“There’s no point,” Lee says about chasing in the Southeast. “It’s just hills and forest. It’s bloody dangerous.” Even if they do manage to deploy on a tornado, the eddied turbulence shed by trees and hills would muddy up the data. By now, though, it has become clear that data collection is not the show’s primary concern. The producers call the shots, and today they want TWISTEX to go East.
Tim stifles whatever misgivings he has about venturing into Dixie Alley and drives east with Carl and Grzych. Grubb, Laubach, and Paul Samaras decide to come along for the ride, following behind in one of the mesonets. They’re all weighing the risks against the potentially historic significance of the outbreak. Lee and Finley decide to sit this one out.
On April 27, near Aliceville, Alabama, no one is getting any signal, and the last radar update is nearly thirty minutes stale. Even Tony Laubach, a mesonet driver renowned for his tolerance for hairy intercepts, is uncomfortable. “This is getting stupid,” he says.
The experience of chasing in the densely wooded Southeast feels alien to Tim. On the plains, there is little to obstruct his view apart from the occasional line of cottonwoods, or a low rise that will pass in a moment. In Kansas, there are places where, if you squint hard enough, it feels like you might be able to see clear to the rim of the world. But in Dixie, it’s like driving through a narrow hallway. The matchstick pines are close and impenetrable. Descending into the deep hollows, a chaser feels caged. Based on the last radar scan, they should be getting close to the track of a storm that’s been repeatedly producing tornadoes. But they have no way of knowing whether that track has deviated in the minutes since they lost cell service.
Suddenly, they spot a tornado lifting and reforming over the canopy. They can barely see the rest of it through the deep woods, but it must be coming back soon. Thirty seconds later, the vortex thrashes through the trees and spills into full view. It’s just 100 yards ahead of them, bursting forth like a thick plume of coal ash to the face.
They catch the thing on camera as it sweeps across the two-lane country road and plunges just as quickly back into the pines. No one argues when Grzych notes that only a few seconds of forward progress separated the probe truck from eternity. The gasp-inducing close call will turn out to be one of the most compelling moments of the season for Storm Chasers.
Later that day, near Pleasant Ridge, just west of Tuscaloosa, a violent wedge passes a mile and a half up the road, effectively ending their chase. Trees with trunks a foot wide, tangled with matrices of downed power lines, block their route. The odor of broken pine and hardwood is overpowering.
By the time they find the interstate, Birmingham and Tuscaloosa are disaster zones. Some sixty-five have been killed. The highways leading into and out of the cities are parking lots. Given the tornado’s path, Grubb believes they saw the monster responsible a short while before it hit Tuscaloosa.
Over four days, some two hundred tornadoes kill 321 people in five states. Fifteen are extremely violent, rated EF4 to EF5. The outbreak is one of the deadliest in modern history, and TWISTEX is lucky to make it out safely. They’re wrung out and frustrated, both by the awful terrain they’d been sent into, and by their impotence in the face of such destruction—not a single probe landed, nor did they ever have a look at a viable intercept.
By the September 25 premiere of TWISTEX’s third season on the show, the series’ popularity—and its quality—have declined. As the first episode airs, Tim suspects Storm Chasers’ run has come to an end, and the ratings don’t improve as the season wears on.
The following January, Discovery announces the show’s cancellation. Though it means TWISTEX is once again without a sponsor, Tim greets the news with something like relief. The cameras have worn him down. The gray in his hair, a light dusting at his temples and sideburns in 2009, has since marched past his ears and down the nape of his neck. “I saw Tim age,” Kathy says, over the course of those years.
“If you knew him long enough,” Lee says, “you knew where his high-energy level normally was, and you could tell it wasn’t there.”
In early 2012, Tim phones Lee and Finley with the proposal they are all expecting: “How would you guys feel if we took this year off from official operations?” he asks. In truth, there really is no other option; everyone needs a break, and the money isn’t there. If funding hasn’t materialized by 2013, he suggests they start beating the bushes.
For Tim and his colleagues, this is a time of transition. At Iowa State, Gallus’s money has run out as well; 2011 marked the final year he would send students out into the field with TWISTEX. Even Tim’s work with Larry Brown runs up against similar budgetary constraints. In 2009, they had moved from Applied Research Associates to another contractor, National Technical Systems. But with Congress at an impasse and the federal budget funded on a continuing resolution, the spigot has been shut off. “So here we are—screwed,” Brown says. “We got all these great ideas and couldn’t get the money.” The hotshot team of explosives experts that has worked side by side since Tim was twenty years old has been disbanded.
Through it all, Tim insists that TWISTEX will return; this is merely an unplanned hiatus, a breather. They’ve accomplished far too much to quit now. In Quinter and in Bowdle, they came away with some of the most compelling data sets ever gathered from within a rear-flank downdraft. Their coup at Bowdle outshone the whole of the multimillion-dollar VORTEX2 expedition. Lee and Finley have only
