In Oklahoma: Chasing Twisters

By David Jackson

It is 11:45 a.m., and Gene Moore is scanning the cloudy skies, pulling on a cigarette, adjusting the treble on his stereo and aiming his blue Ford pickup truck toward western Oklahoma.

He is out to catch a tornado. To be exact, Moore is a storm chaser, and when he catches up with a tornado, it is not uncommon for him to bring it back alive on film. Thereafter scientists at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., can study it in the relative safety of the lab. Catching tornadoes sounds about as unlikely a sport as herding partridges on horseback. But when conditions are right, the NSSL sends out several vans packed with photographers, meteorologists and equipment, assorted airplanes and platoons of experts in hope of harvesting storm data. When people in Texas or Oklahoma or Kansas start running for their lives from a tornado, Moore and his colleagues are usually running full speed into it.

Today NSSL has word of storms moving east from the border near the Texas Panhandle. It has already loosed four aircraft, including one armor-plated job equipped to penetrate the severest storms. Six special Doppler radars, which are sensitive even to frequency changes in falling raindrops, have been focused on the western part of the state. And three storm chase vehicles like Moore's are rolling westward.

Severe weather is expected all over the state, and the scientists at the Norman laboratory, operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) laboratory, have just launched the second part of a ten-week storm project called Sesame 79. Part 1 examined regional atmospheric conditions. Part 2 is aimed at collecting data from specific storms. Nobody in the Great Plains is pleased to learn that a tornado is on the way. But these scientists, engaged in a $3.5 million project to help measure and ultimately predict tornadoes and severe storms, are excusably excited.

Moore is 32 and still working on his degree in meteorology at Oklahoma University. He admits fieldwork appeals more to him than the written thesis that still separates him from a degree. But he is regarded as an expert contract worker and weather photographer, and when tornadic storms are pelting his truck with hail and threatening imminent catastrophe, Moore's language can be impressively scientific. He has caught up with and photographed more than 60 tornadoes in the past eight years, and he speaks expertly of anvils and shears, gust fronts and vortexes, lips and inflow bands.

"I always watched storms when I was young," Moore says. "I figured when I got old enough, I'd follow one and see what it was like." Sometimes these days, he sees them a bit too well. As the pickup hurtles along Route 66, Moore recalls his last big storm. It ended up chasing him all over north central Texas, then dispersed, then treacherously re-formed and became the deadly tornado that killed more than 40 people last April in Wichita Falls. Moore outran it for 15 minutes, until it crossed the road behind his truck. Says he: "It sounded just like a commercial jet landing."

He carries a motorcycle helmet to fend off the huge hailstones that often accompany a tornado, but the only thing he admits fearing is lightning: "There's no rhyme or reason to it." Now he turns up the AM radio and rotates the tuner, listening for the pop of static that reveals the presence of lightning in the billowing clouds overhead. There is none.

By 2 p.m., the alto-cumulus clouds begin to cast shadows across the truck stops and red-dirt farm lands of western Oklahoma. Moore and his aide, Bill Moyer, another O.U. meteorology student, keep peering at the sky, noting the cloud peaks tilting to the southeast, indicating that jet-stream winds are active. "That's good," Moore notes, "real good." Two essential ingredients for a tornadic storm seem to be present, and just as surely moving inexorably toward a showdown. If the cold, swift-moving jet-stream wind persists and clashes with the warm, moist lower air from the south, the atmosphere will be forced to readjust dramatically, creating the vortex of vertical air currents that cause tornadoes.

From Erick, Okla., over near the Texas border, Moore calls Norman. The lab reports that the storm clouds are "falling apart." Moore is unconvinced. He heads west again to get a better look at a cloud bank that seems to contradict the forecast. "Look at that thing!" Moore yells. "It's going up! Hell yes, it's going up!" He throws the pickup into a fast U-turn. He turns on the AM radio just in time to hear an unmistakable crackle. "If I didn't know better," Moore shouts, "I'd say that was lightning!" As the truck speeds through Cheyenne, the skies grow darker.

