Supercell by H. W. Buzz Bernard

Author:H. W. Buzz Bernard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BelleBooks Inc.
Published: 2019-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

TUESDAY, MAY 7

THE TEAM overnighted near Lincoln again. But sleep eluded Chuck. He finally surrendered to his insomnia and arose shortly after 4 a.m. Stormy lifted her head from where she slept at the foot of the bed, stared briefly at Chuck, then plopped her head back on the floor and closed her eyes.

Chuck flipped open his laptop computer and went to work studying the meteorological setup for the day’s chase. The Storm Prediction Center has posted another moderate risk for severe storms, similar to yesterday, but this time for the eastern Dakotas and western Minnesota. The discussion from SPC even suggested the possibility of a long-track tornado or two. Chuck examined the forecast parameters and concurred with that assessment.

A long-lived supercell was what he needed: a thermodynamic brute that could be pursued for miles across the open prairies of the Great Plains. A storm whose very nature would dictate it would eventually spit out a twister, maybe two or three or a dozen, over its life span. Not only that, but such cells were often the ones that ended up harboring the most violent of tornadoes, the EF-4s and -5s.

He hadn’t been chasing during that awful year of 2011, but he remembered well the tales of those stalking what became known later as the Joplin Supercell. The storm blew up over southeast Kansas. For three hours, chasers tracked it toward Joplin, until it finally dropped a twister along the Kansas-Missouri border just southwest of the city. Within five minutes, the tornado had morphed into a killer, a coal-black, mile-wide wedge devouring both buildings and people.

More than a few chasers broke traffic laws that day, running red lights and making illegal U-turns over traffic medians, to escape the violence that was in the process of leveling a modern American city. Others, as though tracking the bloody spoor of a wounded animal, followed in its wake, pulling wounded souls from debris, tallying the dead and breaking down in tears of emotion. They had become part and parcel of the single deadliest tornado in over half a century.

Earlier that year, a multi-day tornado outbreak claimed more lives than any siege since the 1930s as swarms of twisters raked through the South. One supercell, Chuck recalled, traveled over 400 miles from Mississippi to western North Carolina. During its eight-hour search-and- destroy life span, it spit out at least a half-dozen tornadoes. One of them, a massive EF-4, churned through both Tuscaloosa and Birmingham on an 80-mile-long blitzkrieg.

He didn’t wish death and destruction on anyone, but he needed to corner a supercell with the DNA of the beast that had churned through the Deep South. But he wanted it to be on the Great Plains in a non-target-rich environment.

Chuck stood, walked to the window and pulled back the curtains. Still dark outside. Dense fog hung in the air, creating fuzzy yellow-orange coronae around the security lights in the parking lot. He shuffled into the bathroom, read the instructions on the Keurig coffeemaker, and brewed himself a cup of Paul Newman Something or Other.

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