The question before the morning huddle was how to convey the gravity of this day to a populace still traumatized by the Moore tornado without inciting panic. “Are we going to break the glass and pull out the scary words?” Smith had asked. He knew what central Oklahoma had already been through this month. “That’s all they’ve seen on the news: tornado damage, tornado debris. Pictures and video of funerals for the deceased. There was a saturation of information and a palpable sense of dread in the community.”
Over the years, and most recently in Moore, he and his colleagues had noticed a dispiriting pattern during high-end tornado events. Some residents waited until the last moment and attempted to flee down the surface streets and highways. But by then it was usually too late. What they found was gridlock. People were dying in their cars.
Smith had decided to test a new strategy today. In the early afternoon, the Oklahoma Department of Transportation programmed its electronic highway signage to alert metro-area motorists to the coming storm, advising them to keep off the roads after 4:00 p.m. Though the official weather service policy is to recommend against driving in severe weather, today the office decided to urge residents who intend to evacuate to do so early, before the warnings are issued.
At times, it feels as though they are screaming into a void. How many will listen, and how many will die because they don’t? Smith has been in this business long enough to know that people don’t react to abstract threats. “Some of that is just human nature and how people respond to weather emergencies,” he says. “ ‘I’ve got to see it when I look out the window or hear my favorite TV meteorologist saying the same thing.’ ”
Given the timing of the storms, dinner will probably be out of the question, so Smith had left the office a little after noon to grab a bite while he still could. It was surreal, driving through town toward Chick-fil-A, seeing all these people going about their lives as if this were just another day. He wondered which ones were visiting from somewhere else. Did they know what was coming in a few short hours? Did they understand that a fuse had been lit? For warning forecasters, there’s a corrosive, low-grade anxiety to the wait. In the morning the office is abuzz with activity as the forecasters hustle to nail down the event, its location, time frame, and potential strength. After that, it gets quiet, even a little boring, which is another kind of stress. They’re waiting for a bomb to go off.
The rest of the morning and afternoon had passed uneventfully. Smith set his plan into motion, liaising with local emergency managers, broadcast-news, and transportation officials. Austin tended to his routine duties, issued the aviation forecast, and assisted with graphics for release through social media. The office typically launches two weather balloons every day, one at 5:00 a.m. and another at 5:00 p.m. But shortly before two that afternoon, a special weather balloon rose at about a thousand feet per minute above the National Weather Center, a sprawling, nine-story structure of brick, precast stone, metal paneling, and glass-curtain walls. As the balloon buffeted along switchbacking rivers of wind, the radio signals were received by the tracking antenna and transmitted to the forecast office. As expected, the moisture had deepened in the lower levels. The layer of warm, dry air, known as the capping inversion, continued to keep a lid on the unstable mass below. That wasn’t a good thing. The longer the lid remains, the longer these cubic miles of potential energy boil beneath a late-spring sun. It’s like a sealed-off and smoldering room, the heat building and building inside. Open a door or a window—break the cap—and the room explodes. Heat shimmer becomes fire; unstable air becomes the storm. Austin was confident the sky would find its release at some point. But the longer he waited, the more he worried. All he could do was monitor satellite and radar for the first congealing cloud mass, the first echo.
By now, at about 4:00 p.m., they know it won’t be long. The signal has arrived. The winds have finally backed. Visible satellite tells the story. For much of the afternoon, thin bands of cumuliform clouds had striped central Oklahoma like fish scales. Now they begin to coalesce into thick, lumpy braids, the towering cumulus throwing a distinctive shade onto the plains below. It’s like watching the rapid growth of bacteria in a petri dish. Along the cold front and the dry line, which halves the state and trails into eastern Kansas, a string of storm anvils begins to swell, first in the far northeast of Oklahoma, now working its way down to the southwest.
The first radar echo—a storm tall enough to catch the radar beam—comes from Kay County, on the Kansas line. More follow like catching fire. By 4:46 p.m., Smith’s office issues severe-thunderstorm warnings for Custer, Kingfisher, Caddo, Washita, Blaine, and Canadian Counties. The pace of storm growth is startling—a few puffy cumulus clouds have become thunderstorms with tops rising more than 50,000 feet into the atmosphere. “Think about a cloud potentially ten miles in height that wasn’t there fifteen or thirty minutes ago. You can’t really see that at the ground, but some of these updrafts are well over one hundred miles per hour. Things are going on
