Sep 20, 2016

Chasing tornadoes…


Storm chasing in ‘Tornado Alley’ is one of the most unusual but exciting experiences I have ever had…six states were covered in all 17 days of chasing….lightning, storms, hailstones and most importantly tornadoes!

Photograph by Thad Bowling

Photograph by Thad Bowling

Meet the storm chasers…

The eclectic group of people consisted of serial tornado chasers who meet up every year with the same storm chasing company – Cloud 9 – and it’s a rare addiction that appeals to a very unique selection of people. There were 11 chasers in our group plus the three Cloud 9 drivers/meteorologists, of which the novices was my good friend Lynn, two Scottish girls and myself. Other stormchasers included Chris from Buffalo, New York who was OCD about germs – no-one could touch him and every dollar bill he received in change was sprayed with an antibacterial aerosol, Ray from England who pulled out a Croatian flag every time a storm was brewing and waved a photo of Jill Dando (for the non-British she was a TV presenter who was shot dead on her doorstep in 1999) his ‘angel of Dubrovnik’ up to the skies, Thad the practical joker from Key West, Florida, Andre was the eye-candy, a cowboy from Alberta, Canada who always wore his cowboy hat, George Kourounis the famous TV presenter (Angry Planet) who loved telling anyone he could grab about his next TV shoot and the fact he was just in the top 100 adventurers/stormchasers for the Canadian National Geographic.

In all fairness, if I had appeared in a National Geographic feature I would be parading around with a billboard, flashing lights and a loud speaker! The other chasers were just as quirky in their own way but they were all such lovely people to travel with. It was so interesting to chat with them and find out what they do and why they are addicted to storms.

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A typical chase day…

This would involve a meet up in the motel car park at 10am for the storm briefing. In the briefing George would let us know their ‘forecast’ and where they believe the best storms will be and essentially the one that would hopefully bring us a tornado. Every stormchaser has to pick their storm from radar and graphs the night before and just hope (and pray to the glow in the dark Jesus!) that they have chosen the right one! But George was good. He knew his storms. There are thousands of miles covered in their forecasting – we started in Oklahoma and drove through Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado and Nebraska….it turned out that the two tornados we did see were both in Texas…

After a big breakfast at one of the many diners we would set off in the two mini vans to find our storms and tornadoes. It’s all very technical…you need a high dew point and lots of sun for heat to build up the energy to create a storm late afternoon/early evening. Then it was full on chasing….dinner was not high on the agenda as we powered down the roads. Other stormchasers were there too, chasing the same storms. It was all so intense and exciting at that time of the day.

The first tornado sighting was a bit of an anti-climax as it took me some time to realise exactly what bit of the cloud we were looking at and when I did see it, it was so far away and I found it a bit disappointing. Not the ‘Dorothy’ or Wizard of Oz’ kind of tornado – just some cloud hanging from a bigger cloud.

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What if there are no storms?

Down days were when there were no storms to chase. We only had around 3 or 4 of these and we ended up having snowball fights on Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs and eating steaks at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo where there is a competition to eat their famous 72oz steak (2 kg) plus trimmings of baked potato, salad and shrimp. If you eat the entire meal within one hour or less it is free, otherwise the meal costs $72. There was a healthy rivalry between van 1 and van 2 – we were van 2 as it was deemed as the poor man’s van and van 1 was for the elite, 10 times plus serial chasers who had the best cameras and video equipment….as it happens van 2 was by far the best!

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The Throckmorton Texan tornado…

It was van 2 that cowboy Andre steered out of deep mud when being towed by a kind stormchaser who saw both our vans stuck in deep mud during a chase. When storms start so does the rain and flooding which happened when we had gone off road to try and obtain a good angle on the storm. TV presenter George clearly was no off-road driver and when being towed steered the van into a ditch. Van 1 chasers then had to squash into Van 2 and the chase continued. Nothing stops these guys! Speeding along country lanes, Brad the driver screeched to a halt and turned round, drove a few yards then did it again and again – we were in the bear’s cage – which in laymans terms meant we were right under the forming tornado!!!! It was so scary and exciting at the same time. Above us a swirling cloud – Brad could see the rotation and wind change – Chris at the back of the van was panicking and shouting for Brad to get out of the tornado….Jade a Canadian chaser was also yelling to Brad ‘turn back – this is dangerous – turn back!’.

It was very on the edge of your seat stuff – well we were so crammed into the one van that my bum cheeks didn’t actually touch the seat and there were certainly not enough seat belts for everyone. But Brad, an experienced stormchaser knew exactly what he was doing….even if a tad chancy. We then headed away to view the tornado – wow – it was amazing! It was a mile wide ‘wedge’ which means the top and the bottom of the tornado were the same distance like a wedge. As Brad screams in my iPhone video clip “Yeahhh….it’s f**king HUGE”!!!!! Then when the tornado had gone we parked up in the middle of nowhere – well, actually it was a place called Throckmorton (75 miles from Witchita Falls and 150 miles from Dallas) and got out to take photos of the sky – it was amazing – black clouds everywhere, lightning strikes in the distance and then the constant rumble. This was not thunder but hailstones rubbing together in the clouds getting ready to crash down onto the ground. Many times the vans have had smashed windows from hailstones the size of baseballs. We saw several hailstone storms on our chases but thankfully no shattered windows.

I learnt so much about clouds, tornadoes, storms and to see the Great Plains and Mid West of America was just an awesome experience.

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May 2015

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