The Story of Legendary Storm Chaser, Tim Samaras

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with Our American Stories. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the tornado was one of the last true mysteries of the modern world. It was a monster that ravaged the American heartland a thousand times each year, yet science’s every effort to divine its inner workings had ended in failure. Researchers all but gave up until the arrival of an outsider. Brantley Hargrove is the author of The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras. Let’s take a listen.

00:00:45
Speaker 2: Tim was just this middle-class kid from the suburbs of Denver. He grew up in this little bungalow in Lakewood, Colorado. And, you know, I mean, he was kind of an unusual kid in some ways. You know, most kids are playing with, you know, action figures or whatever. He was taking apart his parents’ appliances for some reason. He just really liked to take apart the blender or the television set, just to figure out what made them go. He simply couldn’t take for granted the fact that they actually worked. He had this innate curiosity, and so, you know, his dad, just to keep him away from their appliances, he actually went out into the neighborhood, out to the, you know, this for the outlying community, and would pick up, like, these old radios, these big radios with the dials on them, and he’d bring them back to Tim just to give him something to tinker with. And Tim would sometimes fix them, I mean, if they weren’t working. I mean, he had this natural gift for figuring out what was wrong with a piece of equipment, electronics, and putting it back together again. You know, when he was probably six years old, The Wizard of Oz was on Prime Time that Sunday evening, and his parents dragged the dining room table into the living room and served dinner in there. And that’s where Tim saw The Wizard of Oz for the first time. And, I mean, once that tornado started churning toward Dorothy and Toto, he was completely transfixed by the image on screen. He just couldn’t believe it—this image of power. And, uh, you know, the rest of the film really didn’t interest him all that much. He’d get kind of bored once they started hitting the Yellow Brick Road. But, uh, you know, forevermore he would be drawn to that image, and, you know, he couldn’t believe that there were such things near his home, and he wanted to see one for himself someday. He’s near Denver, so he’s got these storms coming up against the Rockies, these violent thunderstorms that are known to produce tornadoes. And, you know, when he was a young kid, he saw his first funnel cloud in the sky. So, I mean, that sort of just ignited even further this fire that had first begun with The Wizard of Oz. He’s walking into the Denver Research Institute, which is an applied science outfit. They do all sorts of explosives work for the military, and basically, these guys are just geeks who used really high-tech, research-grade electronics to study all sorts of violent forces, among other things. And so Tim walks in. You know, he’s twenty or twenty-one, walking in with holes in his jeans and a T-shirt. And he doesn’t even bring in his own resume. I mean, I don’t think he’d ever drawn one up. And so, yeah, he gets talking to the guy who runs that outfit, Larry Brown, and, you know, I mean, Larry Brown can see this guy is clearly conversant, but, you know, maybe not even the most qualified person that he’s talked to for this job. And so he’s like, ‘All right, Tim, well, you know, this is interesting, but why don’t you come back with a resume?’ And so Tim does, and it’s this yellow sheet of paper onto which he’s handwritten his expertise, which includes working at a mom-and-pop radio repair shop. I mean, it’s not a whole lot there, but, you know, I mean, Larry goes with his gut. He likes Tim. He sees that Tim has a natural ability, and he seems pretty cool, too. So he’s like, ‘All right, I’m going to give this kid a chance,’ and he does. And, you know, I mean, by the time Tim is, you know, years old, he’s got a Pentagon security clearance. Brown saw something in Tim that was, I think, harder to quantify, except that, I think, this is probably the first time he ever actually enjoyed sitting in a classroom. He did take a storm-spotting course and, you know, some basic meteorology through Skywarn, which partners with the National Weather Service, but by and large, he was, you know, teaching himself. He was reading, you know, everything he could, trying to figure out, ‘Okay, how do I go out myself and find these storms, and how can I make myself of use to the National Weather Service?’ I mean, he was also one of their spotters, so he’d be the guy out there giving them on-the-ground intelligence about what actually is happening, because radar can tell us that there is a storm that, you know, has some evidence of tornadic rotation, but it can’t necessarily tell you the tornado is on the ground, and Tim would be the guy who’d be out there in the field with eyes on the storm, telling them, ‘You know, in fact, there is a tornado or there is one.’ Tornadoes were so inexplicable, so poorly understood that atmospheric scientists, meteorologists, you know, the government was just like, ‘Hey, look, let’s, let’s, we can’t even bother with trying to predict these things.’ There’s no point in warning people about the possibility of tornadoes if we have really no ability to predict where they’re going to occur and when with any kind of specificity. And so, yeah, you know, with the, you know, the Signal Services—the Army Signal Services—which is, you know, initially in charge of, you know, National Weather Forecasting and then the Weather Bureau. I mean, it was just the word you didn’t really utter, and so we didn’t even really start making, you know, any kinds of tornado forecasts until the 1950s. I mean, it’s kind of remarkable when you think about it. We just did not understand them well enough to predict them. And so, you know, up through whenever Tim kind of arrived on the scene and began his own research, we’d come a long way, but there were still a lot of unanswered questions. We had just developed in the 1960s and 1970s, Doppler radar, and then mobile Doppler didn’t even come onto the scene until the 1990s, which would allow us to scan at somewhat close range these tornadoes in detail. And so we just had this really essential tool come on the scene. We’re learning quite a bit, however. I mean, the mobile radar, even when you can drag it out into close proximity with the storm, it left some blind spots. It couldn’t scan in that lowest fifty meters or so, and that’s a pretty crucial spot. I mean, that’s where these winds begin to coalesce. I mean, you know, how can you predict them if you can’t understand how the low-level environment is connected to the broader storm environment? And so that was kind of one place where Tim was hoping he could fill in the blanks. Frank was the spark. He’s this explosives expert there in Huntsville, and, you know, back in ’89, Huntsville got hit by a really violent tornado. You know, it killed, I think, a couple dozen people. And in the aftermath, he heard a lot of weird things that sort of struck him and, in some ways, related to his own research. He was hearing that there were all these people who were feeling these tremors in the ground as the tornado approached. I mean, these weren’t yahoos; this was like the emergency manager. It was like a preacher who was in the basement, sheltering with, you know, some people from his congregation, were saying, ‘Yeah, I felt these—I felt these tremors coming through the ground.’ And so he’s like, ‘Okay, I mean, could a tornado measurably transfer energy into the ground to the extent that, you know, you’d actually create some kind of shockwaves?’ And what he found, you know, whenever he went to a USGS Geological Survey site where they had some geophones in the ground, you know, he found out that they actually did—they were actually seismic signals being created by these tornadoes. And so he set out to build this device with federal funding that he hoped would, you know, serve as an early warning network. He would use it to detect seismic signals of tornadoes and to give maybe a little bit better of an advanced heads up. And so he built these devices, but, you know, Frank was not a storm chaser. He didn’t really know how to go find tornadoes and, you know, put these, you know, somewhere near the path so that they could, you know, either pick up or not pick up on these seismic signals. And so he started reaching out to all these storm chasers that he’d heard about throughout the U.S., and Tim’s was one of those names who came up as, you know, kind of one of these prominent, through legendary, storm chasers. Tim had seen this NOVA documentary on PBS a decade before, where these scientists from the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Oklahoma University were going out, chasing down these tornadoes with this instrument they developed called the Totable Tornado Observatory. They were trying to deploy this instrument to get these long-sought-after measurements from the core of a tornado, and they weren’t successful. But, I mean, Tim had been captivated by this documentary, by this idea of these scientists going out, chasing tornadoes down. And so what Frank was offering him was a mission that sounded a whole lot like what these scientists had done. And so, I mean, he couldn’t say no.

00:08:54
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Brantley Hargrove talk about the life of legendary tornado chaser Tim Samaras. An unusual kid, indeed. He didn’t play with action figures. He took apart his parents’ appliances, then ultimately strangers’ appliances, garage-sale appliances—anything he could take apart and discover how the thing worked. Most kids, well, they would have just taken for granted that they actually worked and left it at that. We learned how Tim hustled his way into a world-class research institute in Denver with a, let’s just say, less-than-stellar resume. Luckily, he had a mentor and an adult who recognized a hidden talent and worked on his gut to bring Tim Samaras into the fold. When we come back, more of the story of legendary tornado chaser Tim Samaras here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories, and with Brantley Hargrove. He’s the author of The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:10:22
Speaker 2: The Turtle probe was quite different from everything that had preceded it. A lot of the previous inventions—none of which managed to get into the core of a tornado, you know—and a lot of attention was paid to the aerodynamic profile. And, you know, up to that point, it hadn’t mattered because they hadn’t gotten into a place where that would be of utmost importance. And Tim did pay a great deal of attention to its aerodynamic profile. He conceived this device whose profile was inspired, actually, by a previous instrument that had been devised by, you know, another guy at Applied Research Associates where he was now working. It was an intercontinental ballistic missile launch vehicle that was supposed to be able to withstand a nuclear shockwave. And what Tim did was, he took those plans, and he scaled them down and adapted them to his use. So he built this thing that, you know, ‘Okay, if it can survive a nuclear shockwave, surely it’ll be okay in a tornado.’ And so this device he built is about, you know, twenty inches across, about six inches tall, you know, sort of conical in shape, kind of like a traditional Vietnamese hat. And it was filled with pressure transducers, sensors for temperature and humidity, and this data logger that took core measurements from all these sensors ten times per second. To that point, it was one of the most aerodynamically, and just, you know, in terms of the instrumentation, the most advanced in situ probe that had ever been devised. You know, finding tornadoes to begin with is difficult. Tim was well acquainted with that struggle. For every tornado you see, you strike out on probably at least five other events. First of all, he was dealing with that—just the difficulty in finding these things. And then there’s the difficulty, if you do, of maneuvering ahead of them. So you’ve got to position yourself in such a way that you’ll be able to stay, you know, probably roughly to the north and slightly ahead of the tornado as it’s moving, to be able to drop down front and intercept. So, to add to all this, he also knew that if he’s going to deploy this thing into the core, he’s going to have to get in front of the tornado. I mean, even in a more extreme position than he’d been in with Frank’s instrument. He’s going to have to wait until the tornado is really close. Because tornadoes, they swerve. I mean, they don’t travel in a straight line. They are all sorts of little bobs and weaves in their tracks. And so that means he has to get really, really close—probably closer than anybody’s really ever gotten and survived to deploy this thing. He’d been trying to deploy on several tornadoes the year before and got really close, and I think he was learning more and more just how close he needed to be to pull this off. And so, in Stratt, Texas, in 2003, you know, there were all sorts of risks that he was courting that day. I mean, as he maneuvered in front of this oncoming tornado in the Texas Panhandle, there was baseball-size hail coming down. I mean, he could easily have been brained by a baseball-size chunk of ice. That stuff’s fatal. So he jumps out of his minivan. He’s got his partner in there filming for the scientific record, and there’s this tornado in the distance, you know, clearly approaching. It’s kind of this sort of multiple-vortex circulation moving in at about, you know, probably thirty miles per hour, and so Tim, you know, drops his probe. They’re starting to be able to hear the roar of the tornado. He jumps back in the minivan, and they take off, and they get overtaken by the rain curtains in the outer circulation, and they’re getting battered by some pretty intense winds. I mean, winds approaching one hundred miles per hour, at least, and, I mean, they’ve got telephone poles bending into the road, and some are falling into the road. He’s having to swerve into the oncoming lane of traffic. You know, fortunately, there’s nobody out there, just to steer clear of these telephone poles. I think this is the first time, at least, you know, that I’ve heard, and I’ve watched a bunch of Tim’s storm-chasing footage. This is the first time I really heard true fear in his voice. And I think he felt at that moment like he had pushed it way too far and that they were going to pay the consequences. And, I mean, he was. He managed to get out, but it was a really close brush. By this point, Tim has been out on the road for several years trying to deploy on these tornadoes with limited success. You know, he’s gotten close, but he hasn’t gotten that singular deployment that he’s been shooting for. And so, yeah, he gets onto a tornado near Woonsocket, South Dakota, and the dang thing, it keeps to the fields the whole time. Tim can’t deploy on a tornado in the fields. He needs to cross a navigable road, and this thing, you know, it dies right before it gets to the first navigable road he could possibly deploy on. So he’s pretty dispirited. It’s June twenty-fourth, I believe, and, you know, he’s getting toward the end of the season. This is very late in tornado season, you know; after this, it looks like there’s going to be a high-pressure ridge. It’s going to deplete all the storm potential after that. But as he’s collecting his probes, you know, this guy who’s with him notices the splash of golden sunlight refracting off the backside of a storm to the east, and Tim jumps into the minivan and sees that there’s a pretty vigorous radar signature within that storm. There’s a hook echo. This could very well be an ongoing tornado. So he gathers up his probes as quickly as he can and then lights off down the highway east toward the storm. And as he approaches, he sees that there is an enormous tornado on the horizon. I mean, in my opinion, this is probably the biggest and most violent tornado he’s ever actually encountered. This is the shot he’s been waiting for really his whole life. And the partner with him, it’s his brother-in-law, Pat Porter, you know. He actually asked, ‘Are we going to deploy on that thing?’ And Tim’s like, ‘Damn right!’ And so he approaches this thing down the highway, and it’s closing in on the highway, and he realizes that, you know, his approach is all wrong. He can’t deploy here; he can’t accurately gauge its forward speed, its trajectory. Trying to get on that highway in front of that tornado would be almost suicide. So he kind of pauses for a second, then realizes that he’s got, you know, to the north, and this thing’s moving off to the northeast. To the north, there’s a good grid of dirt roads. It’s not optimal to be on dirt roads because dirt roads get wet and then they get bogged down. But he’s going to give it a shot. So he figures if he heads north on this dirt road and can take the next east dirt road, that he can head the tornado off, drop his probe, and then head north as the tornado moves off to the northeast. So basically, he’s racing the tornado to this intersection a mile or so ahead, and so he takes off, and it’s a hairy ride. I mean, the road just turns into cake batter. They’re fishtailing at various points. They lose sight of the tornado in the rain. I mean, it’s chewing through farmhouses; there’s debris drifting everywhere. But he gets to this place in the road, you know, at this intersection, drops his probe, and hauls as fast as he can, and the tornado runs over his probe. I mean, it’s a