One is that people may have been encouraged via chatter in a number of places to use "driving away" as their strategy for getting away from this particular tornado. A small tornado in Kansas, photographed during Tim Samaras's lightning expedition in August 2009. They were just miles from the city of Moore, which was devastated by a massive tornado that killed 24 people on May 20. I won't be joining them on the roads. I'll take my chances sheltering in place, thank you. Its a free country - youre obviously free to drive when and where you want, and I certainly dont want that to change, but something has to be done to avoid another tragedy like the one that killed 9 motorists Friday evening, including 3 professional tornado researchers Tim Samaras, his son, and intercept partner. Samaras, his son Paul, and colleague Carl Young died in late May in El Reno, Okla. while chasing an EF5 (winds above 200 miles per hour) tornado, which was later estimated to the be the widest . Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group. Pre-school teacher, 29, who lost one of her legs in Boston TIM SAMARAS: THE VALUABLE LEGACY OF A STORM CHASER, Isabel Oakeshott receives 'menacing' message from Matt Hancock, Dozens stuck in car park as staff refuses to open gate for woman, Incredible footage of Ukrainian soldiers fighting Russians in Bakhmut, Pro-Ukrainian drone lands on Russian spy planes exposing location, 'Buster is next!' Being stuck in traffic during a tornado outbreak is obviously unfortunate, but unless you can find a way to outlaw tornado formation in cities during rush hour, sporting events, concerts, accidents,or anything else that causes traffic to snarl, getting hit by a tornado while stuck in traffic is simply a risk one assumes by living in tornado alley and choosing to drive a car. Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin told CNN that motorists faced great danger when stuck on any freeway in the path of a twister. Those media outlets need to do a more professional job and take their responsibility as journalists rather than entertainers more seriously (generally, not just with respect to tornadoes). How did this mountain lion reach an uninhabited island? Police/authority do have the power to stop vehicles/storm chasers from continuing down a road if there is an immanent threat. And that traffic jam was probably caused by the exodus of people following very bad advice, and possibly as well as non-professional storm chasers moving in on the likely path of the storm. Here is all you want to know, and more! In closing it should be important to note that Tim and crew did not get killed because of the traffic that was present on that day. The people could be driving for many unattributed reasons. There was no place to hide.'. That is a real problem and has increased over time. Such a law or regulation could be more general, specifying that police have the authority to direct people generally in relation to emergency disaster zones that have not happened yet. Public safety officials have the right and responsibility to restrict access to Main Street and areas nearby in order to save lives and property. Tim Samaras, 55, along with his son, Paul Samaras, 24, and Carl Young, 45, died on Friday in El Reno after a tornado that packed winds of up to 165 mph picked up their car and threw it, somersaulting, a half a mile. He said "you need to be below ground [pause] if you can drive south bla bla bla", Does this mean "you need to be below ground, but if you are in you car in the path of the tornado you can drive south", Or does this mean "you need to be below ground or if you can drive south, go and drive south". Television cameras showed debris falling from the sky west of Oklahoma City and power transformers being knocked out by high winds across a wider area. The unqualified version of that advice is If there is a tornado coming your way now, get in your car and drive away fast. That is also bad advice. And if people are close enough to a tornado so that a car gets thrown at them, then that might just be natural selection as well. The worry soon turned to flash flooding and floodwaters topped four feet in Oklahoma City on Saturday morning. Regarding the rest of your comment. Yes, chaser convergance has been a huge problem over the last few years. They can't have this, because the traffic is a factor, but yes, Samaras and his crew were not killed this way. A two-and-a-half mile wide tornado would not look like a tornado to a lot of people, Smith said. (Though I'm not so sure that restrictive law re tornadoes is the first or best strategy - simply ensuring that emergency personnel of all kinds have the authority to control traffic might be OK so long as they are adequately trained and backed up with good links to forecasters.) Terrible things they are! The amateur storm chaser who was killed mentioned, in the cell phone conversation he was having with a friend (who was in a safe location and urged the storm chaser to get out of there), two local TV news vans passing him. Tim Samaras, 55, was not known to be risky. >>> What they're doing is seeking fame and fortune by selling their videos to various websites and television stations. Friday night's victims included a mother and a baby sucked out of their car as the EF3 hit near El Reno. The kitchen windows blew in and Pa slid across the kitchen floor and we hid down under the stairs! We are no longer accepting comments on this article. Discovery Channel said it will honor the three veteran storm chasers, who regularly appeared on its show Stormchasers, with a special airing this week. I would just add that other media outlets had apparently been talking about "outrunning" as a strategy for a couple of days before this particular tornado, so the idea was perhaps already in people's minds. I do regard some of the complaints I've gotten, especially