At 6:04 p.m., and a little over three miles to the east of the Cobalt, Howie Bluestein and two graduate research assistants set up on a rise at the southern outskirts of El Reno. Nearby, his RaXPol mobile radar generator thrums as the antenna revolves atop its flatbed pedestal. Sun-cured wheat spikes sough and toss in the tremulous fields to the west, where the wind whips the crops into hypnotic waves. But Bluestein and his assistants are focused on a sight farther out.
Just south of due west, the storm’s lowest level is hidden behind the gentle swells of the intervening miles, yet there is no mistaking the vertiginous plunge of the cloud line. “I’d say that’s a tornado,” says Jeff Snyder, a lanky Minnesotan and research scientist. The broad cone vortex is the color of blue gunmetal, and the cloud motion is startlingly energetic. The storm is gathering strength. The scientists can practically sense the velocities it is preparing to unleash.
Bluestein gives Snyder an instruction, though it is difficult to hear over the generator. “Do you want me to do tornado mode?” Snyder shouts, in reference to the antenna setting that would focus the radar beam closer to ground level.
“No, not yet,” Bluestein replies. He notes that the tornado is still too far out, five to six miles away. Better for now to maintain a broader scan.
“I’m only doing seventy-five-meter range gates instead of thirty.”
“Okay. How long will it take you to do thirty?”
“For me to get reset up, it’s gonna be down for twenty to thirty seconds.”
Bluestein can’t afford to have RaXPol off-line, not with an intensifying tornado in progress. “Let it go,” he says.
As the minutes pass, however, it becomes apparent the tornado is tracking to the east or southeast rather than to the northeast. This is a propitious development for the town of El Reno. But for the researchers, it means they will soon need to reposition. With the sun slipping down toward the western horizon, the once-crisp contrast fades into a brume of rain.
“Do you see it in there?” Snyder asks. Wind presses at his back, drawn into the storm as though its pull is gravitational. “This inflow is something else.”
He glances at the data accumulating on the screen in the backseat of RaXPol, then looks to the real-time radar display, which reveals a prominent hook echo. It’s still in there, of this there can be no doubt. Snyder can even make a crude estimate of its wind velocities: “It’s folding over at least thirty . . . sixty, greater than sixty meters per second,” he says. “That’s over 140 miles per hour.”
He’s shocked by how intense the tornado has already become. Though he couldn’t know this in real time, the true ground-relative velocities are closer to two hundred miles per hour.
By 6:15 p.m., Bluestein’s assistants are retracting the hydraulic stabilizers and prepping RaXPol for the next move. They believe the tornado is still tracking to the southeast, which will take it farther and farther out of range.
They need to keep ahead of it and also avoid the large hail core that radar indicates is on its way. The storm will ultimately set a state record for hail size, producing chunks of ice up to six inches across. It’s just one of many records to be set tonight.
As far as Bluestein is concerned, they have only two options: either they drop south after the tornado or head east, keeping the storm on their right side. After a brief deliberation, he judges it safer to drive east. The roads directly to the south aren’t paved, and he can’t risk getting stuck in this heavy rig. The Canadian River also presents a natural obstacle, with only a few bridges. There’s a southbound highway farther to the west, but he isn’t confident there will be enough time to make for it and cross ahead of the tornado.
Going east may mean that he will lose sight of it in the rain, but at least he knows he won’t get hit. RaXPol pulls onto a deserted I-40 and motors east, Snyder pushing the diesel to the redline. He can only manage fifty-five miles per hour. The easterly headwinds have become so intense that the antenna not only behaves as a parachute, it stops rotating altogether.
As the team examines the scraps of radar imagery that do make it through, Bluestein notices something curious. In fact, he is positively confounded as they travel along the southern flank of El Reno, past the oil-field-supply depots and the livestock auction. The tornado is now behind them, when it should be somewhere off to the right.
How could this be? If the tornado is moving southeast, and you move east, and suddenly the tornado is west of you, he thinks, what does that mean? The most likely explanation, he concludes, is that the supercell is producing tornadoes cyclically. The vortex they had witnessed earlier must have roped, making way for the new twister, which would form farther to the north—behind RaXPol.
Only later, when Bluestein has had a chance to analyze the data, does he discover that he had been dead wrong. It wasn’t a new tornado. It was the very same beast. Instead of drifting away from them, it had swerved dramatically northeast. “And I thought, Oh, my God,” Bluestein says. He and his crew were one decision away from losing their lives. Against such a strange track, venturing south would have brought them straight into the maw of the storm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE DRAGON’S TAIL
CARL BRAKES AS he approaches the intersection with Reno Road. At 6:12 p.m. they’ve finally arrived at their east route, and just in time. The tornado is roughly three-quarters of a mile away at their ten o’clock. They’re close enough now for a view afforded to few others through the rain. The visible funnel is nearly nine hundred yards
