Photography by Dilip Vishwanat
The awesome destructive power of tornadoes sends most of us scurrying to the basement, but it sends Jerry Prsha to his Jeep. A self-avowed “storm chaser,” (whom SLM has interviewed before, in 2009), Prsha spends many weekends pursuing frightening storm clouds across Oklahoma and Kansas, trying to capture video footage of funnels touching down as he drives carefully around the edges of doom.
The recent tornado tragedies in Moore, Okla., and here in St. Louis took on new dimensions when, for the first time, storm chasers were killed by the tornado they were observing. Earlier this month, stars of the Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers TV show—Tim Samaras, his son Paul Samaras, and friend Carl Young—were killed near Oklahoma City when a tornado suddenly and unexpectedly advanced in their direction.
The fallout from their deaths has included a backlash of sorts against storm chasers. Prsha says that he and his fellow hobbyists are much more than adrenaline junkies, and indeed, they assist the National Weather Service as well as the occasional stranded motorist. Heck, Prsha says, most meteorologists have never even seen a tornado. He’s seen dozens of them.
What is the typical storm-chasing weekend like? The holy grail is to see a tornado. The first day is getting there, and the second day the storms often don’t happen till sunset. There are weekends where there’s a storm on Friday and Sunday but not Saturday, for instance, so there’s a down day. Down days there’s great sightseeing, like this one salt lake in Oklahoma and these chalk towers in Kansas. I can go to a minor-league baseball game or a concert. I don’t have much time in general, though: I have a five-year-old daughter and a wife at home I have to get back to.
You must spend a fortune on gasoline. It’s a very expensive hobby, because of the gasoline. I tend to go on long weekend trips, and the last chase I went on I went to southwest Oklahoma. I’m always getting gas, because the power might go out and then the gas pumps are dead. It takes a couple hundred dollars worth of gas for a three-day trip. Last time I went to Oklahoma, it was a $300 trip or so for gas.
How many people are in your vehicle when you’re storm-chasing? I am usually by myself. Most people like me chase with two or three in the vehicle. They’ll have a driver, navigator, and someone else who will watch the storms on radar. I’ve gotten used to doing it all by myself. I use mapping software. I have a touchscreen on my dashboard. I’ve gotten good at using the GPS software to reroute.
What’s the first thing you do when you spot a tornado? When a storm appears to be dropping a tornado, the very first thing I do is look for an escape route. There are different parts of the storm where you can tell where the tornado is going to form, under a wall cloud. I look at roads and make sure they aren’t closed, as a safety thing. Then I look for a high vantage point like a hill or a turnoff for a ranch. You have to position yourself to the south of the storm, because when it forms, rain is dropped in front of the storm and the tornado is in back of the storm. In front of the storm, you won’t see the tornado, just rain and hail.
But couldn’t the storm head south, toward you? It could, but most of them don’t veer very quickly; they curve. The one that happened in El Reno [that killed the TV celebrities] made an abrupt right-angle turn. That’s very rare. Generally, if you’re on the south side, it’s going to go past you.
What did you think when you heard a group of storm chasers had been killed by a tornado? It’s really tough because no one has ever been killed storm chasing. People have been killed hydroplaning or blowing out tires, but never from being hit by a tornado. Tim Samaras is a legend. He’s been around since the mid-'90s. He had a mechanical engineering background. He built his own high-speed camera to capture every phase of lightning, from the clouds on down and back up. He was in that storm, deploying special probes to collect data. He had to put himself in harm’s way to do his job. They’re treating him like an adrenaline junkie, and people in the storm-chaser community are under attack now. Look, there hasn’t been a storm chasing–related death in 57 years. Maybe we are adrenaline junkies in a way, because we want to see this beast of a storm. But one commenter made it sound like we’re no good and we’re there to cause problems. The media is telling people who don’t know anything about what we’re doing incorrect things; they don’t know what we do or how we do it. Most of the meteorologists on TV or at the NWS have never seen a tornado. A meteorologist at Scott Air Force Base treated me like a famous person, because I had seen tornadoes and he hadn’t.
What does the spate of recent tornadoes in Missouri and Oklahoma mean in your hobby? Is this a typical year? About two weeks before the Oklahoma tornado that went through Moore, everyone was complaining on their Facebook pages that there weren’t going to be many tornadoes this year and it was going to suck. Then all of a sudden everything woke up with the terrible tornadoes. You’ll get years like this when everything happens and then nothing happens, or there’s a lot of small tornadoes. You can’t predict how the season will be.
