Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
THE MAN WHO CAUGHT THE STORM
LEGENDARY TORNADO CHASER TIM SAMARAS
BY journalist BRANTLEY HARGROVE
The US sees more tornadoes than any other country in the world, with over 1200 tornadoes per year affecting 42 states. The tornado has long captured the popular imagination as one of nature’s fiercest and most inexplicable forces!
And legendary tornado chaser TIM SAMARAS spent his lifetime chasing these storms. His name might ring a bell. Samaras became the toast of the weather world, soon appearing on the cover of National Geographic magazine, in stints on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and CNN, and eventually earning a position on the popular Discovery Channel show “Storm Chasers.”
This after – in 2003, Samaras accomplished meteorology’s equivalent of the moon landing. He cut right through the tornado’s center and gave the world its first glimpse of the tornado’s most dangerous winds. The data he provided, along with the mere proof that it was possible to look inside the inhospitable core, revolutionized storm science!
Sadly 10 years later – Samaras – lost his life while chasing the monster tornado in Oklahoma City.
To document his remarkable mark on the world – journalist BRANTLEY HARGROVE – delivers the new book ” The Man Who Caught The Storm.”
Following in the tradition of “Into Thin Air” and “The Perfect Storm,” the book is an unforgettable exploration of obsession and the extremes of the natural world and the brave life of Tim Samaras.
In The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras, (Simon & Schuster; April 3, 2018), journalist BRANTLEY HARGROVE delivers a masterful tale, taking readers inside the thrill of the chase and the captivating science of tornadoes. This immersive biography chronicles the life and death of the greatest storm chaser who ever lived—Tim Samaras—in “an instant classic of Americana: a story of tragedy, invention, lore, science, and a most original kind of genius” (Hampton Sides).
With novelistic detail, Brantley Hargrove tells the gripping story of the man who succeeded where all others had failed, the story of the man who caught the storm. Tim Samaras was a family man and an autodidact, with nothing more than a high school diploma in a field of PhDs. He was a lifelong tinkerer, notorious for dismantling his mother’s blender as a boy, just to see how it worked. Working as an explosives engineer after high school near his hometown of Denver, Samaras began to chase storms on his off days. He would watch them brew and bubble on the horizon, magnitudes more powerful than any bomb he handled in his day job. Soon this thrill-seeking hobby became an obsession for him.
When he learned that no one had ever peered inside the tornado core, it became his Holy Grail. After several years cutting his teeth, Samaras set out in the 1990s to make good his unique skillset. He had on-the-ground experience measuring deadly blasts, a knack for cobbled-together engineering projects, and an ever-growing backlog of tornadoes he’d hunted down along muddy backroads. He realized that he could be the one to pierce the heart of the tornado.
Throwing readers into the thick of Samaras’ quest, Brantley Hargrove captures the pulse-pounding race that transforms him from amateur to titan. A growing sense of drive, determination, and risk take hold of Samaras as he creates a one-of-a-kind weather probe and flits into the jaws of deadly tornadoes, hoping to give the world its first glimpse of the unseen.
In Manchester, South Dakota, in 2003, Samaras finally succeeded—accomplishing meteorology’s equivalent of the moon landing. His remarkable probe cut right through the tornado’s center and held fast, giving the world its first glimpse of the tornado’s most dangerous winds. The data he provided, along with the mere proof that it was possible to look inside the inhospitable core, revolutionized storm science. Samaras became the toast of the weather world, soon appearing on the cover of National Geographic magazine, in stints on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and CNN, and eventually earning a position on the popular Discovery Channel show “Storm Chasers.”
However, as Hargrove brilliantly depicts, the same drive and obsession that led Samaras to success would take their toll in time. Samaras kept innovating, but he insisted on operating outside the academy. The chip on his shoulder led him to distrust the PhDs who led the most prestigious storm science expeditions. So, instead of signing on, Samaras forged his own team of upstarts. He operated on a shoestring budget and made the most of his fearlessness within environments that would have sent most scientists racing for the hills. He continued to add new firsts and findings to the field, but Hargrove shows how Samaras’ risks steadily mounted over the years. They were eventually compounded by the arrival of a storm unlike any Samaras—or anyone—had seen before.
In 2013, ten years after his “moon landing” moment, Tim Samaras, his son Paul, and their chase partner Carl Young came up against the tornado that finally proved their match. In a suspenseful, minute-by-minute account of the showdown, Hargrove takes readers inside the team’s pursuit of a once-in-a-millennium twister.