some of the really nasty ones I've gotten by email, to be excuse making. Nooooooooooo!!! At the end of the day this is just a silly notion. " Finally do what we did in California for earthquakes. Though the tornadoes were not as strong as the EF-5 twister that killed 24 on May 20, fear drove many people to attempt to flee the area in their cars only to get caught up in heavy rains and flash flooding. Tim Samaras, 55, was found dead still belted into the mangled wreck, while the bodies of his son, 24, and Young, 45, were flung a quarter-mile away in opposite directions. Plan for a lifetime, like I did. It's your life so guard it like you own it. All this about tornadoes is very reminiscent of fires in Australia. (MORE: Tornado Hunt Team Takes Direct Hit by Tornado). Joel Taylor starred . He knew what to look for. More than 210,000 customers lost electricity in the areas affected by the storm. He was best known for being a Meteorologist. Tornadoes happen in bunches and clusters. On Tuesday, Storm Chasers star Joel Taylor died at 38. Lucky escape: A meteorologist from The Weather Channel was injured after his car (seen here) was thrown 200 yards by the storm, Waterway: A man uses a jetski to travel between his home and Osage City, after Missouri was affected by severe flooding, Storm damage: Navy veterans inspect the washed out road where they pulled a woman and her daughter to safety after their car flooded, A family in El Reno, Oklahoma inspect what is left of their home after Friday night's tornadoes battered the local area, Rain: Parts of Oklahoma City experience extreme flooding after multiple tornadoes passed through Central Oklahoma, For more videos, please go to the Long Center Austin. Three storm chasers died in that storm. Biography - A Short Wiki The other victims' bodies were found half a mile to the east and half a mile to the west, Canadian County under-sheriff Chris West said. All rights reserved. On the one hand, researchers have to pay the bills somehow, and this is one way to do it. Big blue trash cans were being tossed around like a piece of paper in the wind. Flash flooding accounted for some of the deaths, such as that of a 65-year-old man who died on Saturday when his car drove off a damaged bridge in eastern Oklahoma County. He was found hanging in his Wichita, Kansas home. At Will Rogers World Airport, 2,000 people spent the night sheltering in underground tunnels, reported News 9. I have heard that some professional storm chasers offer package tours. Say you are sitting in your home and you know there is a tornado coming and you are watching TV and the following breathless reporting is happening. A National Geographic team has made the first ascent of the remote Mount Michael, looking for a lava lake in the volcanos crater. 2006-2020 Science 2.0. Terry Garcia, executive vice president of the National Geographic Society, said: 'We were shocked and deeply saddened by the news that longtime National Geographic grantee Tim Samaras was killed in a tornado in Oklahoma on Friday, along with Tim's son Paul and their colleague Carl Young. The sudden acceleration to NE caught several folks by surprise. Nine were confirmed dead in the Oklahoma City area on Friday evening, though the death toll has since risen, and flash floods in Arkansas caused additional fatalities, including a sheriff trying to rescue people from rising waters. It was a shock this morning to learn from an editor at National Geographic that Tim Samaras had been killed by a tornado in Oklahoma. They never follow the same track. Privacy statement. local news and culture, Brantley Hargrove Officials added five victims on Monday to the confirmed list of dead from the tornadoes and from storms that caused severe flooding: three adults and two unidentified children, the medical examiner's office said. He did not say "don't get in your car" and he did not say "a car is a bad place to be, and if you find yourself in a car do this and that" which is what he should have said. This one didn't. I started driving on the shoulder. These skeletons may have the answer, Scientists are making advancements in birth controlfor men, Blood cleaning? It is unfortunate that when such behavior becomes a problem society sometimes needs to make a rule of some kind. Three veteran storm chasers were among the 10 people killed, Dallas Area Storms Cause Power Transformer To Explode. Traffic will back up in the places rush hour traffic normally backs up, and some others that usually don't see such backups. The other chaser killed was caught in traffic but I find it sad that the community never claims him as a chaser but rather a thrill seeker. The storm was headed toward Oklahoma City, which has more than a million people in the metro area. However the generic advice makes a lot of sense. Another two sets of storm-chasing meteorologists had lucky escapes on Friday night after their vehicles got too close to the multiple tornadoes that hit the Oklahoma City area. This story has been shared 160,448 times. They are acting in the interests of public safety. Rick Smith, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service at Norman, said that while the storm packed a powerful punch, it wasn't as strong as the Moore tornado. Early aerial images of the storm's damage showed groups of homes with porches ripped away, roofs torn off and piles of splintered wood scattered across the ground for blocks. Keith: I know, I hate words! I could not agree more with the statement in this article saying that driving away is not the best option. Here is what the tornado did: It grew from a big tornado to a bigger tornado, to what might be the largest tornado ever observed with instruments, in a matter of seconds, and it made a fast jog to the right, not an unusual thing for a tornado to do, but unanticipated by the storm chasers. tornado disbursement tactical teams should be flown in by helicopter and then flown out after the job is done, its much safer this way. Actually there were other comments that could even make an above ground room safer. It is fairly safe to say, that Mr. Samaras, his son, and Mr. Carl Young, sustained injuries when the sub-vortex of the El Reno storm directly impacted their vehicle on Reuters Road, west of the intersection with Radio Road. But that. 