Natural Disaster

I woke up in a panic. After fumbling with my phone in a dark hotel room, my tired eyes finally made out the time—3:45 A.M.

A mental scramble of questions fired through my brain: Am I late for work? What hotel is this? What city am I in? What time zone am I even in?

Eventually my brain settled down and I remembered that I was in Wichita, Kansas, and I still had thirty minutes to get up and out the door. I’d been driving all night with my crew and our producer, Gina Sunseri, in search of a live location where damage had been done by one of the tornadoes we had been chasing.

Rolling out of bed, I also remembered that my body was aching from sitting in the car hunched over, writing scripts on my phone, for the last two days. I did some quick stretches before flipping on the light in the bathroom mirror and coming face-to-face with my face. Not good. The lack of sleep and attention to removing my eye makeup the night before had left me looking pretty exhausted. I spackled on some makeup to fake my best at-least-I’m-alive look and rushed out to meet Gina.

After we did GMA from a gas station that had been shredded by a tornado the day before, it was time to focus, because today was the big day. It was May 31, 2013, and Oklahoma City was in the center of the severe-weather threat zone for the second time in ten days.

When we’re storm chasing, we forecast for a target region using all the available data on computer models. Then we start narrowing it down by looking at current conditions on satellite. We make our best scientific assessment of the safest place to be closest to the storm, get there, and wait. We watch the tops of the thunderstorms begin to grow, billowing into the sky at such a fast rate, they almost appear like a time-lapse. Once those cumulonimbus storms grow and we can see the base, we match the visual with the radar and find the tornado. Gina had been chasing with me before for World News, and we shared a love for the entire adventure—the science, the intuition it takes to be in the right place at the right moment, and then just the awe and respect that is beyond words whenever we get up close to a storm and feel its immense power. The feeling I have when I see a tornado ripping across a barren field is probably similar to the feeling sports fans get when their favorite team wins a world championship. It’s exhilarating for me to witness nature’s power and watch whatever natural disaster I’ve been forecasting finally unleash itself. I’ve had the opportunity to see a few dozen tornadoes at this point, but one of the most stunning images of an up close tornado happened in the boot of Missouri in 2009. This beast was plucking huge trees from the earth like it was a pair of tweezers on a set of eyebrows, tossing the colossal trunks through the sky. Every time I’m out in the field I am reminded of the reasons I made so many difficult choices along the way to avoid being confined to a studio full-time. I know it sounds geeky to say, but I love the weather. I have respect for it, and it inspires me every single time. Today was no different.

Just two weeks earlier, my storm chasing had brought me to Moore, Oklahoma, where twenty-four people had died. I was there just an hour after the tornado hit and the wreckage it left behind was devastating. Moore is famous for the F5 tornado of May 3, 1999. We studied this tornado in college, and it still holds the record of fastest wind speeds ever recorded—301 miles per hour! So when Moore was hit again fourteen years later and we were there, we were all braced for something big. And to be in the general vicinity again on this day felt eerie.

I had a bad feeling that today’s tornado in Oklahoma would also take lives. It’s an intuition we all develop over the years by studying storms and the science behind them, and sometimes I wish I didn’t have it. It’s the type of forecast where I would be happy to be wrong. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case this time.

World News broadcasts at 5:30 P.M. central time, and on this day they wanted me live. Because it takes at least an hour to set up a shot, being live pretty much puts us out of the game as far as getting a tornado on TV or tape. With a chase, you have to move. And most severe storms and tornadoes erupt in the late afternoon and evening, after the peak heating of the day fuels the thunderstorms.

Knowing that I would not be able to chase for a while, I chose a place on the west side of Oklahoma City so at least we could see the storms blowing up while being in the major population center, warning folks of the storms on their doorstep. As we watched the anvils taking over the early evening sky, I had my RadarScope app refreshing constantly. I was watching these incredible images of a supercell (a rotating thunderstorm) morphing into a monster, and again that sense of wonder and respect was familiar yet overwhelming. I knew that the storms were just thirty miles away and they were headed towards us. I also kept refreshing the websites where you can log on and “chase” right along with the storm chasers. You can log on to see their dashboard cameras and watch their vehicles move around the storm on the map. I was so envious of all my friends out there surrounding the developing storm.

