The proposal is received by none other than Dr. Al Bedard and Howie Bluestein, along with a third senior NOAA scientist, Joe Golden. These men know better than anyone else the agony of the hunt. If they have learned anything from TOTO, it is that storm-chasing experience is absolutely paramount. If the applicant can’t find tornadoes and maneuver safely around them, the experiment is doomed to fail. Secondly, at some 400 pounds and as cumbersome as an oil drum, there had never been time to deploy more than one TOTO (and in any case, only one was ever built). What attracts them to Tim’s proposal is that it provides plans not for one HITPR, but for seven to ten, intended for deployment in succession. This, Bedard, Golden, and Bluestein agree, will elevate the odds that at least one might yield a direct strike. Furthermore, unlike TOTO, the turtle can easily be handled by a single man.
“There were three or four good responses, including Tim’s,” Bedard says. “We as reviewers thought Tim’s approach had the best chance of success.” Bedard and his reviewers are unanimous in their decision.
Before this process began, Bedard knew nothing of Tim Samaras. Secretly, though, he had hoped that someone like Tim would come along—someone other than a meteorologist who could chase storms and design the heck out of the thing.
In 1999, the Department of Commerce issues a $74,934 grant for Phase I development. By ARA standards, this is a pittance, but it’s enough for a prototype. Tim’s dream is made flesh: a fifty-pound hunk of metal and electronics that looks like a traffic cone melting onto hot asphalt. Tim paints the shell bright orange, a tribute to Tatom’s snail. In homage to the most recent probe effort, where the devices were dubbed E-Turtles, Tim starts calling his device the turtle.
He cannot wait to test his creation, and it’s from the roof of Tim’s minivan that the turtle gets its first taste of the wind. Tim straps the instrument to a piece of plywood and a quad-disk pressure sensor, and floors the minivan at seventy-five miles an hour along a downhill grade near the office. The wind velocities are weak (barely F0) compared with what the turtle will one day experience—but also intensely turbulent, according to Tim and Lee’s analysis. It’s a good first sign.
For a stronger test, they travel with HITPR to the University of Washington’s Aeronautical Laboratory in Seattle and, for a fee, place the device in the facility’s wind tunnel. As smoke accompanies the artificial gale rushing over the turtle, Tim and Lee see a perfect “teardrop plume,” not a chaotic wash, form in its wake. They expose it to velocities ranging from fifty-three miles per hour up to two hundred. It seems entirely possible that winds of this magnitude would send the turtle tumbling. But—as Heyman predicted—the opposite happens. Blasted with winds of over 150 miles per hour, the device holds fast. The load cells beneath the turtle even register a downward pressure. The faster the winds, the greater the downward pressure on HITPR’s front edge. When Tim sees this, he knows his calculations are valid. Even better, the turtle actually seems to prefer a fluttering, turbulent flow. There is little doubt now: barring impact with a wind-driven sedan, his invention should survive a tornado.
The last challenge will be to measure the actual barometric pressure, and not some artifact introduced by the turtle’s steadfast presence. With the pressure highest on the side facing into the wind and lowest at the back, Lee develops algorithms to determine not only which of HITPR’s ports is recording the actual pressure, but also a solid estimate of the wind speed it indicates. This is the finishing touch before the turtle is ready to enter the wild. Then the real work can begin. “Getting an actual hit on HITPR,” Lee says, will be “a whole other level of difficulty.”
In early 2000, Tim travels to Washington, DC, for the second, more stringent round of funding. Before a panel of program administrators from the Department of Commerce, he defends his prototype and outlines the next phase of the turtle’s development: to build a fleet of the probes, and to field them in Tornado Alley. Convinced by his pitch and the elegance of HITPR’s design, the department and NOAA sign off on Phase II and cut ARA a check for nearly $300,000.
What began as absent tinkering, on the floor of a little boy’s bedroom strewn with transistors, diodes, and old radios, has set Tim on a path. DRI and ARA have given him the skills. And the singular instrument called the turtle might just be the tool needed to divine the dread silhouette he first glimpsed as it churned toward Dorothy and Toto. Unlike the tumbling farmhouse, however, his probe will stand while everything else falls. If all goes according to plan, the turtles will enter a realm Tim has seen only at safe distances. This, he understands, will require the acceptance of an altogether novel kind of risk. Tatom’s snail was a sawed-off 12-gauge; close was good enough. But close won’t mean much to the turtle. This rifle bullet is built to pierce the heart and enter the core. Unless it does, his mission will fail.
He will have to wait until he hears the roar. He will have to watch it come on, until he can see the debris and soil lifting into the vortex. Then and only then can he activate the recorder, plant his device, and flee as fast as his V-6 will carry him. With the right approach, the right escape route, he can finally
