The Yaris’s safety features seem determined to betray him. The traction control system detects the slippage induced by the wind and the mud and reduces engine power to one or both of the front wheels. Robinson backs off the gas to disengage the system and floors it again, repeating this maddening process every few seconds, so that he never attains a speed above forty-two miles per hour. He blows past the stop sign at Alfadale, then, an interminable mile later, the one at Radio.
The Yaris fishtails in the current. The tornado core and the subvortex are closing in, and he can see that the rain curtains riding the outer circulation are drawing shut across the road ahead. He hits the gas and the brakes—and hits it again. The wide panorama of the southern plains is lost to a close-in wash of swirling gray and the white spume of aerosolized water, and there is no way to know what wind it carries. “I’ve gotta get out of whatever this is,” he says, punching the traction-control manual-override button. “The car just isn’t going! Traction control off!”
Shortly before 6:24, he breaks through. The rain softens and the wind decelerates. Light creeps into the view behind, and with greater distance the eastern flank of the tornado reveals itself. It is the kind of sight Tim would have exulted in. Crepuscular shafts from the sun sift down onto the fields. A thin ribbon of horizon ends crisply at the southern edge, where the inflow feeds into the circulation like a smoking river. Skyscraper-size crags of dust slide from north to south across miles of tornado flank, drifting loosely, then hardening with the suggestion of vortical motion. Somewhere inside, a subvortex remains nearly motionless at its apex, but Robinson can’t see it from here.
He brakes and finally looks at the thing that nearly killed him. “I just drove through that!” he shouts.
Sensing an eastward tilt, he drives another few hundred yards down the road before stopping again. He grabs his camera, steps out, and begins filming. As it clears Reuter, subvortices coalesce, one after the next, into bone-colored columns moving at speeds for which there can be no response. The wind picks up again, the trees along the road fold over, and Robinson staggers backward. He sprints toward the ditch and dives to the ground. The rear window of the Yaris explodes under a barrage of hail, and the world around is waylaid with scouring braids of red dust and ballistic ice.
A hailstone opens a freely bleeding gash on his face, but that’s the only scratch he’ll suffer today. He’s made it out.
A few hundred yards at most separate Dan Robinson from the killing wind. To his west, just a few hundred yards separate Tim, Carl, and Paul from daylight.
Moments after the subvortex enters Reuter Road, Howie Bluestein and his graduate assistants park RaXPol on the Interstate 40 off-ramp at Banner Road, no more than a few miles east of the circulation. Jeff Snyder sets a zero-degree elevation angle for the scan, so that some of the beam is directed into the ground, while the rest probes as low as the trees permit.
The tornado has transformed dramatically since they turned their backs on it roughly ten minutes ago, at 6:15. At its widest, the span over which wind velocities exceed 110 miles per hour is 3.1 miles in diameter. To the extent that such a tornado may be assigned boundaries, the vortex has peaked at 2.6 miles in width, the largest ever recorded.
If they study the southeastern edge closely, they will detect what is in all likelihood the subvortex responsible for the deaths of Tim, Carl, and Paul. It is all but invisible translating across the face of the parent tornado, except for that moment during which the orbit allows the dim southern sky to reveal its detachment. Though they can’t know this in real time, shortly after 6:25 p.m., RaXPol detects wind velocities in the subvortex in excess of 300 miles per hour. Even more remarkable is the rate at which it rotates around the southeastern flank of the parent tornado: 175 miles per hour, the fastest translational velocity on record, and roughly equivalent to the takeoff speed of a Boeing 747.
“That is a violent tornado,” Snyder observes. “It looks like it’s moving due east now. It may be hooking northeast. We might be able to do an intercept on I-40 if it . . .”
He pauses and watches a current of cloud race low over the fields and into the southern flank. The beast is moving north toward the populous suburbs. Snyder’s hands are shaking.
The tornado then undergoes another structural change. The subvortex becomes difficult to track at 6:26. In its place, a ring of smaller suction vortices—as many as five or more at a time—are detected by the radar as scallop-shaped debris signatures. These are untraceable by any but the fastest-scanning mobile radar. RaXPol produces an image once every two seconds, and even then the suction vortices are spectral presences. “You’re lucky just to track one vortex for two, three, four frames,” Bluestein says. “They’re moving 150 miles per hour, and each lasts only three or four seconds. Do the math. It doesn’t take long for one to go all the way around the tornado, and they don’t even go all the way around. They tend to start in one place, rotate partially around the tornado, and disappear, and new ones start. It’s like a merry-go-round.”
Inside the suction vortices, Bluestein will later discover, are wind velocities on par with the highest ever observed. After two minutes of scanning, the radar indicates it is time to move. They retract the hydraulic outrigging and prepare RaXPol for the drive. The leading edge of the tornado is within a mile, moving rapidly northeastward.
Snyder sees a wall of rain, the dust at the surface whipping like breaking waves. They pull back onto an emptied Interstate 40 and push east, the antenna still revolving, still collecting the signal.
Leaves and small pieces
