When a tornado rolls over

Jun 2, 2013

Lots of news about tornadoes the past couple of weeks, with Oklahoma particularly getting hammered by deadly storms, including an EF5 twister that killed 23 people.

Today we learned that an experienced father-son stormchaser team lost their lives in a tornado they were following, also in Oklahoma.

There’s been some amazing video from stormchasers, like this one of a team in their tornado intercept vehicle, which was hit by the wedge tornado they were following in Kansas:

Watching that gave me eerie memories of the time I was in a vehicle stopped on an Illinois country road as darkness enveloped the car and the sound went wild. I wrote about that in my post, Science of observation

Once we could drive again, we made our way home to DeKalb, listening to the radio as we went. A news bulletin announced two tornado touchdowns – one to the west of where we been stopped, another to the east. It seemed as if a twister had skipped right over us.

Anton Zuiker ☄