What Stands in a Storm (4 page)

And then came the wind. A rash of tornadoes broke out across Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Around 7:25 p.m., a large tornado struck Vilonia, a one-block town in Arkansas, thirty miles north of Little Rock. A husband and wife who tried to ride it out in a big rig were killed when the truck was tossed into a pond. Two others died in their mobile homes. The phalanx of storms marched east in a nearly vertical line that crossed the Mississippi River around 10:00 p.m., beating Mississippi with straight-line winds and leaving in its wake a lingering rain.

Before Monday was over, ten people were dead in Arkansas. The governor declared a state of emergency.

“And you know,” he said, “it may not be over.”

11:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 26, 2011—BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

Jason Simpson never slept well before a storm. He was half-awake when his alarm clock buzzed, and he rolled over in the dark beside his sleeping wife and glanced at the laptop glowing on the bedside table. The radar showed a red streak moving east across the Mississippi River. It was a squall line, a wall of thunderstorms marching in an angled line across northern Mississippi. This triggered a twinge of surprise. Things were expected to get ugly the coming afternoon, but this squall line was sneaking toward Alabama in the middle of the night. Moving steadily east, it would cross the state line well before daybreak.

I've got three hours
, Jason thought, now wide awake.
Time to get to work.

He rolled out of bed and dressed quickly in the dark, careful not to wake his wife. Seven years into his job as a weatherman at ABC 33/40, Jason still worked the morning shift, which began at 4:00 a.m. He was accustomed to starting his day in the dark and functioning on five hours of sleep, but Lacey, four months pregnant with their first child, needed all the rest she could get. Her belly was beginning to swell, and today was the ultrasound appointment that would send her shopping for pink or blue. He hated to miss that tender moment, but the weather does not wait.

Jason went into the kitchen, brewed six cups of coffee, enough for one big mug and a thermos to take into the TV studio. Three pieces of
bacon and three sausage links crackled on the George Foreman Grill, the breakfast he ate every day while trolling the weather maps on his laptop at the breakfast counter. It was part of his pregame ritual, the daily routine that made him feel ready for anything, and he didn't like to miss any part of it, especially before a big storm. He had gone to bed earlier than normal so he could have plenty of time to prepare for what he expected to be a harrowing day. He deviated from his ritual only slightly, nuking a few chicken fingers and throwing them in a plastic container for later. If the weather got dicey, at least he would have protein.

Jason had been on edge for the past week, along with every other meteorologist in the South, as he had watched, with mounting concern, the atmosphere beginning to simmer. Around twenty-two hours earlier, at 1:00 a.m., the Storm Prediction Center had released a two-day outlook with a warning that had made the weathermen shiver:

***POTENTIAL FOR A SIGNIFICANT/WIDESPREAD SEVERE WEATHER EVENT—INCLUDING THE POSSIBILITY OF A TORNADO OUTBREAK—REMAINS EVIDENT THIS FORECAST . . . CENTERED ON THE MID SOUTH/TN VALLEY AREA.***

Tension had swept through the weather community. The professionals hunkered down over weather maps and computer models at the National Weather Service (NWS) and at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) offices. Amateur weather buffs flocked to the chat rooms to fill them with speculation. Conditions were very similar to those of past outbreaks, and the models painted probabilities that looked downright apocalyptic. Yesterday the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, issued a two-day forecast warning that conditions were ripe for long-track tornadoes in parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

Again?
Jason thought.
So soon?

The last outbreak—the worst in years—was less than two weeks
ago. Now the potential for another outbreak was clear and present, but it was hard for Jason not to feel a little skeptical. What were the odds of another one, so soon after the last? Would it strike the same place twice?

In his kitchen just before midnight, Jason puzzled over his weather maps.
These look like fake number
s.
This can't be real.
The wind shear was off the charts, approaching a level he had never seen.

He followed the squall line across his screen. There would probably be damaging straight-line winds, maybe a small tornado or two. But large and violent twisters are rare when thunderstorms march in a line. The individual storm cells in a squall line often compete and interfere with one another, throwing off the recipe for supercell tornadoes. But by midnight, the thunderstorms had begun dropping tornadoes on Mississippi. Around 1:00 a.m., going against type, Jason called a director and told him to meet him at the station. By 3:00 a.m., he was standing in front of the green screen and talking into the camera.

Going on air during a severe weather event is a two-meteorologist job. One monitors the radar behind the scenes while the other performs between the camera and the green screen, connecting with the audience. There is a lot of information to take in, and one look at a weatherman's laptop screen, jammed with maps and chat rooms and camera feeds, is enough to make an average head explode. The screen displays two radars: one showing radial wind velocity; the other, precipitation. Five private chat sessions with National Weather Service offices scroll with internal messages and public warnings. Another chat room buzzes with Sky Watchers, amateurs trained to spot the harbingers of storms. A window shows live feeds from the SkyCams, which must be driven by remote control so that they point in the right direction. And now on Twitter and Facebook, viewers on the scene supply photos that can be useful—as well as ground observations that a seasoned pro knows better than to trust. To the untrained eye, a funnel-shaped cloud can resemble the vortex of a tornado. And some tornadoes look like a thunderstorm sitting on the ground.

