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PrintExperiences of professional storm chasers
A new book chronicles their wild and wooly pursuits.
Spring is almost here. Longer days, greener grass and blooming tulips are around the corner. So are tornados. If you live in Tornado Alley, you will as intuitively perk up your ears for sirens as you do for birds chirping. The ominous green, still sky and cumulus clouds that signal calamity are but a heartbeat away.
Storm chasers sing a different tune when they hear the pitter-pat of hail pelting their car. These enigmatic people gleefully drive headlong into the eye of the tornado instead of away from it.
We see them in movies and on television, yet their joy for the hunt remains unintelligible. Peter Bronski, along with Roger Hill, has written a fascinating book about Hill, a famous chaser, titled “Hunting Nature’s Fury” (Wilderness Press, $17.95), which helps explain the thrill seekers’ motivations.
When Hill was a young lad in Topeka, Kan., and experienced his first twister, he fell in love with the rush. He has never lost his enthusiasm or the accompanying adrenaline high when a twister is near.
The book’s chapters recount specific tornadoes that Hill, now based in Bennett, Colo., has pursued. In between storms, many of them in Oklahoma, he loses his day job and his wife. If T.S. Eliot measured his life by the teaspoonful, Hill measures his by close calls to horrific twisters.
Tornadoes touch ground 1,800 times a year in the Great Plains. In my adult lifetime in Oklahoma, I have been close to, but unharmed by, the fury of tornadoes twice in 40 years. Hill, at peak season, encounters 20 a week. Professionals claim that the frequency of tornadoes is increasing and credit technology or blame climate change.
Local storm chaser Charles Allison confirms what Hill feels.
“I was in my teens when my family moved to Tulsa in 1976 and I encountered my first tornado,” he says. “I was hooked.”
Allison’s passion has evolved into full-time chasing. He sells his videos to Tulsa’s KTUL-TV, The Weather Channel and major networks.
“I’m a photographer foremost,” he says. “I was the guy who first live-streamed video to the station.”
Besides photography, Hill supports his passion by guiding paying clients on tornado-chasing tours. Bronski writes of Hill and other storm chasers like Allison that they seem a selfish breed following only their passions, “but they are driven by an ethical responsibility to help those in need.”
“Hunting Nature’s Fury” is a compelling read for anyone who, like me, has even come close to Oklahoma’s wild side.
