
It took two freak storms—at Tinker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City, both striking within days of each other in 1948—to shake the institutional opposition to tornado forecasts. The first was an utter shock, unforeseen, smashing thirty-two of the Air Force’s most advanced aircraft at a cost of more than $100 million in today’s dollars. Five days later, two weather officers noticed that the morning’s atmospheric conditions bore an uncanny resemblance to those presaging the storm that had just ravaged the base. Despite the one-in-a-billion odds of two tornadoes striking the same spot within a week, the officers issued the first-ever operational tornado watch. They would be on the chopping block if proven wrong. But then, just after 6:00 p.m., a “yellowish” vortex like a giant “radish” dropped down and swept across the runways. The officers’ prediction saved Tinker millions of dollars in salvaged military hardware, and it offered the first glimpse of a pattern.
Even so, progress was sluggish. The first civilian tornado “bulletins” wouldn’t be issued until four years later, in 1952, and few subsequent forecasts would speak of tornadoes. Why risk career suicide by attempting to predict such a fickle event?
