The Fifth Risk(47)
On May 20, 2013, another F5 tornado struck Moore and killed twenty-four people, including seven children in a school, after an interior wall collapsed on them. Between those two events, Moore had been hit by two F4 tornadoes and been dealt glancing blows by several small ones. By 2013 its reputation as a magnet for tornadoes was sealed. “The perception of risk of the people in Moore is about twice that of people living in Norman,” said Kim. Moore is the only town in Oklahoma to have adopted building codes to defend itself against the wind; it has even devised a scheme that allows worried parents to bus their children to schools that have storm shelters. “The people in Norman are less likely to start preparing during a tornado watch than the people in Moore,” said Kim. “The people in Norman think that Moore is more likely to be hit than Norman. And this might be the most educated population, about tornado risk, in the world. Hundreds of meteorologists live in Norman.”
The road to the weather of the future is straight and hot. It leads after an hour or so to the city of El Reno. “You can still see this one,” said Kim. “In the trees.” Eleven days after the 2013 Moore tornado, there had been another spin-up, right here. Within minutes, what became known as the El Reno tornado was 2.6 miles wide, the widest tornado ever seen, and headed for Oklahoma City. “Tornadoes leave scars that are visible from space, when they are big enough,” Kim says.
The second idea that gained traction after the 2011 tornadoes was that people simply failed to appreciate what happened when a tornado hit a mobile home, or a car, or really anything that wasn’t bolted to the ground. If the warnings highlighted the potential destruction, the thinking went, people might pay them more attention. “Impact based warnings,” the new warnings were called, though the differences between them and the old warnings were fairly subtle. The Weather Service did not generally communicate directly with the public. It issued warnings to local emergency managers and the TV meteorologists, who then passed on what they’d been told. But the Weather Service now encouraged the weather media to help people to imagine what might happen if they did not seek shelter. “The idea was the people just don’t know how bad it is,” said Kim. “If they knew how bad it is, they’d take action.”
COMPLETE DESTRUCTION OF ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOODS IS LIKELY. MANY WELL-BUILT HOMES AND BUSINESSES WILL BE COMPLETELY SWEPT FROM THEIR FOUNDATION. DEBRIS WILL BLOCK MOST ROADWAYS. MASS DEVASTATION IS HIGHLY LIKELY, MAKING THE AREA UNRECOGNIZABLE TO SURVIVORS.
And so on.
The market for weather news in Oklahoma is fiercely competitive. The local TV weather anchors already felt pressure to make the reality more interesting than it was. “They glom onto the worst-case scenario days before we can have any confidence,” says Kim. “A government agency does not have an incentive to hype. Private companies have an incentive to hype. The problem when you hype is that you reduce confidence in all weather forecasts, because no one knows the source of the information.” About thirty minutes before the El Reno tornado reached Oklahoma City, a TV weatherman named Mike Morgan told his viewers that anyone who wasn’t underground was doomed. Most people had no underground place to go. The soil in Oklahoma is a sandy clay floating on a high water table: the place on the planet where people most desperately need to dig a hole to hide happens also to be a place in which it is expensive to dig. Though a car might be the single worst place to be in a tornado, tens of thousands of Oklahomans fled by car. Instantly the southbound lanes of the interstate became a parking lot. The El Reno tornado bore down on what amounted to a miles-long traffic jam. . . .
And then it lifted. By sheer luck the El Reno tornado killed only eight people—most of whom had been fleeing it. What didn’t happen did not get nearly as much attention as it deserved, in Kim’s view. “If it hadn’t lifted, if it had continued on its path, the estimate of the fatalities would have been Katrina-level. It’s the worst catastrophe that almost happened. In the most tornado-savvy population in the world. It was really jarring.”
El Reno had been her turning point. “It struck me: How could we think we could help people without understanding people?” she said. “The way we have approached things is by learning about the threat. We’ve ignored the people being threatened.” She thought that impact based warnings were intellectually dishonest: How could you warn about the impact of a storm whose force you would only be able to discern after the fact? She was also pretty sure that people knew what a tornado could do to them. The people in Alabama and Mississippi knew. So did the people in Joplin. Their problem, as she saw it, was a different sort of failure of the imagination. People could not imagine that all those tornadoes that had wound up hitting other people could instead have hit them. The sirens had become fake news. The government needed to find ways to make the news feel real.
A few months later, she moved to Washington, DC, on a congressional fellowship and went to work for a senator who sat on the committee that oversaw the Commerce Department. “I’m gunning for something inside NOAA,” she said. “You have to have people on the inside to make the change.” In late 2014 her ambition collided with Kathy Sullivan’s, and NOAA hired Kim Klockow to be its first, and only, social scientist. She became the odd group in the room.
She’d spent three years in the job. She’d hoped to create a social science unit on the top of the agency that could both direct a research program and spread what it learned through the Weather Service. “The problem with our science is that it is new,” she said. “And we don’t know how to make people not die. We need data on what led a person to do what they did. We need observations of humans responding to weather information.” She’d made some progress. She’d also been frustrated. “Barry Myers [AccuWeather’s CEO] turned up at a meeting and said that I shouldn’t be doing what I was doing,” she said. “Because it’s marketing. But it’s not marketing. It’s saving lives. The question became: What can we do in this space without interfering with the profits of AccuWeather?”