Watching and Warning

Dear Tom Ridge,

I hear you’re talking about adding another “alert level” to our national terror alert system, something between orange and red. Burnt sienna, maybe. Or ochre. Maybe fuschia. Well, Mr. Ridge, let me tell you, your system is never really going to have the visceral, “call-to-action” effect on me that you’d like. Not that it’s a deeply flawed system whose “alert levels” occasionally get bumped up as knee-jerk reactions to hearsay or just paranoia – no, I’m not implying that at all. It’s just that your terror alert scale can never quite compete for the cumulative dread that can be instilled in my heart by two simple words.

Tornado warning.

Springtime is lurking around the corner, and in this part of the lower midwest – the Texas/Oklahoma/Kansas/Arkansas/Missouri corridor known collectively as Tornado Alley – this young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of hiding in a closet with my wife and my cats and praying a lot. Few things bring to my surface quite the same mixture of scientific curiosity, awe, and unabashed terror as taking shelter during a tornado warning.

For those who live in parts of the country where this phenomenon just doesn’t happen everyday, let me explain to you the unique lifestyle that is spring/early summer in Tornado Alley.

As the warmer seasons take hold, the plains states experience a unique but potent cocktail of daytime heating, humidity, and a rapid-fire parade of high and low pressure systems. Warm and cold air masses collide over the earth’s surface, competing for airspace. Where the two meet, energy builds up and releases violently. And after all this time, no one is really sure how or why it happens, but the sky decides to pay the earth a visit, frequently trying to pick up souvenirs. The storms dissipate, but in the meantime have usually dumped a lot of rain – inches at a time, not fractions of an inch. The next day’s daytime heating exacerbates the existing humidity…and it begins again. It’s a constant cycle, sometimes throwing day after day of violent storms at you, or sometimes saving it all for an all-night reign of terror as several storms blast through in quick succession. Without wanting to draw a banal comparison, I can really only imagine that this is part of what it must feel like to stand at a bus stop in Tel Aviv on any given day.

As short-lived a storm as a tornado is, it can concentrate more violence than a hurricane can muster into a concentrated space. Small towns can literally be wiped out. And it doesn’t do larger cities any favors either. I found this out quite intimately on April 21st, 1996. A friend of mine from California – who I talked to two or three times a week – had called earlier that Sunday night, asking me if I was in the path of some seriously bad weather that had been brewing all afternoon in Oklahoma. I explained to him that, while I was alert to the situation, the Arkansas River – which conveniently carves the state line between Arkansas and Oklahoma along the western-most city limits – had a history of deflecting storms, and would probably do so again this evening.

A few hours later, half of the city was without power, the roof had been peeled away from part of my apartment, allowing rain to pour in by the bucket, and for that matter, no one was sure the building would still be standing by morning. And my cats were under a couch, traumatized for life. They still run to me and crouch down at my feet if they hear so much as a clap of thunder. Two people were dead. Whole buildings in the city’s historic district – boasting structures over a century old – were now piles of brick and rubble. And the hell of it is, nobody saw it coming until the last possible moment.

Wait a minute, this is just like the terror alert scale.

A particularly nasty supercell – a storm which packs a lot of energy into a larger structure than usual, and the kind of storm which is responsible for most tornadoes – had barrelled up through southeastern Oklahoma, dropping multiple funnel clouds as it went. When it reached the Arkansas/Oklahoma state line, the storm was powerful enough that it simply couldn’t be bothered by a mere river. It raced through downtown Fort Smith, going right in front of my apartment building and taking a left just past my workplace at the opposite end of the block. It then carved a path through north Fort Smith, killing two children when it hit a house, skipped the river again, and then destroyed a large chunk of the neighboring city to our north. On its way out of that city, it destroyed more homes, killing a man and his young son in the process, before finally lifting back into the clouds.

All of this took less than half an hour. (For a more in-depth description of this event, with quite a few photos, click here.)

And this was a weak storm, an F-1 on the Fujita Scale as later investigation revealed. This was a baby.

And prior to this, there was perhaps a minute’s warning, since the Tulsa branch of the National Weather Service – which has serviced the Fort Smith area since Fort Smith’s own office was closed in a round of budget cutbacks in the early 1990s – simply hadn’t believed amateur radio storm spotters’ claims that the storm was as bad as they said. The command to sound the torando sirens came so late that, after mere seconds, those sirens were silence by the power outage as the tornado smashed through a downtown power substation. Still fairly new to the task of watching over that far easten part of their territory, Tulsa’s meteorologists weren’t even clear on where certain specific landmarks were with regard to the spotters’ reports. It was a bad situation for those of us depending on the forecast, but a bad situation also for the people issuing the forecast. A real worst-case scenario. There were later major management changes at the Tulsa bureau, changes which were unusually public. But since people had lost their lives, that was probably to be expected.

As recently as last year, I’ve had to hit the deck as well. The only problem is that the post-1996 culture at the Weather Service has been to sometimes jump the gun on issuing a tornado warning and firing off the civil defense sirens. (Due to nasty storm experiences in my childhood, the sound of those sirens has always terrified me in a way that few things can. They’re frequently tested at noon on Tuesdays, provided no actual severe weather is expected, and waking up to that sound is not one of my favorite sensory experiences, nor is the accompanying sensation of my two cats leaping under the covers with me at full speed.

So, back to orange alert? No problem. Doesn’t worry me. I’ve known some real terror. The spring months are loaded with many days spent under a severe thunderstorm or tornado watch, in anticipation of bad weather. Unlike the national terror alert system, I takethose quite seriously. I’ve got a weather alert radio at home which fires off a loud signal if any kind of watch or warning is issued for my area. Unlike the national terror alert system, the weather advisories command my attention and my respect. I’ve had far too many close calls to look at it any other way. After three decades, it’s ingrained into me almost like combat readiness training.

I was talking with an old friend recently who grew up in the same area I did and, like me, he’s a fellow weather-watcher. We were reminiscing about the full-screen warning graphics that the local CBS station used to cut into programming with, usually with the EBS tone followed by the voice of the weather service announcer. Let me tell you, I was by myself once when one of these tornado warning screens popped up in the middle of my cartoons, and then the sirens started up and the power went off in rapid succession. When you’re five or so, and you’re absolutely by yourself in the house when that happens…well, I was a nervous wreck for many weeks after that. And who wouldn’t be after seeing the following?

These are fairly precise recreations that I cooked up myself, but they’re spot-on enough that I got chills just making ’em.

Now, once again, there’s a warning system that inspires true terror. Incidentally, years later when I found myself working in TV, I was asked to come up with a similar system of full-screen cut-ins, and I deliberately strove to replicate that glorious and terrifying Red Screen Of Death.

Management vetoed it. Said it was too bold, too scary. I wonder if my old boss is working for Ridge now – y’know, we want fear to permeate every fiber of your being and every nanosecond of your life. But we don’t want you to worry about it.

Hopefully there will be no need for me to grow to feel that old familiar dread about whether we’re at yellow or orange alert. Trust me, you don’t want to know what it’s like.