What Stands in a Storm (11 page)

A forecaster, Spann focused on predicting future conditions using models based on past weather patterns. Doswell, a researcher, focused on studying, recording, and measuring severe weather, to understand the mechanics of storms (though early in his career he had been a part-time forecaster). Ultimately complementary and equally vital to the progress of the science, one looked to the future, while the other analyzed the past.

Doswell joined his fellow research tribesmen in a landmark study—VORTEX1 (the Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment)—that aimed to record and measure the entire evolution of a tornado, up close and in great detail.

Live tornadoes are infrequent, irregular, fleeting, and erratic—the most resistant subjects. You can't study them in a lab. You can't control the environment. You could engineer an outdoor lab with the finest instrumentation, but even if you built it, they might not come.

To reckon with all these variables, VORTEX1 created a mobile lab that could follow supercells as they formed. A fleet of planes flew into the supercell and recorded measurements. A Doppler on Wheels (literally a big radar mounted on the back of a truck) provided three-dimensional maps of the winds swirling inside the tornado.

During the 1994 and 1995 storm seasons, VORTEX1 succeeded in documenting the entire life cycle of a tornado. (It also inspired the movie
Twister
.) But one of the study's key questions—
What is the difference between supercells that produce tornadoes and supercells that do not?
—still could not be answered.

Thus, the scientific sequel: VORTEX2. Actually, it was a megasequel, at least from a production standpoint. At a cost of more than $10 million, this project was as logistically mind-bending as the invasion of a small country. Pulling it off required orchestrating one hundred-plus researchers from labs and universities, more than
forty vehicles, mobile weather balloon launchers, aerial drones, and deployable pods that would measure the inner workings of a tornado. To maximize the number of potential intercepts, the study area spanned 750,000 square miles—a sizable chunk of the Great Plains that stretched from the Dakotas to southwest Texas, from Wyoming to Iowa.

VORTEX2 deployed its scientific battalion in the quieter-than-average tornado seasons of 2009 and 2010 and intercepted around thirty supercells and twenty weak or short-lived tornadoes. In June 2009, Wyoming gave the scientists a long-lived tornado that remains the best-sampled tornadic supercell to date. But, like a fishing trip that yielded a cooler of keepers but no whopper, VORTEX2 closely studied a season that failed to cooperate by delivering the necessary action. The watched pot refused to boil. Nonetheless, VORTEX2 yielded important insights about triggering mechanisms for tornadogenesis, the inner structure of a tornado, and wind damage. Scientists are still analyzing the data, but their findings should improve tornado warning lead time.

“The average warning time nationally is thirteen minutes,” said Joshua Wurman, president of the Center for Severe Weather Research in Boulder, Colorado, and one of the principals of VORTEX2. “If we can increase that lead time from thirteen minutes to half an hour, then the average person at home could do something different. Maybe they can seek a community shelter instead of just going into their bathtub. Maybe they can get their family to better safety if we can give them a longer warning and a more precise warning.”

3:07 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA

Danielle stood in the TES lobby, watching James Spann and wondering what to do. Everyone in the office was starting to murmur anxiously about the storm. But through the glass door, the sky did not look menacing. Just gray and cloudy. The temperature was a balmy eighty-two degrees, the dew point sixty-nine and rising. A gusty wind blew in from the south, tugging on flags up and down the street. Beyond the TES parking lot, the traffic roared by at its regular pace on the four lanes of lower Fifteenth Street.

Danielle recalled the rash of tornadoes that had come through less than two weeks ago. Her power had gone out that night, and her alarm clock had failed. What were the chances of getting hit again? She planned to weather the storm at home with friends, playing board games and watching movies until it passed. She invited her grad-student colleague to join them. He could hang with Will, talk baseball.

The Cullman tornado had been on the ground for more than half an hour now, and it was headed toward Huntsville, the big city northeast of her parents' house in Priceville.

James Spann was waving at a new scary-looking splotch on the radar aimed north of Tuscaloosa. An angry spiral with an evil red eye, it was headed northeast at a steady clip, and at least three small towns lay directly in its path—Hamilton, Hackleburg, and Phil Campbell. It
was scary enough by itself, but west of the storm, in Mississippi, the brigade of storms stacked up behind it was chilling to behold.

“This is going to be one of those red-letter days,” Spann said, looking over the tops of his spectacles. “We're just gonna sit back, take a big deep breath, and we're gonna get through this thing together.”

Now there was a new tornado warning for a cell coming out of Mississippi and entering Pickens County, just west of Tuscaloosa.

“This thing is wrapped up like a top,” Spann said, “and that's crossing the state line.”

The producers cut to live video streaming from the dashboard of two tornado chasers trolling the lonely back roads of Alabama, trying to intercept the tornado. Their camera showed nothing but window wipers and black asphalt scrolling between shadowy pines and a sliver of white sky.

Danielle was annoyed. She could not see the whereabouts of the storm headed her way, and it was making her grumpy. Why wouldn't they zoom out? Just then, her phone pinged with a text from her sister.

Within four minutes, the atmosphere was boiling with no fewer than ten supercells raging northwest across Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, bearing litters of tornadoes. The thirty-eighth tornado of the day was on the ground in Alabama, and dozens more were forming behind it.