What begins as Samaras’ all-out race to deploy on a record-breaking storm, however, quickly turns into a race for mere survival—one that Samaras was fated to lose. As the monster tornado neared Oklahoma City, it stretched to 2.6 miles in width, wider than Manhattan. It was the largest tornado ever to be recorded, worldwide. With its sheer size, its unpredictable movement, and the low visibility it afforded, the vortex overtook Samaras’ vehicle and killed Tim, his son Paul, and Carl Young.
They were the first chasers ever to die within a tornado, but Samaras’ legacy lives on. Samaras revolutionized our understanding of tornadoes by succeeding where decades upon decades of researchers had failed. By proving it was possible to plant a weather probe in a tornado and have it hold fast, he reopened an essential method by which researchers can gather data to better predict and understand monster storms. Once an outsider, Tim’s work has become foundational. Today’s leading tornado researchers in the U.S. are now using probes based on Samaras’ revolutionary design and have made them central to their endeavors.
In the wake of Samaras’ death, Brantley Hargrove, then a young staff writer at the Dallas Observer, profiled Samaras for the weekly newspaper, which became the starting point for this book. In the reporting, he realized he had only just begun to scratch the surface of Samaras’ story, and he was determined to tell the epic in full. Tornadoes had long been a source of fascination and fear for Hargrove, who grew up near Jarrell, Texas, where he witnessed the aftermath of a violent tornado during his youth. As Hargrove grappled with his subject Tim Samaras and sought to get inside the man’s mind and mission, Hargrove realized that he would need to go beyond interviews and archival research for this biography. He would need to chase tornadoes himself. Hargrove sought out expert storm chasers, including some of Samaras’ old companions, and went out in pursuit of major tornadoes, for weeks across nearly every state in Tornado Alley. Doing so gave him insight into the awe, beauty, and terror of the spectacle; but it was only after witnessing a tornado pummel a small fishing village that Hargrove could truly understand why Samaras worked so hard throughout his lifetime to understand this phenomenon. Samaras had seen this kind of death and destruction as well, and he wanted to do something about it.
Through the power of Hargrove’s writing, readers will glean insight into the psyche of a man who risked his life to better understand and educate the public about one of the world’s most mysterious and destructive forces. The Man Who Caught the Storm is the story of a monster that still haunts our world and of the bold souls who’ve tried for decades to slay it. It’s an indelible portrait of the complicated man who came closest of all, and the passion that led him to greatness—then led him too far. Hargrove’s remarkable prose elucidates the nature of obsession and commitment, and what sparks purpose in our lives. It speaks to our tangled fear and enchantment with the natural world, to our urge to understand, and to the world’s refusal to play along.
About the author: BRANTLEY HARGROVE is a journalist who has written for Wired, Popular Mechanics, and Texas Monthly. He has gone inside the effort to reverse-engineer supertornadoes using supercomputers and has chased violent storms from the Great Plains down to the Texas coast. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife, Renee, and their two cats. The Man Who Caught the Storm is his first book. https://www.hbrantleyhargrove.com/, his Twitter account is @BrantHargrove and here is a video from our Simon & Schuster Books Youtube Channel https://youtu.be/tvf8bg_aKPs where Brantley discusses his book.
More on tornadoes: The substance of a twister is nothing more than the air we breathe—wind, vapor, atmosphere—yet it has sharpened to a knife’s edge and imbued with unimaginable force. A high-end tornado can grind a house into sawdust, impale cardboard into solid concrete, and launch vehicles hundreds of feet skyward in seconds. Its unfathomable power is matched only by its terrifying unpredictability: Even today, the average time between tornado warning and impact is just 14 minutes. This is a perilously short window, and one that’s of special concern in the United States. America sees more tornadoes than any other country in the world, with over 1200 tornadoes per year affecting 42 states, primarily in “Tornado Alley” and the Southeast. Tornadoes incur a level of damage in the U.S. that outstrips that of fires, earthquakes, and floods—and climate change has only exacerbated the intensity of these storms in recent years. Understandably, in an effort to understand, predict, and protect against them, tornadoes have been the focus of decades of concerted scientific study. However, even as recently as the turn of the 21st century, the tornado remained one of the last obstinate mysteries of the modern world. By the year 2000, scientists had launched a rover to Mars and sent home photos, but no instrument had ever entered the interior of a tornado and survived. Researchers had tried, throughout 1980s and 90s, to pierce the tornado core with high-tech weather probes, which became the basis for the movie Twister. But every real-life effort failed, until scientists eventually gave up the quest. Surviving the ground level of a raging tornado was either impossible, they said, or a fool’s errand. However, this didn’t sit easy with many. The ground level is where humans live, after all; and in a violent twister, it’s where they’ll die. If ever scientists were going to be able to test their theories about how tornadoes form, shift, and intensify—or about how we might construct safer houses or increase warning times—someone would need to do the impossible.