What Stands in a Storm (5 page)

He had thought it would be easy, because James made it look effortless. But in front of the green screen, it was not so easy. Jason found himself with his back to the camera—a broadcast sin—floundering around as he tried to figure out where the heck on the blank wall to point. You could almost hear the air whooshing out of his ego like a balloon as he trudged off the set, chin to chest. James had been in the control room, watching the boy unravel. He met him at the door.

“Don't worry about it,” he said. “It gets easier.”

That was classic Spann. Little words. Big message. Unforgettable truth. Jason had a seventy-mile drive home to let that marinate. By the time he pulled into his driveway in Holly Pond, he had talked himself out of quitting.
It gets easier.
Those three words prevented him from giving up on this career.

After that, Jason worked with James whenever he got the chance. James taught him everything. Most important, he taught him to be himself. Authentic. Viewers could smell a fake across two counties. “Don't be a blow-dried boob,” James would say, nodding at the stiff-haired guys on the national news. “You be you. You're from Holly Pond. You remember that. Don't ever forget where you came from.” Jason watched, listened, and learned. He got a job in a smaller TV market and practiced. In August of 2004, shortly after the ten o'clock news, his phone rang. It was James.

“What do you think about coming to work for me?”

“I think it'd be pretty good.”

Jason could not wait to work a severe weather event with James, to be his right-hand man. But it did not happen right away. In the first bad storm, he found himself third on the totem pole. Jason stormed out of the studio that day, hurt that he was not trusted to do the job that James
had hired him to do. But James knew he was not ready. Eight or nine months later, Jason had learned how to anticipate what James needed.

It got easier.

In the studio, Jason drove the equipment while James went on camera. Jason had studied James for so long that he knew what he wanted, sometimes even before James did. The hand signals would come in handy today.

Seven hundred miles away, at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, the warning coordination meteorologist Greg Carbin was watching the Birmingham radar closely. He spotted a bow echo forming—a line of storms pushed out into an arc, like a hunter's bow. The storms' position at exactly 5:52 a.m. looked to him like a giant question mark, punctuated by a storm cell at the bottom. It was poised over central Alabama, spreading over roughly eleven counties. Carbin shook his head and thought:
Even the atmosphere doesn't know what it's doing
.

Like a canoe paddle moving through the surface of a lake, curling the water into whirls within swirls, the squall line moved through the atmosphere, stirring up small to midsize tornadoes. Some dissipated minutes after they formed. Others grew to a size that could shred a double-wide trailer into ribbons. One stayed on the ground for twenty-three miles. They coursed insidiously through the rural lands of west-central Alabama, across counties where timber farms outnumbered stoplights.

At 5:18 a.m., the fifth tornado of the day to strike Alabama had come straight down the main street of downtown Cordova, a small town an hour's drive northwest of Birmingham, shattering storefront windows along Commerce Street and leaving a trail of bricks and broken glass.

As that storm raged on for another nineteen miles, another tornado, a sneaky one, was born on the outskirts of Tuscaloosa. In a blink of the radar's eye, what looked like a straight-line gust of wind mutated
into a tornado. By the time it appeared on Jason's radar, the funnel was already on the ground, tearing up Coaling, crossing the interstate, and heading toward the Mercedes-Benz plant.

While he was on the air, Jason felt his mobile phone buzz. He stole a quick glance at the screen. It was his cousin Bob from Holly Pond.

Why are you calling me?
he thought, annoyed.
You know I'm on the air. You know I can't answer the phone.

He hit ignore and returned to the radar. That's when he saw it, the angry red comma passing over Holly Pond. Over his parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. The family farm.

Yeah, he knows I'm on the air. That's why he's calling. They must have been hit.
A surge of emotion made him blink and swallow. The storm was suddenly personal. Things just got real. James read his face, gave a nod.

“Go take a minute. Get some air.”

Jason stepped out of the studio and into the white cinder-block hallway with a beat-up striped couch, and tried calling his family. No answer. He choked up and called his wife, who had been trying to reach them, too, with no success. Jason pulled himself together and went back into the studio. The midstate storms began to dissipate, and the morning event wound to a close. The northern third of Alabama was still being pummeled by weak tornadoes, but the sky above Birmingham was clearing up—for now. When the
ON AIR
light went dark and the studio dimmed, Jason looked at James, and James looked at Jason.

They said nothing.

That said everything.

Around 7:00 a.m., Central Alabama woke up to blue skies and sunshine. Several storms were still spinning upstate, but Birmingham and Tuscaloosa looked deceptively clear. Thirty-one tornadoes had struck Alabama, but many of the people outside their path had no idea anything
had happened until they turned on the morning news or picked up the phone. Some of them wondered,
Was that it? Is it over?

James rushed straight from the weather desk to his office, a windowless room the size of a closet located in the middle of the building. This morning's outbreak was just the opening act. Today's atmosphere was a powder keg, and the source of energy that would set it off—the sun—was beginning its rise. If the morning had been this bad already, the afternoon would likely be off the charts. People would die. How many? That answer was something he considered a direct reflection of how well he did his job.

