Supercell
Doug listened to the police radio, tracking the storm chasers. The noise was deafening.
The storm was enormous, and fast. Tim’s crew should get out of there. Now.
On the radar, the storm shifted south. He heard Tim shouting. “Oh my God! It’s coming!”
Doug closed his eyes. Too late.
This historic micro-fiction piece is based on the life and death of a storm chaser named Tim Samaras. On May 31, 2013, Tim and his photographer son Paul Samaras, and meteorologist Carl Young (all members of the research group TWISTEX, founded by Tim), were attempting to gather lightning data when the largest tornado in U.S. history formed over El Reno, Oklahoma and the three were unable to escape its path.
Tim was a scientist who was devoted to developing technology that would help future generations to learn from the meteorological circumstances that cause tornadoes. You can read an excellent wiki about Tim Samaras to learn more.
Although Tim was passionate about gathering data, and was a very determined storm chaser, he was also very careful. By all accounts, he would never have put his son’s life in danger. According to the wiki about Tim Samaras, “The true size of the multiple-vortex tornado confused onlookers by its mammoth proportions containing orbiting subvortices larger than average tornadoes and its expansive transparent to translucent outer circulation.”
In other words, it was like multiple tornadoes in one. It was massive. And it would have been impossible to understand its proportions or direction if you were in its vicinity.
It is believed that the storm chasers were attempting to parallel the storm on a county road, south of the storm’s path when it shifted and came upon them.
This image shows the swath of the El Reno tornado.
I pulled the following image of the TWISTEX team from Wikimedia Commons. The wiki does not list the names of the TWISTEX members in this image, but I believe it includes Tim Samaras, center, in the blue shirt, meteorologist Carl Young in the navy blue shirt to the right, and Tim’s son Paul Samaras to the far right in the red jersey. All three were killed in the El Reno tornado, when they were caught by surprise as the tornado shifted south over their location. (The three men are also pictured in a DailyMail article with fellow storm chaser Tony Laubach, pictured here third from the left.)
Tim Samaras’s TWISTEX vehicle was found by officer Doug Gerten after the storm passed. Tim’s body was still in the passenger seat of the car, but the other two victim’s were found half a mile east and half a mile west.
Although Doug Gerten is the main character in my fictionalized account, I have no idea whether he was the one listening to the police radio just before the tragic event. It didn’t feel right to put this in the story, but the three storm chasers were heard on police radio just before their death screaming “We’re going to die! We’re going to die!”
Rest in peace, Tim, Paul and Carl.
Thanks for reading. This micro-fiction piece is a 50-word short story for the weekly Fifty-word challenge. The prompt for this piece was “danger,” and the original version of the story actually included the word. But the word “danger” didn’t make the cut in the final version. I wanted the reader to experience it.
