UPDATE: I have a “before” picture of the vehicle now, posted below.
UPDATE2: Perhaps storm chasing has reached a tipping point.
Respected Tornado Reseacher And Storm Chaser Among Dead In Oklahoma | FOX17online.com
OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. — Family members and members of the storm chasing community are confirming that well-respected tornado researcher and storm chaser Tim Samaras is among the eleven confirmed victims of Friday’s tornado that ripped through El Reno, Oklahoma. Samaras was one of the most well-known and respected tornado researchers in the world and had made many appearances on television shows like the Discovery Channel series Storm Chasers and was a regular contributor to shows on National Geographic.
The day that should change tornado actions and storm chasing forever
Update 9:30 a.m., June 2: We now hear that “veteran storm chaser Tim Samaras; his son, Paul Samaras; and chase partner Carl Young, are among those killed by Friday’s EF-3 tornado in El Reno, OK.”
===============================================================
In the midst of all the tragedy unfolding in Oklahoma, media and storm chasers have been swarming all over the tornado outbreak. I’ve seen this many times in my years in television news: when you are tasked with going live, sometimes common sense gets literally thrown to the wind.
The Weather Channel lost sight of reality today, trying to get close to get the best footage for live coverage, and paid the price. Fortunately, they weren’t killed. Just last year, the TWC ran this segment by TWC meteorologist Mike Bettes, where he asked:
Mike Bettes’s Open Mike Discussion “Storm Chasers, Have They Gone Too Far?”
And it seems, Mike Bettes doesn’t listen to his own advice. Watch:
From TWC’s report on the incident:
Meteorologist Mike Bettes was chasing the monster rain-wrapped tornado near El Reno, Okla. when he says the storm picked up the heavy chase SUV and threw it an estimated 200 yards.
“We were ahead of the storm. We stopped to broadcast and I saw a large violent wedge tornado,” Bettes said in a live phone interview after he established phone connection after the incident.
“What we were trying to do was just get away from it and get to the south side of it,” Bettes said. “But what ended up happening was all three of our vehicles that we chase with were all hit by it.”
Basically, he put his team so close, he couldn’t get away from it.
And, he should know better. From the videos I’ve seen, this appeared to be a multiple vortice tornado, with a central core surrounded by other vortices (typically 3 or 4). Sometimes these outer vortices are intermittent and invisible.
Trying to dodge multiple vortices in the middle of live TV is of course a recipe for disaster.
h/t to Firsthand Weather
UPDATE: Before the tornado caught it, all blinged out:
Image by Kevin Parrish of NBC News
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I love when you can nail hypocrites talking down to people. Glad they’re OK.
Wild ride tonight. Rode it out with a few neighbors in the storm cellar. No apparent damage near us. It will be interesting to get better information and damage estimates tomorrow.
I was just watching TWC for a bit. Boy, certainly pushing the envelope. It’s one thing to play chicken with a tornado with a narrow base where it’s really tough to get hit, it’s a whole different scene with half mile wide wedge tornado that you can’t dodge.
I had air bags in my car “tested” when a pickup truck turned left in front of us. It’s really amazing that people can be strapped into a metal can while its sheet metal is twisted in ways I can’t do at home, but that you can walk away from afterwards.
Yep, I think at least two storm chasing teams need to rethink their goals. If it’s just to provide ground truth to the radar images, they really should be more careful about their communication links!
The misleading opening statement in the video….”year of the tornado”….
Mike is a dunce
Not Mike Bromley
This storm was not typical. It was more like a hurricane. Tornadoes formed, dissipated, and reformed near the preceding one. It was not what these chasers are used to. Of course, you are right. They should know and take precautions accordingly. The tornado that got the chase vehicle, and several others, though I think this one was the only one picked up and tossed, had taken a sharp turn to the south. Again, unusual. Apparently five fatalities, all vehicle related. The number of hospitalized seems to be about fifty. Better numbers will of course be forthcoming. Flooding is the problem at the moment. It is not clear how much damage was done.
What happens when storm chasers catch one
One could say the same thing about combat photographers. What they need is better gear, or say, a roll cage. I appreciate their work. http://tinyurl.com/ldo6s5v
I wasn’t watching TWC, but from what I have seen, watching through various TV stations and spotters, live, this is unfair.
In the wake of the previous Moore tornado, local stations were telling people to -evacuate-, so they did, and the i35 was packed with people fleeing the OK City area. The chasers got caught in that traffic jam. This does not seem to have been a matter of getting to close the way ‘core-punchers’ tend to do, this was due to the news stations giving very bad advice, resulting in this disaster. Now, maybe more information will get out that will change my perception of what happened here. But at present, this seems to be the case.
It was also somewhat unusual in that you had a train of supercells not greatly separated in space, one after another.
