The Fifth Risk(49)
He was utterly exposed. Alone, out in a massive storm that might, or might not, be concealing a tornado. He wheeled his truck around and hauled ass. Instead of heading straight back toward Elk City, he drove south, along the width of the storm. As he drove, he reported what he was seeing to the Weather Service, and the Weather Service was reporting what it knew to him. The anemometer on top of his truck recorded the speed of the winds being sucked into the storm: 79 miles per hour. The Weather Service told him they’d had reports of hail that was bigger than baseballs. Traveling 80 miles an hour down a dirt road in a pelting rain, he was all the time thinking about what to do: Wait, to make sure he’d seen what he’d seen? Or phone the Weather Service and trigger a tornado warning that set off the town siren? “So you sit here and make this decision,” he said. “And I think: Who is going to dispute my word? So I called the Weather Service.”
He came upon a sight that pulled him up short: downed power lines. The poles that had held them were gone. As if they had never been there. The tornado had crossed his path and leaped ahead of him: how he did not know. He’d thought the storm was chasing him; now, apparently, he was chasing the storm. Then he saw it, but it took him a moment to realize what he was seeing. It wasn’t like a tornado in the movies. “It looks like the cloud was on the ground,” he said. “It was a thousand yards wide.”
For the next twenty minutes he followed the cloud’s trail of destruction. Dead cows everywhere. Shattered oak trees. A school bus turned into a twisted pile of metal. Cars piled on top of each other, upside down, in a pond. He knew the landscape well enough to see what it was missing: big trees, telephone poles, mobile homes. “You could say,” There used to be a house there,’” he said. One house he passed was only partially destroyed. It looked as if some giant had tried to dissect it: the front half had been ripped away so that he could see all the way back into the television room. The big red barn that had been right next to it had vanished without a trace. The house belonged to Miss Finley, an old woman who lived alone. Lonnie’s job wasn’t emergency rescue—he was meant to be the eyes on the storm—but he stopped anyway, to see if he could find her. As he searched the ruins, a truck came flying up. “It was Miss Finley’s son,” said Lonnie. “He said she had gone to the town shelter.”
When you are chasing a cloud, there’s a question of how fast to go. Lonnie perhaps went too fast. Soon he found himself staring at a subdivision of new homes, all destroyed. “I’m looking over at these houses, and all I see is sticks,” he said. Debris was now crashing around his truck. He looked up and saw a huge piece of tin. “I got large stuff falling out the sky,” he said. “I can’t go any further.”
All along, his phone had been ringing. The Weather Channel. CNN. MSNBC. All these TV people were calling to find out what had happened. The truth is, he didn’t know, and it took him a bit of time to figure it out. It turned out that more than two hundred homes in Elk City had been destroyed, along with thirty-eight businesses. A lot of property had been lost. But—and here’s what shocked him—people had mostly kept out of harm’s way. Karen Snyder had refused to leave her cats and had been found, alive and well, with the ruins of her house on top of her. Gene Mikles had called the sheriff to ask if he should seek shelter, had been told that he should, and had started to the shelter but then returned to his home to grab his phone. He’d been found dead on the ground outside. “Only one fatality and eight bruises,” said Lonnie. “What I think happened is that people listened to the warning.” The town shelter had been so crowded that they’d had to lead people into the basement of the fire station.
On the morning of May 16, 2017, purely by chance, a team of researchers in the Storm Prediction Center had been testing a new tornado model. Even after they varied their assumptions about the conditions of the atmosphere, the model generated tornadoes. The images were clear and consistent: later the researchers said it was as if they had seen the storm in the real world. Everyone in the weather business believed this was the future: the ability to predict a tornado, in theory, before it spun up. The ability to imagine it, with precision, before you could see it. Now it was happening. The researchers informed the Weather Service meteorologist on duty, and the meteorologist issued a different kind of alert. Not a warning, but a warning that a warning was very likely coming; and it had prodded Lonnie to behave as he might not have done. It made him feel the threat was real—that the storm might hit him. That feeling had caused him to trigger a warning a few minutes earlier than he might otherwise have done. “The main thing I was so excited about is we were able to set off the sirens thirty minutes before it hit,” he said.
Lonnie Risenhoover knew nothing about what had happened inside the Storm Prediction Center. “That was a prototype,” he said. “It was the first time they’d used it. I didn’t know it.” But he knew what he was hearing from the Weather Service staff sounded different from what he usually heard. They’d given him, in effect, a clearer sense of the odds. They’d done what Kim Klockow had been advocating for: don’t tell people what the tornado will do to them if it hits them. Instead, persuade them that the threat is real. “People in Oklahoma, they’re going to credit the media,” said Lonnie. “Because that’s where they are getting their information. But who they should credit is the Weather Service. The Weather Service—they don’t give themselves enough credit. They say,‘We’re just doing a job.’ But I don’t know where we’d be without them.”