Do you ever feel like a sort of vulture, seeking out destruction? I have thought about that. I’m an introspective person. One of the reasons I go and chase where I go is because there are wide-open spaces, and it doesn’t hit anything. I do see barns tipped over, cows with broken legs, trees ripped apart. It’s different in metropolitan areas, because of the carnage and because it’s a trap for motorists. I could get stuck. A tornado is going to happen whether I’m there or not. I’m not there to film the carnage. A tornado is a freak of nature—they’re so rare. Most people don’t get to see them. And don’t forget, the first thing on the news is a fire or a shooting. It’s acceptable for the media to be there, but not a guy filming a tornado? I don’t understand that. And we storm chasers are the ones who find them in the first place.
What’s the most dramatic experience you’ve ever had while storm chasing? I was in a little town called Quinter, Kan., near the Colorado border, and I witnessed a tornado going across the road. Some storm chasers were kinda blown off a muddy road onto the side of it, and we had to get a farmer to pull them out. I saw some storms heading toward us. I was able to intercept an F1 tornado going across I-70. Then it started getting dark, and I decided to give up. In the dark, you’re waiting for lightning to see by, and I can’t drive in the dark and rain and look for those things by myself. I started on I-70 back east and a tornado on the radar looked like it was going to cross the road right in front of me. I pulled off the road and a bunch of people pulled off behind me. I thought it had passed. After that, I got back on the highway and encountered three overturned tractor trailers. One of the people had hit his head on the concrete. As I was talking to him through the window, it was hailing bad. He asked me, “Is there another one coming?” I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “You’d better get out of here.” 911 was sending a helicopter form far away, from Amarillo. Once they dispatched the helicopter, I took off down the highway. I ended up on the side of the road, because my radar wasn’t working anyway. As I’m stopped, the wind hit the back of my Jeep, and I noticed the headlights were pointing down. The wind picked up my Jeep all the way up to a 45-degree angle, with me in it. That was the scariest time I ever had.
How many tornadoes have you seen? In the range of 40, maybe 45. Sometimes they’re little tiny slivers and sometimes they’re huge.
Do you share data with the National Weather Service? We all call in when we see things. There’s a website called Spotter Network and it was invented so the NWS can see where our vehicles are. I’ve never gotten a call from them, but a lot of people have. We can also report weather through Spotter Network. We can describe wind damage and the size of the hail. Then they can issue warnings appropriately.
Do you consider storm chasers an important source for the NWS? The NWS is sitting in a room with a bunch of computer monitors, and their radar data has gotten much better. They can see the shapes of raindrops, even. But they can’t see below the tree-level, below 500 feet, accurately. They require public confirmation of things. They need people, whether it’s chasers or spotters. It’s an integral part of what they do.
Is there a type of tornado you’d like to see? I don’t think so. Just like snowflakes, tornadoes are all different. One that I witnessed was an F4, with close to 200 mph winds, and it wasn’t all that large. The one I saw before that was a mile across, but only an F2. I just wanna see a tornado sitting out in a field, not hurting anyone. In cities, carnage happens.
How do your loved ones feel about your hobby? When my wife and I got married, and I told her that I chase storms, I don’t think she really understood that I go out looking for bad weather in my car. [Laughs.] The first time I did it after we got married, I drove to Kansas. There’s a software package we use where she can see me and the storms around me on a map. Sometimes, if there isn’t a very good signal, my icon might disappear for a while. Then she might just be losing her mind. I call her when the signal comes back to tell her I’m OK. She’s gotten calmer, because she realizes I try not to take risks. She was afraid of storms, but now she’s starting to look on radar and pick out tornado signatures.
Have you been harassed by cops? Yeah. Just to give you an example, last year in Salina, Kan., we were going north, and I was about the third storm chaser in a line of cars and three police cars fly past us. I thought they were going to be proactive and help warn people about the storm, but they stopped farther up ahead to watch us going past, to shoot radar at us. We were all going the speed limit, and instead of telling people about the storm, they were concentrating on us speeding, in the middle of nowhere. People could have been trapped in their homes, and they were shooting traffic radar.
Is there competition among storm chasers? There are a scant few who are very competitive, like the guy with the tornado tank. He makes a living by selling video to the networks. He does it year-round and chases hurricanes, too. Another guy shoots snowstorms, too. These guys I can count on two hands that do it for a living. They’re competitive. With the rest of us, there’s a lot of camaraderie. You’ll see the same guy by the side of the road two years later, and then you’ll get a steak dinner together at Applebee’s. That’s our ritual. It’s called a "chaser convergence," where we all end up on the same storm on the same road in the middle of nowhere, and we'll share a laugh. You can become lifelong friends.
How many times have you seen the movie Twister? Anytime that I want to smell the grass and the wind of Kansas and Oklahoma, I pop it in. I’ve watched it a lot. From a storm-chasing standpoint, it’s very hokey. There are not very many real things in Twister.
Check out Prsha’s impassioned defense of the storm-chasing community here.