At 3:30 p.m., the radio announces a tornado watch for a wide corridor stretching from Abilene, Texas, to Enid, Okla. "Ha!" Moore cries, his judgment vindicated. Overhead, the underside of the clouds is heavy with moisture. Bill Moyer begins to check out the cameras.

In Vici, after pulling into a gas station, Moore rushes to a phone booth for one more call to the Norman lab. Back in the truck, he exults: "This is it! They're going crazy back there." He floors the accelerator, heading for the tornado's path, so he can get pictures. At 4:09 p.m., the first heavy drops splatter on the windshield, washing away the dead insects. A jumble of blue gray shapes rushes across the sky. Soon chilly blasts of air shake the truck. A windmill in a nearby field whirs crazily. "It's only a matter of time before we get hail," says Moore.

At 5:05 p.m., two other NOAA vans appear. All pull over for a hasty conference. A student with a two-way phone to the lab yells that the worst conditions are centered about 20 miles west of Enid (pop. 52,700). Moore spins his wheels, and the chase is on again. In Fairview, 30 miles west of Enid, several pickup trucks are parked along the road. Next to them, lanky farmers in caps and blue jeans stare at the turbulent, darkening sky. Women carrying grocery bags peer from the doorway of the IGA market. A handful of motorists watch from the refuge of an APCO gas station down the street.

In Enid, tornado sirens begin to shriek with an otherworldly howl. The sky is now black as night. Only a dim outline of the horizon betrays the threatening shape of the cloud formations. Several cars fish tail dangerously down the flooded streets. From the radio an announcer yells: "Take shelter! Get downstairs!" He adds that a tornado has just destroyed mobile homes west of town.

Within minutes, the western sky has turned a stunning emerald green, and huge hailstones are smashing on the truck's roof. It is 6:16 p.m. Moore pushes east as the hailstones, some of them literally the size of golf balls, threaten to crack our windshield. After plowing through a curtain of hail and rain, the truck turns south and breaks through the devastating storm. As it rolls through tiny Covington (pop. 605), every light in town blinks off and on, twice, because of storm-blown power lines. "Look for an escape route," Moore warns Moyer.

Soon the rain stops, and the clouds begin swirling in an unfamiliar turmoil, deadly and full of force. They move faster, roiling and dipping over a wheatfield. It is now 7 p.m. Suddenly, 1 ,000 yds. away, a charcoal sky seems to extend a smoky finger that stabs down at the earth, then withdraws. "There it is!" shouts Moore, screeching to a halt. He and Moyer scramble out and hoist their cameras as the monstrous sky, churning and converging, forms a crooked funnel once, twice, half a dozen times. Each time the terrifying funnel snakes earthward and scratches the grassy field, dancing unsteadily, then retreats.

Seconds later, Moore lowers his camera and looks in horror as, 100 yds. away, the tan blur of a 100-m.p.h. tornado wind crosses the road on which the truck is parked. That wind could easily send it rolling end over end like a kid's toy. Moore dashes into the cab, Moyer on his heels. "Get in!" he screams. "That son of a bitch is coming right at us! Now! Let's go!" He jams the truck into gear, and we race north. Behind, hardly the length of a football field away, the ground beneath the tornado is suddenly lost in a dark howling whirlpool. Then the truck is hit again with the full force of the hail. A shower of red dirt and debris tossed up by the tornado batters it. Minutes later, as Moore pulls into Covington, tornado sirens suddenly fill the air.

The storm tears away to the south east, passing north of Oklahoma City. The pickup heads for Norman. It has taken 500 miles of driving and ten hours, but Moore has caught his tornado, and it didn't catch him. The 11 ft. of film on which he captured nature's awesome dervish will be scrutinized by NSSL scientists and added to the incomplete yet growing mosaic of knowledge about storms that kill an average of 250 people a year and do a billion dollars worth of damage.

Gene Moore pats his camera affectionately: "Now," he says, "that was a tornado."

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