After the tornado dissipates, and the chase ends, Carl announces, “Wow! That was pretty exciting.”
Tim, however, is brooding over the deadly course the day might have taken. In all likelihood, Paul’s presence inclines him further toward caution. In previous seasons, Paul had typically followed at a safe remove in one of the mesonet cars. With Discovery Channel cameramen in the truck, there simply hadn’t been enough room for him. But now he rides with Tim, and Kathy’s words of warning still resound in her husband’s ears. In the background of video footage taken by Paul, Tim is candid with Carl: “I didn’t mean to get nasty, but if you get alongside it during the rope-out stage, we can get in a lot of trouble. I wasn’t comfortable with it.”
Carl’s response is odd. Either he hasn’t understood, or he is deflecting Tim’s aggravation. He replies nonchalantly, “No worries.”
After that, neither of them speaks for a while.
Any grievance must seem trivial later that afternoon when they hear about what happened in Moore, a suburb south of Oklahoma City. At the time, they had known only what they saw on radar: a nightmare velocity couplet over a densely populated city. As they drive south into Texas, the consequence of that radar signature reveals itself. Everyone in the car is glued either to a smartphone or a laptop. Two elementary schools, they learn, have been destroyed, and seven children are dead. The death toll has risen to twenty-four in all. More than 1,200 structures—houses, businesses, hospitals—will have to be torn down.
The tornado took a path through town that is eerily similar to the one sampled by Josh Wurman in 1999. Because even well-anchored homes have been swept from their foundations, the National Weather Service bestows an EF5 rating. While its forecasters had been clear about the potential for “strong tornadoes” today, what happened in Moore was no foregone conclusion. Most chasers—and forecasters—had thought the big show would take place farther south, around where Tim, Carl, and Paul were chasing. But something unforeseen transformed the supercell heading for Moore: a chance encounter produced a lethal outcome.
It was only after merging with another decaying thunderstorm that the Moore supercell kicked into overdrive and began cutting a trail of EF4 and EF5 damage. The question on every scientist’s mind now is whether the merger touched off the storm’s drastic intensification. And if it did, how could such a unique and seemingly random series of events be predicted?
Once again, the storm has shown mankind—Tim Samaras included—that there is still much to learn. The message from the sky today hadn’t screamed killer tornado. But a middling storm just happened to collide with another thundershower’s outflow surge, and now twenty-four are dead.
That night, the crew busts on a storm near Wichita Falls, Texas, then works its way east to book rooms at a motel in Sherman, just south of the Red River. The next day, they pass through Dallas, heading southeast after a possible target. Along the way, they see plenty of rain and hail, but no tornadoes. The following morning, May 22, they begin the long journey back to Colorado. Tim, Carl, and Paul need to prepare the LIV for the lightning project, which will kick off in a few days. Grubb won’t join them for the next chase; he doesn’t want to miss his daughter’s birthday.
They drive north up Interstate 35, through Texas and into Oklahoma—a route that will take them right through the middle of Moore. By the time they pass Robinson Avenue and enter the damage path, traffic has slowed to a crawl. It is quiet inside the truck. Paul angles his camera out the window and shoots video; Carl snaps photographs.
They see trees that have been filed down to bare trunks, hung with metal and plastic. The mud-blasted vehicles piled along the highway look as though they’ve come from a scrap yard. As they pass through a neighborhood, the rows of houses stop all of a sudden. There is nothing on the ground but debris-strewn slabs and driveways that lead nowhere. After a few hundred yards, the houses begin again, practically pristine.
On the other side of the highway, they are stunned by the damage to the Moore Medical Center, an ostensibly well-engineered structure made of precast concrete and reinforcing steel. Even from I-35, they can see that the building’s envelope has been stripped away where it faced the tornado. Part of its roof system has been peeled open. If they could have gotten closer, they would have noticed that a large metal Dumpster has come to rest atop the building. TWISTEX’s resident EMT, Ben McMillan, had been present at the scene, helping pull people from a collapsed office building nearby as the tornado receded in the distance.
As often as those in the truck have had to pull up to a town reduced to rubble, the sight never fails to induce a profound melancholy. This is the storm chaser’s moral conundrum: they come to see the fastest wind on the planet, but they know full well it may fall like the sword of Damocles on people’s lives, homes, entire towns. Every chaser responds differently. If they believe in God, they pray for the dead and the living. If they’re engineers, they may filter the destruction through the measurable: structural anchoring (or the lack thereof), debris impacts, and the cold calculus of wind loading. Some chasers dive headlong into the wreckage if first responders haven’t yet arrived, the
