Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
On May 23 Jerry Prsha left his cozy North County home and drove west on I-70 toward Quinter, Kan. The first tornado he encountered was a huge wedge, maybe 2 miles wide, stretched across a bruised sky. He saw telephone poles lying on their sides. He broke his towrope pulling a car that had been blown into a ditch. He shot footage of a car as it was picked up by the winds, suspended in midair and then hurled into a drainage ditch.
He kept going, past two more tornados and into the path of a fourth. On the video (youtube.com/watch?v=GgGjtZxGEkI), you hear him say, “I’m probably 300 feet away from this.” His laugh is pure glee, almost a cackle. “This is incredible!” he yells as the hand-held camera judders across the sky, where a ropy, dark gray funnel rises out of a swirl that’s actually debris (“sheds, or refrigerators, or cows”) flying in winds of 200 mph.
The sticker emblazoned on the back of Prsha’s Jeep reads, “I’m a storm chaser. If you’re following me, you’re going in the wrong direction.”
Why storms? When I was 6 or 7, we were driving to Fairmont City, Ill., in our 1970 VW bug, and a tornado touched down on the field next to us. Branches are flying across the road, my dad’s driving like crazy, my 15-year-old sister’s screaming—and I’m thinking it’s really cool.
When did you start chasing? When I was 20 and able to drive without parental influence, I used to take trips into Illinois, chasing storm fronts as they came through. Finally I learned not to do that: They move too fast, and it’s not that often that they actually produce a tornado.
What’s so great about a tornado? It’s so forceful, so uncontrollable—understanding how it works is a big draw. And seeing it for myself. You feel very lucky, because it’s actually pretty rare. There has to be so much air rising in a thunderstorm that it creates a rotation—and only 10 to 15 percent of those turn into a tornado. So many conditions have to be right, it’s mind-boggling.
Why did you drive to Illinois? Missouri gets storms. You can’t chase in this part of Missouri: There’s too much traffic, and there are too many trees, too many hills; you can’t see what’s coming at you. Illinois is very flat: You can move through farmers’ fields and country roads.
These days you head in the opposite direction, though. Out west, you see how a storm actually creates itself. As the warm air gets sucked in, the water vapor condenses into a giant wall cloud that hangs from the bottom of the storm; that’s generally where a tornado is going to form. Storms we see here are probably one-fifth the size of storms out on the plains. Here it’s like hunting a cat; there, a tiger that can come after you.
Why didn’t you just major in meteorology? I did for a while, but I couldn’t handle all the math. Now I’m a Macintosh consultant.
What do you drive? A Jeep Wrangler with a police scanner, CB radio, weather radio, a touch-screen computer on the dash so I can pick up radar as I’m driving, amplified wireless Internet so I can pick up from hotels as I drive by, and a Sprint wireless data card. Although when you’re driving around in the middle of nowhere looking for a tornado, sometimes you can’t get service.
Imagine that. And how do people react to your vehicle? They peek inside or give me a puzzled look. I’m always afraid the police are going to see all the antennas and think I’m a terrorist. Local sheriffs don’t appreciate storm chasers, either; they don’t realize the service we provide.
And that would be … ? The storm chasers are the eyes of the National Weather Service. The NWS can look at radar and say, “This is happening here,” but until someone calls in and says, “We have a funnel cloud,” they can’t know what they’re seeing is accurate. The NWS created Skywarn to train citizens to call in reports; St. Louis County has more than 2,000 people involved.
What happened on May 23? I got greedy and drove toward Ellis, Kan., to try to catch one more tornado. It was too dark, with too much rain and hail, so I finally stopped on the side of the road. I knew there was a big tornado on the ground in front of me. I was watching it on radar and listening to other storm chasers report; they’d been on the other side, and they could see it much better.
How many of you were out there chasing this thing? I bet there were more than 300. We were passing each other constantly. You can tell: They all look like porcupines with all the antennas. I saw researchers from the University of Texas, from Nebraska, from [the College of] DuPage in Illinois. The University of Oklahoma had the DOW out there, its mobile Doppler on Wheels.
Why such convergence? We knew there was a low-pressure area over Denver that was just sitting there spinning, and we knew four or five days in advance that it was going to be bad.
So how do you position yourself for the best view? You try to manipulate your vehicle to the dry slot, where the air is rushing into the storm. It’s usually the southwest corner. The rain and hail drop in front of the tornado, and the counterclockwise motion pulls this wall of rain and hail around the left side to the back, so it masks the tornado. If you drive through that, you can drive right into the tornado without knowing it. “Punching the core,” it’s called. And it’s very risky.
