Posted on 05/18/2018 8:39:25 AM PDT by simpson96
HAMMON, Okla.—When residents of this remote rural area were warned to take cover from an approaching severe storm, tour director Bill Reid aimed his vanload of six giddy passengers into its path.
“It’s going to get crazy,” said Mr. Reid of Tempest Tours, which takes visitors on excursions into some of the wildest weather on the continent, amid reports of torrential rain, baseball-sized hail and possible tornadic activity.
As the U.S.’s tornado season kicks into high gear, so does the booming-but-risky business of taking paying passengers on storm-chasing tours in the nation’s tornado alley.
The 1996 movie, “Twister,” and the 2007-2011 Discovery Channel reality TV series, “Storm Chasers” have helped to fuel the growing popularity of the tours—in a trend that worries some safety experts.
Although the storm tour companies offer no guarantees, spotting—and taking photos of—twisters is the Holy Grail for storm chasers and tourists alike. With only about half the normal number of twisters so far this year, the tornado season has gotten off to its slowest start in years.
But that hasn’t stopped Tempest Tours, among others, from selling out its storm-chase tours, which can last from a day to 11 days and run $300 to $3,850. The company started in 2000 with 20 tourists now hosts about 200 passengers a season who come from around the country and world, said founder Martin Lisius.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
It’s all fun and games until people get killed.
No one gets killed, you just engage in cute banter with Helen Hunt with cows and tractor parts flying all around you, and everything works out fine in the end.
Even before the movie “Twister”, I had heard of storm chasing. But back then, it was primarily professionals and meteorology students doing it.
I would love to go out on one of the tours. I’d like to see a tornado.
Of course having said that, I’d like the tornado to ideally be in a large large field where no homes are destroyed and no people are killed or injured.
Sign me up.
It would beat anything going on in my existence.
What amazed me most about that video is in the lower righthand corner of the screen. A guy is lying on the ground and then sits up.
I’ll not understand how we didn’t get swept away by the winds.
As a life long mid-westerner, always loved the summer storm as it moves through. Temps drop 15 degrees in like 2 minutes, refreshing ozone air smell, everything gets super green, the initial pitter-pat of rain. But then the golf ball sized hail machineguns your vehicle, sheer winds dropping trees and pulling the shingles off your roof, lightning strike takes out your power grid. Not so fun.
What amazed me most about that video is in the lower righthand corner of the screen. A guy is lying on the ground and then sits up.
I’ll not understand how we didn’t get swept away by the winds.
...
In think he was swept away and ended up in that position.
I want to drive the Jeep pickup.
Helen optional.
People do it for the thrill of knowing it might be deadly. Like skydiving, car racing, rock climbing, etc. My thrill is solo hiking in wintertime. If I slip and break my leg in zero weather while ten miles from the trailhead, things get dicey real quick.
I've had enough storm excitement to last a lifetime, thank you!
He just left a hardware store with a tube of Super Glue in his back pocket which broke when he was knocked down.🤡
I attended college at OU (Norman, Oklahoma) in the sixties. When a tornado warning (one sighted) in our local area, we would load up a car, buy some beer, and go looking. Lots of fun.
“I think he was swept away and ended up in that position.”
True, very true.
That will teach them for cutting someone off.
Way back in 1970-71 I was a mechanical engineering student at the University of Oklahoma. The meteorology dept was in the same school so they would come by at times and recruit spotters. It paid $1.50 an hour and more if you got good pictures. It was a way to make ends meet and we usually didn't have to go far from Norman to do the job.
BTW the movie Twister was an abomination with the way they had tornadoes sneaking up on unsuspecting people. Every TV station in Texas and Oklahoma had extensive weather coverage even then. We would get a roughly 1-2 hour heads up regarding severe weather.
Wow, see my post 18. I never read the comments before I posted. Same thing with us. It would empty out our floor at Johnson Tower whenever storms were approaching.
It would be fun to convert a military MRAP into a storm chaser. Make the windows bigger, put in padded seats with good straps. Go for the vortex.
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