Jason usually drove the radar, in the studio. But right now, he was flying solo on the weather desk, doing his best to cover both jobs, translating the gist of what he saw into the black eye of the camera. He asked two early morning anchors on the early shift to help him.

“Look for power flashes, low-hanging clouds,” he told the anchors, “anything that looks weird.”

At 4:16 a.m., while most Alabamians slept soundly and unaware, the first tornado reached into the dark of rural Alabama and filled the air with a lonely roar and the snapping of tall pines.

Across town, lead meteorologist James Spann was startled awake by the loud bleating of his smartphone. It was just a few minutes before his regular alarm went off, as it did every weekday at 4:52 a.m., but the sound startled him, and he surfaced through a fog of surprise and alarm. His weather app was doing its job, waking him up with the day's first warning. He pawed around on the nightstand for his phone, which lay next to the weather radio, glanced at the radar, and shot out of bed.

Oh, Lord!

Thunderstorms were developing up and down the state, and the National Weather Service was already pumping out warnings in six counties. It took a minute for him to confirm he was not dreaming. In three decades of reading the patterns of the atmosphere, James had seen the weather unleash a Pandora's box of maelstroms, but not like this one.

“When it comes to thunderstorms,” his colleague Al Moller always said, “expect the unexpected.”

These predawn storms had surprised him with both their timing and severity. Every single conventional forecasting method had failed him. In yesterday's broadcast, he had warned emphatically about the potential for dangerous storms to rumble through the afternoon. But he had said nothing of a morning outbreak.

James fought the queasy feeling that he had botched the forecast. He showered quickly and threw on the uniform he wears every day in front of the green screen: dress shirt, tie in any color but green, and dark trousers held up by suspenders. He stuffed his MacBook Pro in a bag, grabbed his jacket, and jumped into his silver Ford Explorer. The sky was black and the clouds hung hot and low. Stealing glances at the weather radar glowing on an iPad mounted to his console, he raced—his wife would kill him if she knew how fast—to the TV station on the other side of town. Thank goodness the roads were empty at this hour. The commute takes twenty minutes on a regular day. Today he got there in ten.

This was rare form for Alabama's favorite weatherman. In a state where only the Gospel is gospel, James Spann's word is considered the next best thing. A common refrain is: “My mama says, if James Spann says it, it must be true.” Wives have learned not to talk to their husbands during the Iron Bowl or anytime James Spann is on the air.

Spann, fifty-three, bald on top, gray on the sides, delivered the weather in a deep, crisp baritone. Many of his viewers were outright fans. They called him “my hero,” and “the Man.” They knew if they e-mailed or tweeted him a question, they would get a personal answer. They read his blog and watched his weekly online video talk show, WeatherBrains, on which he and other self-professed “weather weenies” talked shop about meteorology. Spann had more Twitter followers than some national celebrities and had reached Facebook's max on friends. He may be the only weatherman in history to have his own bobblehead doll.

Spann fans swore that they could glance at a muted TV and tell you how bad the weather was based on what they could see of Spann's uniform.
Uh-oh, I see suspenders—where's the tornado?
Those visible suspenders meant he had removed his coat, a signal that weather conditions were getting serious, and you had better pay attention. If his sleeves were rolled up, it was time to hide in the closet. “The day the tie comes off,” said one fan, “will be a very, very bad day.”

When Spann burst into the studio, jacket under his arm, Jason could still hear the sleep in his voice. James looked at Jason and read his face: conditions were bad. They had been a team for seven years and could communicate whole paragraphs with a glance and a gesture. Without a word, they swapped places. Spann stepped in front of the green screen, opened his laptop on a mobile podium, and addressed the black eye of the camera. If he turned his head to the right, he could see himself in front of the weather map on a small monitor just off camera. Beyond that, he could see Jason on the weather desk, behind a row of six monitors that showed the disaster unfolding in many dimensions. Jason gave him a hand signal and the show went on.

Above them, above the wires and the studio lights and the acoustic dampeners, above the rooftop of the ABC 33/40 station on the hill in south Birmingham, the sky was already churning.

Jason would never forget the first time he met James Spann. It was April 1998, his senior year at Holly Pond High School. The guidance counselor had pulled him aside and said, “Jason, there's somebody here I think you need to talk to.” The Storm Link minivan had pulled into the parking lot, and out climbed James Spann, there to give his meteorology talk to the students, to dazzle them with his science. Jason helped carry in a projector and a twenty-pound laptop. On their walk down the hall, the high school senior gushed. When he was bored in class, he drew pictures of megastorms, radars dotted with hook echoes, the supine commas that signaled spiraling winds around a ball of debris. James looked at the kid, and saw promise.

“How would you like to intern with me this summer?” James said.

“Really?” Jason said. “That would be great!”

It was seventy miles from his house in rural Holly Pond to the TV station in Birmingham. But that was back when gas cost seventy cents a gallon. He could make the round trip in two hours and on four
dollars. Like a young Jedi, Jason studied James. He watched the way he moved, the way he talked, the clues he noticed, the words he chose. But the kid was one of about thirty interns that year. How could he ever hope to make a lasting impression on the master? One night he got his chance: his first taped weathercast.