But you did it May 23? Accidentally. I was heading to Quinter, and my Swift WX software showed a rotating storm—a large rotating storm—with a TVS [tornadic vorticity signature]. It’s a red triangle that means they think it’s a tornado. Radar updates come every 4 1/2 to 5 minutes, so there’s some latency; you can’t trust that information. You have to watch the clouds. So I looked up—and then I pulled over.
You waited until the hail stopped? Yeah. When I finally decided it was safe to go behind the storm—hail’s in front, remember?—I found a semi tractor-trailer tipped over to the right, in the middle of the road. I stopped to call 911, and as I’m talking to this man, making sure he’s OK, I see more tornadic-looking storms on radar, a line of them, all with red triangles, heading toward my location. Hail’s bouncing off this gentleman’s head as he leans against my car, coming in my half-opened window and hitting my temple.
And hail’s in front of a storm. Right. So I know there’s something heading toward me that’s a pretty good size. I call 911—it’s raining so hard I can’t even see the mile marker, but I have my GPS—and tell the operator there’s diesel fuel pouring out of the truck. When I see the red lights of an emergency vehicle coming, I tell him they’re on their way and head off. Half a mile down the road I find another tractor-trailer, this one flipped to the left, because of the storm’s rotation. So I know right where the path of the tornado was.
Did you stop again? Just long enough to tell the driver help was on the way. Then I took off again, and an eighth of a mile down there’s another tractor-trailer, tipped at a 45-degree angle; he must have swerved.
And that line of tornadic storms is still coming at you? Yeah, but you can’t just drive past people who might be hurt. After I left the third accident, I pulled under a viaduct, because my radar had gone out. Hail started to hit the front of my car so I backed up a little. This gust of wind hit the back of my car and picked it up, and I saw my headlights pointing down at a 30-degree angle. That was enough to convince me to floor it and take off.
You’ve had offers for your videotape? Storm Chasers contacted me about purchasing it, and so did the London company that produces Raging Planet.
When did storm chasing become a hobby? When Twister came out in ’96. People see Twister and think, “Oh, that’s fun,” but that’s just not the way it is. Some chasers go years without seeing a tornado.
What’s the secret to spotting one? Watching weather and radar all the time, even when you are not chasing, and talking to people who know what they’re doing. The Internet caused a lot of learning; Stormtrack.org is the biggest site, and it’s invaluable.
The community is pretty tight? Weather geeks tend to get together. I’ve met a retired St. Louis County police officer; a photographer from Bland, Mo.; a professor from SIU Edwardsville. After a storm we tell little war stories, like the gentleman who got so close to that first tornado, the RFD [rear flank downdraft] blew out his back window. I have a plastic windshield.
Are storms getting worse? Tornado Alley has moved a little farther north and east, because the Earth has gotten a little warmer. But as storms approach the St. Louis area, they lose their humidity, because there’s so much concrete, and humidity is what causes the lift in a storm. So storms will start to die out, and then when they get to the east side, with all the plowed fields, they blow up again.
How do you react to storms when you’re at home? With a sense of dread. I have a new baby, 8 months old. So I’m concerned when weather rolls through, because I have people and property to protect. But as soon as I get into my vehicle and leave and go to see storms somewhere else, my mood is completely different.
How does your wife feel about this? She’s been afraid of storms all her life. When we were dating, she knew I liked storms, but I don’t think it came up that I actually chased them. Now she’ll point things out to me on radar; we have a computer sitting on our coffee table with weather on it constantly.
Are you sure you wouldn’t want to be a meteorologist? Yes and no. Those poor guys sit in that office. They have really cool equipment, and they’re getting fresh data, but they’re there 10 or 12 hours a day. And they don’t even have a basement!
So what keeps your wife calm when you’re out? My software. She can actually see where I’m driving and where the storms are. There’s 50 or so people driving around at any given time on this software program.
Is this a death wish or a love of chaos? Maybe it’s a drive to prove you know what’s really going on. There’s no cheating on these things; you have to watch and learn and make a judgment, and if you’re off by 50 miles, you won’t see anything.
A lot of people think storms really are an “act of God,” a judgment of wrath. People are superstitious; they think we have some kind of control. One guy thought the meteorologist had sent the storm to destroy his property, and he kept calling to harass him about it. Finally the meteorologist said, “If you don’t stop calling me, I’m going to send another one!”
