At 5:19, Austin observes the first evidence of a hook echo on radar in southern Canadian County. This does not necessarily mean a tornado is on the ground. But it means that the storm is beginning to organize, to rotate, and to wrap itself in precipitation. He is looking for evidence of continuity in movement, from the upper levels of the storm down as far as the radar’s beam will reach. The sign he is searching for is convergent winds near the surface.
The forecasters glance up at the bank of flatscreens, where local news stations display live feeds from helicopters with eyes on the storm. They look for the shape of the wall cloud. Austin glances back down at the radar screen. He’s searching for evidence that the precipitation detected by radar is moving in different directions in close proximity. That means rotation. If he sees a ball of precipitation at low elevations that’s red on one side and green on the other, that’s the signal.
At about 5:35 p.m., he spots it—clear evidence of tornadic rotation. Shortly thereafter, the forecast office issues the evening’s first tornado warning.
“It’s strange,” Smith says. “Once the storms get going and you begin to see what may happen in more concrete detail, there’s this feeling. You never quit trying to put information out, but at some point if you haven’t done something by now—if you live in a mobile home and you haven’t driven to a shelter by now—it may be too late.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
EL RENO, OKLAHOMA
A WHITE CHEVY Cobalt pulls off to the side of Calumet Road, just south of the on- and off-ramps to Interstate 40, on an isolated stretch west of Oklahoma City. Behind the wheel, Carl Young films and shoots still photographs with a DSLR camera. Tim Samaras is in the front passenger seat next to him, and his son Paul sits in the rear. They peer through the windows to the southwestern sky at a mammoth Oklahoma supercell. It looks every bit as though it intends to pick up the deadly trail scythed through Moore eleven days before. This is a high-precipitation superstorm, characterized by sheer enormity and power rather than clean lines and discrete, graceful funnels. Its troposphere-piercing anvil looms nearly twice the height of K2. The mesocyclone and the wall cloud beneath spin low and close to an antenna tower’s warning lights, darkening miles of prairie.
The wait can be enervating, especially when a chaser suspects what’s coming. There’s a helplessness in this foreknowledge. He can only keep his vigil, torn between two competing hopes: that a man who has seen so much will see something new today, and that when the tornado finally comes, no one dies. This close to Oklahoma City, though, he may be asking for too much.
The dire language out of the Storm Prediction Center is almost unprecedented. The latest sounding has been described as a “loaded-gun profile.” CAPE values of instability are consistent with the highest ever recorded by the National Weather Center this time of year. The Bowdle, South Dakota, tornado of 2010 is likely the most powerful Tim has ever personally witnessed. Its CAPE values had maxed out just shy of 5,000 joules per kilogram. The values this afternoon are astonishing, rising in excess of 5,000 to 5,500 joules per kilogram.
On any other day, Tim would be his usual conscientious self, ever mindful of obligations. Lightning should be his primary mission right now. But he seems to have resigned himself to missing out on the most promising electrical display so far this season. At nearly six in the evening, it is unlikely he will make it back to Alva to collect the LIV in time. He’ll pass on the once-in-a-season electrical event for a supercell setup that may never repeat in his lifetime. He’s a tornado hunter at heart.
The mystery of what form will emerge from the storm is essential to the anxious wait. How does one patiently pass the time when, as a friend of Tim’s once put it, you’re waiting to see “the hand of God”? The coming cataclysm could resemble the awful thing that swept out of the pine curtain like a haze of coal ash in Dixie Alley two years before. It could look like the broad wedges of Manchester or Bowdle. Or it could look like no tornado he’s ever seen.
Aside from their proximity to an urban center, this chase won’t be as bad as Dixie Alley. Tim must take note of the country roads, which are laid out in a grid, albeit an uneven one. The prairie is largely level, apart from some low hills. Scattered over the green terraced ridges are oil-well-pad sites on graded squares of yellow-red gravel and sandy loam. The wheat and hay country is seamed with hackberry- and oak-lined draws. There are gullies that bleed into freshets, freshets that merge into creeks, and creeks that branch toward the kinked trunk of the Canadian River—the only real natural barrier they might have to contend with.
Setting up on the southern cell is the obvious call, and it should be clear by now to Tim, Carl, and Paul that they are tracking the right storm. The sun isn’t due to set for another few hours, but here, under the spreading anvil of the cumulonimbus, dusk is coming on fast.
At 5:41 p.m., Carl pulls back onto Calumet Road and drives south in no particular hurry. Excited chatter fills the cab. The distended wall cloud pulses with life. It’s a cocoon in pupation, promising the emergence of another life-form entirely. After less than a mile and a half, faded asphalt transitions into gravel, and the circulation from their vantage becomes rain wrapped. In all likelihood, Tim and Carl have decided that by taking the first east road they come to, they can get out ahead of the rain and improve their sight lines.
Over the next twenty minutes they
