The Fifth Risk(45)
She found all sorts of odd groups, outsiders to the space project, unknown to the astronauts’ families, who might be relevant to the new mission: teachers, museum professionals, curriculum supervisors, textbook publishers, exhibition designers, video-tech types, and so on. Plus, an architect. She gathered all these people in Biosphere 2, in Oracle, Arizona, “to get everyone out of their ruts.” Pretty quickly the architect turned the event into a presentation of his plan for the building. Kathy and the others could see that he hadn’t listened to a word anyone had said. She let him go the next day. In the end, the group discussion led to a course aimed at middle-school students. There are now fifty-two Challenger Centers around the world, and they have taught four and a half million students.
In the aftermath of the Joplin tornado, the odd group—the new kids in school—were the psychologists and behavioral economists. In 2014 Kathy helped to persuade Congress to write into law the idea that social science was part of NOAA’s mission. The agency could now hire people to collect a different kind of data—data that would enable them to figure out what exactly was going on inside the minds of the American people, so that it might save their lives.
The funny thing about tornadoes is that no one knows how powerful they are until they’ve hit something. The National Weather Service can tell you days in advance what to make of a hurricane—the strength of its winds, and the size of its storm surge, along with the likelihood of its hitting your city instead of someone else’s. As you sit on your porch in New Orleans deciding whether you should get in your car and drive to Memphis to avoid a hurricane, you have a pretty good idea what you are in for if you don’t. Tornadoes aren’t like that. Like the rest of the weather in the continental United States, they move from west to east, but the paths they take are random. Their force can be judged only after the fact, by the damage they’ve done. If a hurricane is another night in a bad marriage, a tornado is a blind date.
The scale for judging tornadoes, after the fact, runs from 0 to 5. It’s called the Fujita scale. What makes it different from most scales is that it is consistently terrifying from beginning to end. An F1 tornado merely peels roof surfaces off houses and knocks cars off the road. By F2, mobile homes are being destroyed and cows are flying through the air.
Kim Klockow was seven years old, playing in a field in Naperville, Illinois, when she caught sight of her first tornado. She didn’t know what she was seeing. “I saw the booby clouds,” she recalled—the breast-shaped mammatus clouds that accompany big storms. “I was looking at the anvil of the storm.” No one ever actually saw the tornado until it wiped out some of Plainfield, Illinois, on August 28, 1990. It had eluded radar and, wrapped in a rainstorm, had been invisible to the naked eye. The National Weather Service didn’t even issue a warning until an hour after the event. Afterward it would go down as the only F5 tornado ever recorded in the Chicago suburbs. In an F5, cars become missiles and big, well-constructed houses simply vanish. Kim’s parents had driven her through Plainfield two days later, and she’d seen buildings she’d been inside of reduced to rubble or entirely gone, like in The Wizard of Oz. “You don’t think of buildings as being dangerous,” she said. “You think of buildings as being a place you were safe.”
That tornado had killed twenty-nine people, injured hundreds more, and traumatized the region. The following year, as another storm approached, people were on edge. When the wind kicked up and the hail began to ricochet off the pavement, Kim was in the neighboring city of Joliet, with her mother and two-year-old sister, registering for French lessons. Her mother grabbed them and fled. As they sped toward home, Kim could see her mother watching behind them. “We were actually being chased by the storm,” she recalled. “The hail sounded like bullets hitting the car.” For some reason her mother insisted that the windows remain down: hail fell onto Kim’s lap. “My mother was saying the same thing over and over, but I didn’t know what it was. She was saying Hail Marys.” They peeled into the driveway and her mother screamed at her, “Get into the house, and get downstairs!” She’d run and hid—and came away with the feeling that it was only by luck that her house had not been blown away. “After that,” said Kim, “any weather information we got, I wanted to know. This is actually the story of every meteorologist. We are a whole field of people who are child trauma cases.”
One hot May morning I picked Kim Klockow up from her office at the NWS Storm Prediction Center, in the National Weather Center Building, in Norman, Oklahoma. The center is a joint venture between the University of Oklahoma and NOAA, and about as perfectly situated as an institution can be. The south-central United States is the planet’s convective sweet spot: here the warm air from the Gulf of Mexico collides with the cool air tumbling down over the Rocky Mountains and creates storms with more energy than nuclear bombs. Texas has twice as many tornadoes as Oklahoma, but Oklahoma has them in about a fourth the space. Kansas has about a third more tornadoes each year than Oklahoma, but Kansas is a third again bigger than Oklahoma and has a third fewer people. If you have some need or desire to witness dramatic collisions between people and weather, Oklahoma is your place. “Being here during a serious tornado event is better than football,” says Hank Jenkins-Smith, who runs the University of Oklahoma’s National Institute for Risk and Resilience—which is as aptly sited as the Storm Prediction Center. At the top of the National Weather Center Building is a skybox, facing west, and equipped with special blast-proof glass, to watch the approaching tornadoes.