By noon, fellow chasers are combing the muddy fields north and south of Reuter Road, sweating in the oppressive heat and humidity. Marc and Sharon Austin are there, as is Garfield, their friend Erik Fox, and as many as a dozen other volunteers. The three probes are quickly recovered near a shallow creek. Later, another storm chaser finds Carl’s camera, lodged in the littoral mud.
The day after, Kathy Samaras and her daughter Amy arrive in Oklahoma to collect Tim and Paul. Jim has already arranged for a mortuary to prepare them for transport. That night, the Austins host Kathy and Amy at their home in Norman. They take them to dinner and are joined by Garfield and Fox, who’s a former cop and veteran with past training in investigations like the one at hand. Kathy has many questions, but they are reducible to one: How could this have happened to a chaser as skilled and experienced as her husband? Garfield does his best to explain. He had assumed someone else would take on the investigation, but he knows now that he and Fox have more access to the evidence than almost anyone.
Tuesday morning, Garfield and Fox return to Reuter Road. Fox approaches the still-saturated fields as though they are the scene of a terrible vehicle accident. He surmises the sedan had been carried south from the road and dropped trunk-first near a bend in the creek, where Paul, the probes, and most of their belongings were found. As Fox walks east, he locates six impact craters, each an average of 150 feet apart and gradually hooking to the northeast. The divots in the soil seem to follow the orientation of wheat lying flush in the direction of the wind. They lead across Reuter and north into the canola field where the sedan was found. It is obvious to Fox that the car hadn’t been airborne the entire 600-meter distance. This looks like a high-speed rollover, only worse than any he can imagine.
Meanwhile, Garfield gathers evidence to track the Cobalt’s movements that day. The video clips from Carl’s camera prove invaluable, while Dan Robinson’s rear-dash-camera footage allows Garfield to anchor their locations in time, and to orient them to the tornado center. He drives the route they took, turn for turn, and imagines he were in the car with them. Slowly, the portrait of a storm chase emerges, and Garfield begins to comprehend a series of decisions, each representing a link in the chain that would finally bind them. The rain wrapping around the northern flank ensured they were blind to the evolution of the monster to the south. The speed and erratic movement of the storm shrank the margin of error to near zero.
The dead-ending of Reuter at the airport was a critical blow, forcing them to lose precious ground to the tornado. It meant that Tim would never get ahead of a storm that was gaining speed. “You go south one mile, you go north one mile, and that’s two miles of driving time you lost,” Garfield says. “That corresponds to two and a half minutes.” At the end, those minutes meant everything.
Tim and Carl had a chance to escape, either by bailing early up Reformatory Road or by turning north onto US 81—though either would have meant aborting the deployment or attempting the intercept by taking a far more circuitous approach through rush-hour traffic.
As the Cobalt approached Route 81, the tornado was turning sharply northeast, then almost due north. Any chasers to the south of the storm would have known exactly what was happening. The rear-flank downdraft surge came screaming around the south of the mesocyclone, carrying with it an advancing wall of dust. Bruce Lee and Cathy Finley have dedicated their careers to this storm-scale feature, the one Tim feared would drive the vortex into a rope-out to the north. By US 81, Tim may have thought he’d already seen the storm’s shift north, but Lee and Finely believe the RFD gave it second life. It was the accelerant poured onto the flame. The tornado swelled to more than two and a half miles in width, and its forward speed doubled. The subvortex began its exterior orbit. It reminds Lee and Finley of Quinter, Kansas, the only tornado that has ever truly frightened them. “We’d never seen anything like that before and haven’t since,” Finley says, “Except for El Reno.” The only difference is that in Quinter, the turn to the north had saved their lives.
After the surge, Tim, Carl, and Paul’s last ride turned into a race they couldn’t win. Beyond US 81, they had one last chance to bail north to safety, along Alfadale Road. But here again they continued eastward, either because they didn’t understand how dangerous the intercept attempt had become or, if they did, because it was too late to make the turn. “By the time they figured out what was going on, they had ten seconds before they got to Alfadale,” Garfield says. “That isn’t a lot of time to brake and go north if you’re driving fifty miles per hour.”
Had they stopped shortly after Alfadale, they would have endured hellish winds, but they might have avoided the subvortex and survived. Yet they kept going because they had always been able to outrun tornadoes in the past. They had always been able to wriggle free. “They put their noses in some places we just wouldn’t,” Bruce Lee says. “Obviously, that comes with a price.”
By the time they were halfway between Alfadale and Radio, the fates of Tim, Carl, and Paul were fixed. “Storm chasers all think alike. It’s clear to me why Samaras did what he did. He wasn’t being irresponsible. He had to walk the edge. He’d walked it a hundred times before and came out