Danielle's boss, Karen Thompson, made an announcement to the staff.

“You know what? Let's just go home,” she said. “Everybody go home.”

No point in staying. Schools were letting out and the city was shutting down. Thompson, who had lived in Tuscaloosa all her life and was accustomed to storms, was not all that worried. It was just a
part of living here, and according to her memory, tornadoes had more or less followed Highway 69, a hair west of Tuscaloosa. She heard the weathermen saying it was going to be bad. But they always said that.

Danielle packed up her last few things. Her desk was clean. She said her last round of good-byes and texted Will.

Normally at this hour on a Wednesday she would be driving to work at the Wingate. But not today, since her boss had cut her hours. As she walked across the parking lot to her car, the sirens began to wail and a stiff wind tossed her hair. Steel-wool clouds curled across the sky, hanging so low they looked like they might snag on the treetops. The muggy air lay upon her like a soggy towel. Under the curdling clouds the world took on a heavy cast, and the streets were still wet from the morning storms, giving them a slick, metallic sheen. It looked like it might rain again.

Her grad-student friend said it sounded like a fun way to weather a storm, but he was tired and decided to just go home. She wasn't sure whether she would see him again between graduation, the wedding, and her move to Florida. Over the past four months of working closely together, they had become friends. Danielle delivered a big hug, just in case this was good-bye.

The nine-minute drive from TES to 31 Beverly Heights began east on Fifteenth Street, a corridor of college haunts that have fed, entertained, and distracted generations of college students. Inside Fifteenth Street Diner, a meat-and-three tucked in a strip mall, waitresses in Crimson Tide T-shirts crisscrossed the black-and-white checkered floor, delivering plastic plates of fried catfish, okra, and hush puppies to diners squeezed into the red vinyl booths. Central High had let out early, and the parking lot was empty. Danielle followed the string
of taillights past Bama Bowl to the intersection of Fifteenth Street and McFarland Boulevard, where the scent of fried donuts at Krispy Kreme sometimes mingled with the meaty smoke curling from the pits of Full Moon Bar-B-Que.

As Danielle drove home, Loryn was already in the hallway, burrowed in a nest of blankets and pillows. She had not bothered to put on makeup or straighten her hair—no way was she leaving the house in this weather. If she inched toward the living room, she could peek around the wall at the meanness outside the bay window. She had dragged the large flat-screen TV from its stand in the living room, stretching the cord to a place where she could watch James Spann from the safety of the hallway.

The blotch on the radar behind Spann was growing bigger and bigger. It looked to be pretty far north of her, but still it scared her into hiding. She sought comfort from friends on Facebook.

Danielle walked in and laughed at Loryn's hallway blanket-fort but decided to join her. This weather was getting serious.

Across town, Will shoved his laptop in a blue-and-black backpack that he carried everywhere. It was warm out, and he was wearing a black Priceville High Baseball T-shirt with black-and-white athletic shorts that gaped around his skinny knees. He climbed behind the wheel of his sand-colored Ford F-150 pickup, setting on the console the Alabama wallet his uncle gave him on Christmas.

It wasn't an easy thing for a southern boy to admit, but tornadoes scared him, too. He was easily spooked, by strangers at the front door of his parents' house or unfamiliar noises in the night. Anytime he was home alone in Priceville, his family would come home to find
the blinds closed and every light in the house blazing. He had joked during the April 15 outbreak that “this is my kind of weather,” but today he had been keeping a nervous eye on the news. He called his mother to check in.

“They say it's gonna get bad down here,” he told his mom, Jean Stevens. “Danielle wants me to come over to her house to just hang and watch movies.”

First he needed to turn in a history paper—his very last college assignment—and meet with his professor. But it was getting late. His phone buzzed with Danielle's text, letting him know, as promised, that she had gotten home.

Danielle did not approve of this plan, and she was not afraid to let him know it. James Spann kept telling people to go to a safe place, and the radar screen behind him was painted with so many angry spirals it was hard to count them all. Seven? Ten? Two big ones were leaving Mississippi and entering Alabama, headed northeast at fifty miles per hour. One of them was aimed at Tuscaloosa.

On ABC 33/40, James Spann was zooming in on an evil-looking spiral far north of them. The significant tornado index read 17.5. Until today, he had thought it was a scale from 1 to 10.

“That's a debris ball,” he said. “That's the radar beam bouncing off the stuff in the tornado. Cars could be in there. Boards, bricks, glass, nails, shrapnel, pieces of homes.”

Danielle and Loryn hunkered down in the hall, listening. Danielle's phone buzzed again with another text, this time from her father. Ed Downs had been nervously eyeing two storms tracking directly toward his daughters. He fired off a quick text to them.

One hundred miles north of Beverly Heights, a road was being shucked from the earth. A small bulldozer cartwheeled through the whipping dirt, and a dump truck careened fifty yards through the air, crumpled like a soda can. A two-ton utility trailer launched into a mile-long arc and cratered the earth with its impact. A Corvette flew 641 feet. At the Wrangler plant, a flock of blue jeans launched into flight, flapping like denim birds. A memory quilt that told the story of a life was carried over two counties.

Somewhere, a mother watched the blackness swallow the town where her children waited.

3:44 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—SMITHVILLE, MISSISSIPPI