As soon as I finished the live shot, I looked at Gina—I wanted to hit the road. We blasted west, but with every refresh of the radar I got more and more concerned. I asked Gina to slow down so I could make a decision as to how to approach…or perhaps not approach. The radar was updating slowly, but as soon as the last scan of the atmosphere came in, I shuddered. The structure of the storm now looked like nothing I had ever seen. My stomach dropped. I had a terrible feeling. The freakish blob was centered over El Reno, Oklahoma, and it was so ugly. When I say the radar was ugly, I mean it was far from textbook. I knew how to chase a textbook storm. But this one, I didn’t want to mess with anymore. So I told Gina to drive south—away from the storm. I had already directed the crew and satellite truck to go south and get out of this storm’s way. Gina and I raced south and within five minutes started seeing the tweets:

The Weather Channel’s Mike Bettes flipped vehicle in tornado

Discovery Channel’s Reed Timmer’s storm-chasing vehicle loses hood

Several chasers getting far too close in the El Reno tornado

I had storm chased with Reed on the show Storm Chasers, I knew of Mike, and there were definitely other friends and colleagues I had out in the path of that storm. No one was dead, but it appeared there were injuries.

This had never happened before. Storm chasing had been getting more and more popular, congested, and even dangerous at times. Not because of the tornadoes themselves—but because the chasers were reckless. Yet there was no way all these people were being reckless. I couldn’t believe it. As the tweets kept rolling in, my jaw dropped. It was like a nightmare.

My heart collapsed. If World News had not insisted on a live shot, my entire crew and I would have been near that tornado, and chances are we would have been hit as well. World News might have just saved our lives. So again, thank you, Diane Sawyer. I believe that makes two times you have kept me alive.

Gina and I drove all the way south to Chickasha to allow the storm to pass before taking back roads north to El Reno. Through the flash flooding and postfrontal winds, we finally made it to the town where the storm had hit. It’s very rural, which is a great thing, because right away the landscape looked a lot better than what I’d seen ten days earlier when I had arrived right after the tornado in the densely populated town of Moore. Still, there were several deaths and more than a hundred injuries. That evening, I did updates on the storm for World News (West Coast), 20/20, Nightline, and 20/20 (West Coast) with all the footage from the damage we found in El Reno. As soon as we finished, I realized GMA was only a few hours away. I couldn’t sleep. Not in the van and not after such a wild night. I was too frazzled. Mike Bettes had survived, but as each hour passed, more and more video of storm chasers, people I knew, kept rolling onto my feed. There was wild video of another storm chaser, Brandon Sullivan, barely outrunning the tornado with his group.

All day Saturday we found damage, talked to survivors, and told the stories of yet another deadly twister in central Oklahoma. I was fatigued, but figured I would stay through the weekend and get a flight out Sunday evening. That was before I knew the full truth.

Sunday morning, about thirty hours after the tornado, I woke up to dozens of missed calls from one of the bookers at GMA. All the texts, e-mails, and voice mails were asking the same thing: Do you have Tim Samaras’s contact information? Of course I did! I called the booker and shared Tim’s info. Before I hung up, I said, “Why do you need to talk to Tim?”

“What?! Nope, sorry, you are wrong. That’s the craziest thing I have ever heard. Maybe it’s someone else? No way it’s Tim.”

I didn’t believe my booker for one moment. I called Gerard, the weather producer who had so warmly welcomed me into GMA, who was back in New York getting our show together.

“Gerard, you are not going to believe what the booking department just called and said to me. They tried to tell me that Tim Samaras died in the tornado.”

Gerard kept talking, but I froze. My world went black with the news that one of my heroes was gone.

