The Fifth Risk(48)
And then Trump was elected. She’d planned to return to Oklahoma anyway, but now she did it with a sense that she might be better off starting small, rather than trying to change the entire Weather Service from the top. “The inspiration came from Dr. Sullivan—she advised me to rely on‘small bets’ to make significant organizational change, not to try to force big, sudden change from the top.”
It was May 2017, and Kim Klockow had been back in an office at the University of Oklahoma only a few weeks when the meteorologists in the Storm Prediction Center forecast a storm in the Texas Panhandle. She hopped into a car with another meteorologist and went west, to where the weather came from. “When I was in DC I lost my sense of direction,” she said. “In DC this is not material knowledge.” She’d found the storm in Texas, and then turned around and followed it from behind into Oklahoma. The little girl once terrified by the storm that was chasing her was now a woman chasing a storm. In Oklahoma, as often happened, the storm met an atmosphere more favorable to it, and it grew. “I saw it,” she said. “It was a beast.” She’d arrived just outside of Elk City when she heard the Weather Service issue its tornado warning—and so she’d stopped. “You don’t chase into a city,” she said. “You don’t chase to see death and destruction.”
At length, she and I drive the hot, flat road past the Cherokee Trading Post & Boot Outlet and arrive in Elk City. Elk City is where we’d been heading all along.
Lonnie Risenhoover had been managing emergencies in Beckham County in one way or another for forty years. Before he became emergency manager for the entire county, he’d worked as a fireman in Elk City, where he was born and raised. His great-grandfather had moved there in the late nineteenth century, before Oklahoma was even a state, and the family had remained ever since. There were only about twenty-five thousand people in the whole of Beckham County, about half of those in Elk City, and Lonnie knew most of them. He’d seen all the storms, too, but the county had been lucky that way. “Most of the tornadoes are real rural,” he said. “‘Well, we had a tornado and Joe’s chicken coop just blowed away.’” Tornayda. The one thing the storms had in common was the hysteria about them generated by the TV news stations in Oklahoma City. “If there’s an icicle hanging off the corner of the house it’s ‘hey, there’s an icicle hangin’ off the corner of the house, we’re gonna go live with it!’” A-sicle.
The information Lonnie took seriously came directly from the National Weather Service. (“If the Weather Service had a TV channel, everyone would just watch that.”) Every morning he woke up and checked NWSChat—the Weather Service’s tool for communicating with local emergency managers. The morning of May 16, 2017, had a slightly different feel to it than usual, though Lonnie didn’t immediately put his finger on why. They said a storm was coming from the Panhandle, but storms were always coming from the Panhandle. There was no tornado warning.
But a tornado wasn’t like a winter storm. The models hadn’t gotten to the point where they could predict a tornado before it happened, in the way they could bigger weather systems. The Weather Service could only issue a tornado warning after it had seen the tornado, either with its radar or one of its spotters. “What I noticed,” said Lonnie, “was that they’d changed some of the language they used. They said‘tornado emergency.’ It used to be just a” tornado warning.’”
He left the chat more worried than usual. The storm might be a problem, he thought.
The Elk City Fire Department had a few tornado spotters, but they just sat at fixed points: the city had blind spots. “The western part of Beckham County, we didn’t have many storm spotters,” Lonnie said. “And I’m basically a one-man shop. So I can do everything I need to do in my vehicle.” His truck had so much gear in it that you didn’t want to ask what it all was, for fear that the explanations would never end. From his truck he could measure the wind speed, see the radar, and stay in touch with the Weather Service, even if his phone lost service. He got into his truck and drove west, to find a place from which he could see as much of the earth’s surface as possible.
If you were just passing through you’d think Beckham County was essentially flat. Brownish-yellow wheat fields and pastureland as far as the eye can see. In his forty years of storm spotting, Lonnie had come to know every slight undulation in the terrain. In twenty minutes he was parked on some of the highest ground in the county, facing southwest. When the meteorologists from the Storm Prediction Center go out to chase storms, they chase them from behind, to make sure they aren’t overtaken by the tornado. Lonnie just sat there, waiting for the tornado to come at him. “My wife used to go with me,” he said. “Now she won’t. She says,‘You scare me.’”
Then he saw it. Or maybe he didn’t. “I seen a funnel,” he said. “But I wasn’t going to start calling it a tornado until I start seeing grass or something else it’s picking up.” Whatever he was seeing vanished after maybe a minute. He couldn’t tell how fast it might be moving toward him, or how far away it was. He didn’t want to trigger a warning unnecessarily—if he did that, people might not believe the next one. At the same time, what he was hearing just then from the National Weather Service was not normal. They hadn’t seen the tornado, but they were acting almost as if they had. “I kept getting information,” he said. “They were feeding me a lot of information. And I thought, This is really, really going to be bad.”