Why spotters die
- View
The risk record, the one tornado that ever killed storm chasers, and why experience did not save the most experienced people in the field.
In this lesson you will
- Rank the leading causes of spotter and chaser death, and justify the ranking from the available evidence.
- Recall the core facts of the El Reno 2013 event and why experienced people died in it.
- Explain why no report is worth closing distance for.
The ranking, and why it surprises people
Ask a new spotter what is most likely to hurt them and they will say the tornado. The evidence says otherwise, and the ordering is the single most useful thing in this module.
| Rank | Hazard | Why it is where it is |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The vehicle | Ordinary road crashes, on wet roads, at speed, by tired distracted drivers. It has killed more people doing this than everything else combined. |
| 2 | Lightning | Kills roughly twenty people a year in the United States, almost none of them near a tornado, and more than half after the rain has stopped. |
| 3 | The tornado | A distant third. One tornado in the entire record has killed storm chasers. |
Flooding and hail have killed spotters in vehicles, which is really the first row again. Module 6 lesson 4 covers why flood deaths are overwhelmingly vehicle deaths.
The counts you will see circulating, a specific number of vehicle deaths against a specific number of tornado deaths, come from a self-published tally kept by one chaser. It is careful work and it is not peer-reviewed, and no peer-reviewed analysis isolates chaser deaths by cause. This course prints no count for that reason. The ordering is well supported; the exact numbers are not, and you should know which is which before you repeat either.
El Reno, 31 May 2013
The one event that has to be taught, because it is the only tornado that has ever killed storm chasers and because the people it killed were not careless.
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Maximum width | 2.6 miles, the widest tornado on record |
| Time on the ground | about 40 minutes |
| Path length | 16.2 miles |
| Killed | 8 |
| Injured | 151 |
| Official rating | EF3 |
| Measured near-surface wind | at least 295 mph, by mobile radar |
The last two rows are not a contradiction. The EF scale rates damage, and NWS Norman stated that surveyors could not find damage supporting a higher rating. Official ratings do not use radar winds. Module 5 lesson 6 explains why.
The tornado was rain-wrapped, its forward speed accelerated from around 35 to over 50 miles an hour, and it turned sharply left. Sub-vortices inside it moved far faster than the parent circulation, which is the mechanism the research afterwards identified as what caught the vehicles.
From the NWS Service Assessment: all eight direct fatalities on 31 May 2013 were in vehicles, four of them people who were storm chasing. Not in the open, not sheltering badly. In cars. This is the official finding, it is the best-supported statement in this lesson, and it points at the same place the ranking above does.
Three of those four were the TWISTEX research team: Tim Samaras, his son Paul Samaras, and Carl Young. A local resident, Richard Henderson, was killed in a separate vehicle. Tim Samaras was among the most experienced and most safety-conscious people working in the field, and had spent a career arguing for caution.
That is the comfortable reading and it is the wrong one, because it lets you conclude the same thing cannot happen to you. Experience does not protect you from a storm doing something nobody has seen it do. It buys you better judgment about ordinary situations, and El Reno was not one.
Roads kill in ordinary weather too
The other case worth knowing is the one with no storm in it. On 28 March 2017 near Spur, Texas, three chasers were killed when one vehicle ran a stop sign and struck another. Texas DPS confirmed inclement weather was not a direct cause, and one driver was not wearing a seatbelt.
A stop sign. That is the whole lesson of the next lesson, arriving early: the dangerous part of a spotting trip is usually the driving, and the driving is dangerous in the completely ordinary ways driving is always dangerous, made worse by distraction, fatigue and wet roads.
The distance question
Every risk in this module scales with how close you are and how much you are moving. So it is worth saying plainly what a report actually needs, because the answer is less than people assume.
Module 7 listed what a usable report contains: what, where, when, movement, and whether your numbers are measured or estimated. None of those improves by halving your distance to the storm. Several of them get worse, because close to a storm you cannot see its structure, you cannot judge its motion, and you are busy. Reports here are cross-checked against radar, so distance costs you nothing and buys you the entire margin this module is about.
Check yourself
You are planning to spot a severe weather event this afternoon. Statistically, what is most likely to injure or kill you?
- A road crash while driving to, from or during the event
- The tornado, if one occurs
- Large hail while you are outside the vehicle
- A downburst hitting your parked vehicle
Hint
One tornado in the entire record has killed storm chasers. Ask what the other cases have in common.
Answer
A road crash while driving to, from or during the event
The vehicle, by a wide margin, and it is not close. The NWS Service Assessment found all eight direct fatalities at El Reno were in vehicles, and the other well-known chaser fatality event involved a stop sign and no severe weather at all. Lightning is second. The tornado is third and the gap is large.
Sources
- NWS 2014, Service Assessment: May 2013 Oklahoma tornadoes and flash flooding
- Wurman, Kosiba, Robinson & Marshall 2014, Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. 95(1), 31–45: the role of multiple-vortex tornado structure in causing storm researcher fatalities
- NWS Paducah, "Safety for Mobile Spotters", produced from an essay by C. A. Doswell III
- NWS lightning safety
- Wakimoto et al. 2016, Mon. Wea. Rev. 144(5), 1749–1776: aerial damage survey of the 2013 El Reno tornado combined with mobile radar data