About Thunderstorms and Tornadoes
No doubt you have taken note of the thunderstorms which have rolled through parts of our valley over the last few weeks. We are all paying attention to the tornadoes popping up in parts of the US almost daily. This is spring—this is weather time.
No matter where I see it or smell it, flashing lightning and the acrid ozone smell, lingering briefly behind it, take me back to being a small kid. And those hours-long lightning storms moving across the Kansas prairie are still with me from grad school days. That dance between negative and positive charges on ground or in clouds, and the neutralizing of atmospheric ions remind me that lightning is really the AAlka‑Seltzer@ of the air.
How I love lightning… and am fascinated by tornadoes.
I am carried right back to Lawrence, and the University of Kansas. There, in the early 1970s, I met Bob Brown. Bob was hooked on heavy weather—the heavier the better. I got caught up in his addiction the first time I met him.
I was working on a Ph.D. in geography and meteorology. Bob was after a Master=s degree in business administration. He had been an Air Force meteorologist, but was out of the Vietnam and Air Force business by the time we met. For giggles and cash, he worked with us in the Department of Geography and Meteorology as a teaching and research assistant.
Bob insisted that the atmosphere, and every individual storm or system within it, had its own life force—its own consciousness. He also believed storms had well‑developed senses of humor. To forecast the weather effectively, he said, you had to be willing and able to “feel” what the atmosphere had to tell you. The best forecasters, he said, were old Kansas farmers who heard the weather talk. I thought long and hard about that consciousness, that sense of humor and that “life force@ of storms. Years later, my best forecasts as a TV weatherman in Denver came when I really listened to the atmosphere.
One of our KU profs had a big federal contract to study tornado damage, to identify the safest place in a house during a tornado. It was great. We got to travel on that dime through much of the Midwest “tornado belt,” examining the carnage and learning about twisters.
I was fascinated by the power and damage of those storms. We saw things that seemed impossible. And we saw tornado humor.
The bark might be completely stripped off one tree‑‑and I mean completely‑‑while a tree ten feet away would look as if nothing had passed. A broom and individual broomstraws might be sticking THROUGH car windows.
A tornado flattened part of Lubbock, Texas. It hit in midafternoon, as school let out. A woman told us that she heard the roar of the tornado as her two kids hit the front steps. There was no time to get under the house, and a voice told her to get into the coat closet by the front door. When the terrifying shaking and roaring and crashing stopped, they got out. That closet was the only thing standing above floor level in the entire block. The woman said she found God in that closet. Probably still goes in there Sunday mornings.
Our funniest tornado story also happened in the Lubbock episode. Mobile home parks are often death traps, since the light metal boxes are not made to take such winds. One mobile home park was hit, but little damage was done. It seems a bachelor, the owner of a bright red Mercedes convertible, lived in the park. When he had a date, especially if she was pretty, he would drive around the park a couple times. He flaunted his women, money and shiny car at every chance. We found his totaled home upside down on his totaled car. No serious injury, but his was the only real damage in the park.
Looking at damage was interesting, but we always arrived after the tornadoes. More than anything, Bob wanted to see a tornado close up. He spent his spare time doing what he’d done for years—chasing storms. With the top down on his little Austin-Healey, he would intercept a line of severe thunderstorms and follow them into Nebraska or Missouri, hoping to see a funnel drop out of the bottom of some bulging cumulonimbus cloud. Bob often returned soaked to the skin with stories of crashing lightning, hail, and torrential rains. Over hundreds of hours and thousands of miles, however, he never saw a twister.
Bob got his MBA, and took a job with Ma Bell in Boise. One week after he drove his wife and baby out of Lawrence, we watched a tornado hang for ten minutes over the house he’d lived in for three years.
Tornadoes here in Paradise are highly unlikely—indeed almost impossible with that stable marine layer above us. But I thrill to our lightning storms. Sometimes I remember that, after this life, I intend to go fly with the tornadoes.
Happy almost summer…
[Copyright James L. Huckabay, 2013]
