February 5 was a milestone in the 2008 presidential primaries, but politics got eclipsed by the day”s deadly weather. By now, the whole nation knows of the disaster that rumbled through the South on Super Tuesday. As my chase partner, Bill, and I sat in his Suburban in Corydon, Indiana, watching the line of storms along the cold front move in, we never suspected the magnitude of the tragedy playing out to our south. And the storms were far from over. They would continue through the night to our east, through Kentucky and Ohio.
As I write, the death toll from Tuesday”s outbreak stands at sixty, and the SPC (Storm Prediction Center) Storm Reports for February 5 shows a tally of 103 tornadoes. The stories and the photos in the news are heartbreaking. The looks on people”s faces…the shock, the grief, the unbelief…it”s hard to grasp the enormous human impact of this event. All of us find ourselves in circumstances at one time or another where loss strikes, and we ask ourselves, “Now what do I do?” But to survey the remains of your home scattered across acres of field and twisted through ragged treetops…to think of the loved one you”ve lost whose smile dances in your mind and whose voice still rings in your ears…I can”t begin to imagine what that is like.
And it”s only early February. Severe weather visitations aren”t uncommon in the South this time of year, in the region known as the Dixie Alley, but a disaster of this proportion is another thing altogether.
After Bill and I had checked into our hotel rooms in Corydon, a few miles west of Louisville, Kentucky, we grabbed a steak and brew at a nearby restaurant. At that point, the storms were still a ways off, but by the time we had finished eating, a light rain was falling and lightning flickered through the sky. We headed back to the hotel, with the idea of calling it a night and watching the weather play out on TV and on my laptop radar. But a glance at GR3 showed a developing supercell making a beeline for the area just east of us, so we decided to head back out and intercept it.
Due to problems connecting with the Internet in the car, I couldn”t access GR3 for a good fifteen minutes. As we drove blindly into the storm, with the wind and rain intensifying, I felt a mixture of concern and extreme irritation. I”m a fairly placid personality, and my feathers don”t ruffle all that easily, but difficulty with radar connection during a chase is one thing that can cause me to pop blood vessels in my eyeballs. Eventually, I got us hooked up with GR3, which revealed two things: 1) the storm had passed us, as we suspected; and 2) it would definitely have been worth pursuing, had we not been headed back west, had not the cell been moving at warp speed, and had not our road options been rotten. In the SPC storm reports, I could swear I read of a tornado incident in Milton, Kentucky, northeast of our intercept area. Looking again, I can”t find that record, but if a touchdown did in fact occur in that area, this was the storm that produced it.
With the main event seemingly over for the night, we headed back toward Corydon, and parked on a side road near our hotel to watch the squall line blow in. The line was not far from us–around ten miles, according to the radar, and closing in fast. A second, smaller line was also kicking up to our south along the outflow boundary, with a small, relatively isolated cell near its far end.
Embedded supercells pulsed northward up the main line, like corpuscles through an artery, triggering a medley of shear markers and tornado vortex signatures as the whole system translated rapidly in our direction. But that lone wolf cell was what had my interest. As it neared Brandenburg, thirty miles south of us, it began to show distinct signs of rotation. The National Weather Service in Louisville indicates that this small but vigorous supercell did in fact put down an EF-1 tornado in Brandenburg.
As Bill and I approached the Michigan state line the following evening, the snow began to fly. The back end of the weather system was chuffing out a truly nasty winter storm, and the center of the low, poised just above the southern tip of Lake Michigan near Chicago, was wrapping in a truckload of wet snow for our driving amusement.
I arrived home around 9:30, flipped on my computer, logged onto Stormtrack, and checked out the chase reports and discussions. That”s when the severity of the previous day”s event really began to unfold for me.
As obsessed with the power and beauty of severe weather as storm chasers are, we”re nevertheless like anyone else when it comes to human impact. We never want storms to affect lives, and we”re horrified when they do. The 2008 Super Tuesday outbreak is one of the worst in the nation”s history. And, as I have already mentioned, this year”s storm season is still months away from its normal zenith in May.
I hope the rest of the 2008 chase season will be a good one, not a bad one. Not a tragic one, with more ugly surprises.
May God”s grace and comfort attend those whose lives have been devastated by last Tuesday”s terrible storms.