Tim Samaras was a highly esteemed and respected storm chaser and scientist who worked on the Discovery Channel show Storm Chasers, and that’s how I knew him personally. But I knew of him for a long time before that. Tim was a rock star in my world. He was the person I was most excited to meet when I first got to guest on the show. I’d been a fan of Tim’s since college and had read his work. I studied his storm chasing the way a musician might study Beethoven or the Rolling Stones. Not only was he a weather genius, but he was the ultimate professional, always conservative and never reckless in his analysis and action the way so many storm chasers can be. His primary focus and reason for storm chasing wasn’t the adrenaline rush but the opportunity to collect data that would benefit other scientists. Less than a year before, I’d gone lightning chasing with Tim and his son for five days in a special I was doing for Nightline. The trip was so exceptional because we were able to get to know Tim really well. We met him at his home east of Denver, toured his workshop, and saw the giant camera he called the Kahuna—one of the fastest cameras on the planet, designed to capture the birth of the lightning strike, which is still not fully understood in the study of the atmosphere. I ended that beautiful piece for Nightline with a quote from Tim: “I don’t know how many storms I’ve seen in my lifetime, but every single one of them still gets me excited. The little boy in me just wants to come out and watch and stare.”

I was proud of the piece we did. It was beautifully shot, and it showcased the part of chasing and the science I had always wanted people to see. Tim was the star. And now he was gone.

I hung up the phone on Gerard and began to wail. Gina looked at me and her maternal instincts kicked in. Without asking for details, she immediately held me as I sobbed and rocked in her arms.

We were now a half hour to air and I was still sobbing—the kind of waterworks that are even too much for the movies. I couldn’t even catch my breath. I really don’t think that I would have experienced more grief in that moment if an actual family member had died. I was way too tired, and this reality was overwhelming and so hard to process.

I knew Tim personally, just enough to feel connected. But it was more than that. I respected him. He was a pillar in the world that I’d devoted my life to, and now he was gone. Up until Tim’s passing, I never thought of storm chasing as potentially deadly. From the storms over Lake Michigan that I initially fell in love with to the tornado I had seen just ten days before in Oklahoma, these storms were powerful, yes, but they didn’t kill people I knew! No one I knew had died in a tornado, let alone died storm chasing. And for it to be Tim Samaras—the most conservative, non-adrenaline-junkie storm chaser ever? It made no sense, and was incredibly unfair. To this day, I still can’t make my peace with Tim’s death entirely. It still makes me tear up. Not only did we lose one of the best scientists in our field, but I knew storm chasing had to change. Or at least our relationship to it had to. I had to relinquish control once again to the atmosphere. Mother Nature does indeed know more than we will ever know. That is a very difficult reality for a natural disaster to admit.

I imagined the loss his family would feel and wondered if I had any right to feel my own grief. I was getting closer to going on air, and as much as I wanted to be professional and pull myself together, I couldn’t stop crying. I got on the phone with my executive producer, John Ferracane, and we decided that I wouldn’t say anything about Tim until his death was confirmed publicly and we were certain that his family had been notified.

Gina gave me a pep talk and I made it through what was the most difficult on-air segment I’ve ever done, somehow managing not to cry. My voice was quivering, I looked exasperated, but I didn’t cry.

For the next twenty-four hours I told stories about Tim, his son Paul, and Carl Young. My colleague, the wildly talented David Muir, who was doing the weekend World News at the time, helped me craft the story so Tim, Paul, and Carl were celebrated, not vilified as “reckless chasers.” I will forever be grateful for David and his help that weekend. I did my best to fight through the sorrow. I had never told stories about people I knew. And this tornado was so different from any other, and not just for personal reasons. It was the widest tornado in recorded history. It exploded in size during its sixteen-mile track, and most importantly, it reminded us all that no matter how much we learn about the atmosphere, Mother Nature is still in charge.

This was another Katrina moment for me. The humanity of the storm became so much more real, and for me, life changing. This was a natural disaster that brought this natural disaster great perspective and humility.