'We're scrambling around,' said Lara O'Leary, a spokeswoman for the local ambulance agency. >>> I support this 100%. category. Not only are rubberneckers prohibited from fire danger areas, even people who live in the area are prohibited from access. Jeff also included a video from a different storm chaser who, by his own admission, was too close, and whose escape (along with his partner, who was driving) was delayed by something like half a minute by other storm chasers getting out of Dodge. I don't know what they were thinking in a state packed with cars and almost no other transportation options and few shelters. from a major non profit, click through the the X Blog to read the press release. Education may help, but first we need to educate Meteorologists in the media, the brilliant minds out there need to come up with a set of definitive standards on what to do and what not to do and hold the TV weather accountable, develop an educational program for the public, but most of all give people a place to go, public shelters or something for safety, if people have a shelter they more than likely wont get in their car in the first place. The tornado then hurled the light Chevy Cobalt to the ground, leaving it looking as though it had been rammed through a trash compactor, police said. Yes, lets get the facts straight, which the comments below and the information added here help do. The Weather Channel issued the following statement: It was with great sadness that The Weather Channel learned of the passing of Tim and Paul Samaras and Carl Young as a result of the El Reno Tornado. A father-and-son team of storm chasers and their long-time partner were heard screaming 'we're going to die, we're going to die' on highway patrol radio moments before they were killed by one of the savage twisters they'd devoted their lives to following. Most tornadoes in the United States are relatively small. I remember Pa wearing this Civil Defense helmet and he was chirping on this big ol' walky talky! I think that Tim Samaras knew what he was doing. The debris field created by Samaras' wrecked car, the report concludes, corroborates the footage, which shows the subvortex moving across the face of the larger tornado at about the time Samaras' headlights disappear. On the other hand, it means they are intentionally bringing civilians into the danger zone, and these civilians don't always know how to react if the situation gets out of hand. I don't know all that much about chasing so I recognize that there could be some logistical problems with my above statements. Why is it these days that every time someone dies someone wants to make a new law restricting freedom? An element. 'That's a very unwise thing to do because it's the absolute worst place you can be during a tornado.'. The bodies of another motorist and the Discovery Channel storm chasers, Tim Samaras, his son Paul, and Carl Young, were found in a three-mile diagonal path near N.W. Tim Samaras sits with instrument probes he used as part of his TWISTEX field research program. Let's create MORE laws to regulate something we really do not know if it is a problem. Or was it a rotating thunderstorm (a supercell) with small- to moderate-sized tornadoes swirling about one another? They did not discuss the details but I would suspect you would want a helmet that comes down to the jaw line, which sort of eliminates a lot of bicycle helmets, although likely the bike helmet is better than a bare head. I'm Sooner born and Sooner bred and I learned early that a car is one of the most dangerous places to be in a tornado. The new year once started in Marchhere's why, Jimmy Carter on the greatest challenges of the 21st century, This ancient Greek warship ruled the Mediterranean, How cosmic rays helped find a tunnel in Egypt's Great Pyramid, Who first rode horses? meteorologist. It truly is sad that we lost my great brother Tim and his great son, Paul. Though the state's transportation authorities strongly advised citizens not to drive, some interstate highways in Oklahoma were jammed with stalled traffic, as heavy rains drenched roadways and flooded low-lying areas. I recently found the article on the el Reno tornado you wrote several years ago and I was struck by the naivety of your arguments on laws banning chasing. His website Twistex has been integral to understanding how tornadoes work and improving warning times for those living in Tornado Alley. On one hand, there's a robust set of predictions for what the behavioral motion of these bodies ought to be, while on the other there's what we actually observe. Brandi Vanalphen, 30, was among the hundreds of drivers trapped on traffic-snarled roads as she attempted to flee the tornado system menacing the suburb of Norman. Reed Timmer and Sean Casey and their crews modified vehicles that successfully survived being in powerful tornados (for Mythbusters fans, you may have seen these two teams vehicles go head to head with a jet engine to see how they would survive tornado strength winds on the episode Storm Chasing Myths). That's really all I have to say on that issue. Hail and heavy rain pelted the metro area to the point that emergency workers had trouble responding to 'widespread' reports of injuries. I have stood up for professional storm chasers in this post. Since then, multiple versions of what happened have been claimed, and as far as I can tell, all of that is laid out in the various comments on this thread.