I-40 is a major east-west interstate that was shut down, so westbound travelers had to go somewhere. I’m not sure, but I bet they were detoured onto I-35 which is major north-south road. I-35 is usually very busy on any day, but especially on a Friday.
The line of storms was going in the standard SW to NE direction, but then the line turned east and even started moving in a NW to SE direction. So the standard “go south” option was the wrong one.
The teams that are here for the NCAA softball championship rode out the storm in the hotel’s underground parking lot. And there was a hockey game at the Cox Center that they also evacuated everyone to the garage. But, there are reports that the underground tunnel system in downtown OKC is a bit soggy because of the 5+ inches of rain.
http://newsok.com/video-serious-flooding-downtown-underground-tunnels-being-evacuated/article/3840592
Agree, but disagree.
First, for all intents and purposes the only people that seemed to be in that area were chasers, so it’s not like they were blocking legitimate escaping traffic.
Second, there’s no way our insurance will be paying for that vehicle, unless they’re magicians and managed to talk an insurance company into insuring a clearly marked tornado chasing vehicle against tornado damage. My guess is they didn’t.
Third, the video from that vehicle is some of the most incredible I’ve yet seen. Watching the multiple suction zones forming and zipping around was breathtaking… and useful. Not to mention the scene where they get crushed ALONE should keep a lot of chasers farther away than they normally might have risked.
In my personal opinion the movie Twister did far more harm than today’s ill-fated chase.
Meanwhile, it was stressful watching the packed highways with tornadoes and softball-sized hail descending upon them. I sincerely hope when tomorrow dawns the first responders have nothing but good news.
I was watching on CNN (I despise Anderson Cooper, I got the distinct impression he was annoyed that his day was “wasted” by storms), FoxNews (Shepard Smith is great at this stuff, but the Lo-Def feed is horrid), and KFOR-4 in Oklahoma City, which was the authoritative channel. Within minutes YouTube had some great videos. Things have sure changed.
No doubt the tornado was magnified by global warming. Before global warming, that would have been a safe distance. /sarc
That would be a multiple VORTEX tornado, not a multiple vortice tornado.
Plural for vortex is vortices, so singular for vortices is vortex.
But singular for multiple flips in your tornado-chasing SUV is still STUPID.
Kurt in Switzerland
Bwaaa….amateurs never take less likely possibilities seriously.
A roll cage for a vehicle that just might be rolled by weather? Good idea clowns.
Reminds me of a dog. What does it do when it finally catches the hubcap?
Fools rush in.
You missed this introductory text:
The hunters becoming the hunted.
Footage was shown here in Australia on SBS News. You could see the from inside the vehicle that it was being hit by various airborne objects, one looked like a vehicle another was a bale of hay. There does seem to be an increase in bad weather reports, and the desire to be first to report right in the centre of the event. Glad they were unhurt, but rather silly thing to do. Reminds me of the eruption of Mt. Ruapehu in New Zealand in 1995. Some of my workmate got in their cars and drove ~400km’s to go see it firsthand.
Another point to consider are those idiots who pay to be storm chasing tourists. WTF? They really do not need to be in the way. There have been lots of reports about those people in the area.
I don’t have a problem with the guys from the stations who report back on the location of the storms. I have great respect for the station helicopter pilots who go up in the storms to track them. The local stations are very good and they track the storms by streets. It is only nervewracking when they mention your street!
But the great local reporting may cause some people to delay taking shelter. I was getting ready since I made the decision to shelter in place – I contacted the neighbors. key friends, etc and watched the TV. Then the storm turned east and I was ok (northern suburbs), but the central city was not. So, those people may have decided to hit the road.
By the way, one cable news show made it sound like everyone in the OKC Metro area was in their cars and in a panic. OKC Metro has about one million people. The vast majority were safe in their houses and not panicing.
I prefer Gary England on Channel 9. Gary and his crew are very calm. Some of the other TV guys tend to get over dramatic. But one excellent thing that happens in OKC is that most of the radio stations switch to the TV stations, so even people traveling through the area can hear all of the warnings.
Here is an interesting story about the above ground shelters in Moore – http://newsok.com/oklahoma-tornadoes-aboveground-shelters-stood-up-in-face-of-ef5-moore-tornado/article/3840636
Well, I dunno… Traditionally, journalists have been worthy of respect because they have the guts to go where most of us won’t go voluntarily. War fronts, disasters, etc. Bettes showed some guts, thus he deserves some respect.
I’m a little worried about Luther Wu. In his last post he was trying to evacuate and things weren’t going well:
U OK Luther?
commieBob, I’m betting on power outage… not stressing yet.
Incidentally, if you have the ability to watch this in HD, be awed:
http://youtu.be/kOh9Ptz4w28