Deaths highlight the dangers of storm chasing
Dallas (AP) — As a powerful storm system swept across Texas, storm chasers raced to record its fury and witness a tornado. But one such pursuit ended tragically when three men were killed as their vehicles collided at a rural crossroads.
An SUV containing two storm chasers working under contract to The Weather Channel ran a stop sign Tuesday about 60 miles east of Lubbock and struck a Jeep driven by an amateur from Arizona, authorities said.
It was not the first time storm chasers were killed trying to document violent weather up close.
The latest tragedy just underscored the risks of speeding after storms to capture meteorological data and hair-raising video — a field that has become crowded in recent years.
Here are a few things to know about storm chasing:
Earlier tragedy
The deaths in 2013 of longtime storm chasers Tim Samaras, his son Paul and colleague Carl Young were probably the first “storm intercept fatalities” among researchers, the National Weather Center said at the time. They died racing down a storm that killed 13 people in Oklahoma City and its suburbs.
Tim Samaras and his Twistex tornado chase team produced material for the Discovery Channel, National Geographic and meteorological conferences.
An amateur storm chaser named Richard Charles Henderson died pursuing the same storm. He sent a friend a cellphone photo of the tornado that killed him minutes later.
Crowded field
The father of storm chasing is widely considered to be David Hoadley, a retired U.S. government administrator who has recorded some 230 tornadoes over more than half a century of running down storms.
But the field has grown far more crowded because of the financial incentives, the rise of social media and entertainment such as the Discovery Channel’s “Storm Chasers” and the 1996 movie “Twister,” starring Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt.
Tim Samaras told National Geographic shortly before his death that it’s not uncommon for hundreds of storm chasers to line the roads as a storm develops.