Between his radio interviews and hundreds of e-mails, the damage reports poured in. A quarter of a million people in the state had no power. Five people were dead. Mobile phone towers had been knocked down, and the network was overloaded. Landlines were not working. Cable was gone. The Internet was out. It was a hot mess.

The damage crippled the weather community. The storm had taken out equipment they needed to forecast and broadcast warnings. Meteorologists lost their radar feeds. Weather radio transmitters were disabled. SkyCams were busted. Communications systems were groaning under the weight of everyone calling at once to check on family and friends.

“Okay, let's start over,” James told his technicians. “Instead of telling me what is
not
working, tell me what
is
.”

While workers raced to fix downed cameras and broken lines, Jason joined a morning news show called
Talk of Alabama
. He had to get the word out—at least to people who could still turn on a TV—that the day was far from over. This blue sky was a lie.

“Please, pay attention this afternoon,” he said. “This is not what you think it is. Get ready. This might be the last time some of us talk.”

After the show ended, Jason walked over to the newsroom to brief the reporters. Usually when there is a weather situation brewing, he steps into the news director's office and closes the door. But today it was time to make sure that everyone heard the alarm. He stood on a
platform behind the news desk and swore the apocalyptic warnings were not hyperbolic.

“Gary,” he said, turning to the news director. “Have I ever told you that we were going to have a horrible tornado outbreak?”

“No.”

“Well, today is that day. Get ready for mass casualties if these things hit cities.”

“When does it start?”

“An hour or two.”

“Where do you think the first one will be?”

“It could be anywhere.”

It could be anywhere.

In an age when we can map the human genome, gather dust from a comet hurtling through space, and engineer synthetic DNA, science cannot predict exactly when and where a tornado will form. A radar cannot “see” tornadoes. It can only detect conditions known to be present when they form, such as signs of strong rotation. And the presence of those radar features does not prove a tornado exists. The only way to confirm a tornado is for a human to lay eyes on it. This, in meteorology, is called ground truth. It is one of the most valuable tools meteorologists have today.

Ground truth is the difference between probability and reality. It is a key factor in the false alarm rate—the percentage of warnings issued by the National Weather Service based on conditions seen on radar when in fact no funnel has materialized on the ground. The problem is, supercells that bear tornadoes look almost exactly like supercells that do not. So when a radar signature glows with the inflamed comma of a hook echo—a sign of strong rotation—but no ground truth ensues, a warning coordination meteorologist at the NWS must decide whether to issue a tornado warning based on circumstantial evidence alone.

A tornado warning triggers a ripple effect of communication and action, beginning with countywide sirens. Broadcast meteorologists such as Spann have no authority to issue a warning, but they shoulder a great responsibility to disseminate it quickly and broadly to the public. They are the town criers, informing the legions who still do not get
their warnings directly from the NWS via weather radios, websites, or smartphone apps.

Herein lies the great dilemma: Warnings issued without ground truth are often false warnings. The sirens sound. People run to their basements. Then nothing happens. After a few such occasions, people stop running. They grow complacent. They stop trusting meteorologists or, worse, accuse them of crying wolf. Then, when they hear the next alarm, they go outside to scan the sky for confirmation. Or they simply ignore it.

To warn or not to warn? That is a loaded question. In weighing the consequences of being wrong in either case, it would seem logical to err on the side of warning. But overwarning has dire ramifications, too. At the time of the outbreak, the false alarm rate at the NWS office in Birmingham—and nationwide—was hovering around 80 percent.

Ground truth is one of the reasons James Spann spends a great deal of off-the-air time teaching children and adults about storms. The best storm chasers may be able to put themselves in the right place at the right time to catch a twister—sometimes. But storm spotters, who stay put, are everywhere. The 290,000 volunteer spotters across the country scan the skies above trailer parks, small towns, rural farms, and other places the SkyCams cannot reach. Most of them have attended two-hour classes that teach them how to tell a violently rotating column of air from a harmless funnel-shaped cloud. Spann's classes are eight hours and often draw four hundred people of all ages and walks of life. When something wicked comes their way, they photograph it, film it, e-mail it, tweet it, and post the valuable real-time information in private chat rooms where Spann and others can harvest info from trustworthy sources. They are one of the most valuable tools meteorologists have today.

Education is, as Spann sees it, a critical part of his duty, not only to enlarge his network of ground truth but to teach people how to save themselves. Teaching the public to be weather-wise is just as important
as devising and broadcasting accurate forecasts. An old friend and colleague, the tornado researcher Chuck Doswell, summed it up:

If our forecasts are perfect but the users don't receive the message, don't understand the message, don't know what to do with the message, and don't act upon the contents of the message, then our time and effort have been wasted.

Spann spends hundreds of unpaid hours every year teaching storm-spotter classes, giving presentations at public libraries, and preaching the gospel of weather safety to just about anyone who will listen. His favorite audience, without question, is children.