By 6:43 p.m., the tornado is no longer detectable by radar; the Oklahoma City metro area averts the unthinkable—winds exceeding 300 miles per hour ripping across congested highways. By the time it reaches Interstate 40, the storm has grown so massive, has spawned so many new storms, that a torrent of cold outflow finally drowns the mesocyclone.
The damage path stretches largely through unpopulated areas of Canadian County. Eight are dead and a dozen more have drowned in the resulting flood. Included in the body count are the first three storm chasers ever to die in a tornado.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
GROUND TRUTH
CANADIAN COUNTY SHERIFF’S deputy Doug Gerten locates the Chevy Cobalt in a field south of El Reno shortly before 7:00 that evening. He’s sitting in his Crown Victoria, a stout, seasoned investigator wearing a ball cap over his buzz cut. He watches marble-size hailstones shatter like glass against the hood as what’s left of the storm moves away to the northeast, toward Interstate 35 and points just west of Oklahoma City.
Some forty yards to his north, Tim’s sedan is crushed nearly beyond recognition. Pieces are scattered across fields of wheat and canola on both sides of Reuter Road. For fifteen minutes Gerten waits, until finally the hail stops falling. Then he steps out onto a prairie coated with ice in summer and wades through canola that has been matted flush with the earth, stumbling in its viney tangles.
He approaches the sedan and notes that the front end has been ripped away. The motor is gone. The rear end and the trunk are either in another field or have been compacted and thrust into the cabin. Little more than the chassis remains, and all but one of the tires is missing. The roof of the sedan is now no higher than Gerten’s hip. It took the car apart, except for the stuff that was welded together, he thinks.
Through the rear window, he sees a body on the front passenger side. He circles around and peers inside at a man lying prone on the seat, which has snapped and now reclines into the back. His legs are folded in the floorboard, draped in a deflated air bag. He looks middle-aged, with short gray hair that has gone white at the temples. He wears no shirt and no shoes, but his seat belt is still on. Gerten doesn‘t need to feel for a pulse because he knows what death looks like. He notices broken limbs and lacerations, but no other terribly significant injuries.
He calls the sedan’s tag number in to the dispatcher to see if he can determine the man’s identity. The registration comes back to a woman from Colorado, named Kathy. He thinks he knows the name Samaras, though he isn’t sure how.
Gerten spots a Jotto Desk affixed to the center console, which signals storm chaser; he knows they often mount laptops to such desks to track forecasts. He reaches inside the car and pulls a wallet from the man’s back pocket to find his driver’s license. He looks from the license to the man’s face, visible only in profile. Gerten knows who he is now. On that show about storm chasers, he had often seen this view of Tim’s profile when he stared up at tornadoes.
From this moment on, when Gerten communicates with dispatch about Timothy Michael Samaras, he’ll use his cell phone instead of the radio. Chasers often carry police scanners, and Gerten worries that if they hear about this, they’ll converge on the location. He dials dispatch and calls in the “signal 30.”
All through the evening and into the wee hours, Gerten remains with Tim, waiting on the state medical examiner’s office. A wrecker should be coming by to pull the Cobalt from the field. The fire department is on the way; they’ll free Tim from the sedan’s mangled chassis with the Jaws of Life. After an hour or two on the scene, Gerten gets a call from a fellow deputy up the road. The man has found Carl. His body is roughly 500 yards west of Tim’s, half-submerged in a ditch running high with rainwater. Paul won’t be found until the next morning, once the water has receded.
The night deepens as the firemen come and go, lighting up this stretch of dirt road in the farm country south of El Reno. In a few short hours, the sun will rise on a bad landscape that’s only going to look worse in the light of morning. Gerten stays with Tim through it all.
As he waits by the Cobalt in the dark, he remembers for some reason the opening credits of Storm Chasers. This is the memory he wants to linger after Tim Samaras’s last ride. The guys are standing together on an empty plains back road a lot like this one, posing in front of Tim’s gleaming GMC diesel, arms crossed and brows furrowed. There they stand in Gerten’s mind, looking to the horizon, raring to light out toward the next target somewhere off in Kansas.
The next day, at around one in the afternoon, a young weather service researcher named Gabe Garfield comes across the wrecked sedan as he’s conducting a damage survey. He snaps a picture and sends it back to the National Weather Center. The image will soon spread throughout the meteorological community.
By nightfall, rumors have begun to swirl. The scuttlebutt holds that not only have three chasers perished at El Reno, but they were three of the most well-known and respected of them all. Marc Austin, at the Norman forecast office, sees Garfield’s photo and shares it with his wife, who soon sends it on to Ed Grubb. Ed had driven a mesonet for years. “The wheels, the door handles, the color . . . it all matches,” he tells her.
Too restless to sleep, Garfield and the Austins meet at an IHOP for coffee and
