The behaviors that produce spotter crashes, the two-person rule that prevents most of them, and why fatigue is a weather hazard.

In this lesson you will

  • List the driving behaviors that cause spotter crashes, and their countermeasures.
  • Apply the two-person team rule of driver and navigator.
  • Explain why a report is never composed while driving.
  • Describe a legal, fully off-the-roadway pull-off.

What actually goes wrong

The NWS mobile spotter guidance, written from an essay by Chuck Doswell, is blunt that the highway is threat number one, and the list of behaviors is unglamorous. Every one of them is something an ordinary competent driver does when their attention is on the sky.

  • Driving with less than full attention. Watching the storm, watching radar, talking on a net. The road gets whatever is left.
  • Speed, usually to keep up with a storm or get ahead of it. The storm is not going to wait, and it is not worth it.
  • Rain and hail covered roads. Hail on tarmac behaves like ball bearings, and standing water hydroplanes at speeds well below the limit.
  • Sudden stops, because something appeared in the sky, taken by somebody who forgot there was a vehicle behind them.
The one physical cue to memorise
If you can hear water splashing under the car, you are on the verge of hydroplaning or already doing it. Ease off, do not brake hard, do not steer sharply. That sound is the warning you get and it comes before the loss of control, not after it.

Stopping

Almost every good observation happens stationary, so how you stop matters more than how you drive.

  1. Never stop in the roadway. Not in a lane, not partly in one, not on a bend, not over a crest. Hazard lights do not make a stopped vehicle safe; they make it a visible obstruction.
  2. Get fully off the right of way, all four wheels, clear of the white line with room to spare.
  3. Confirm it is legal. Interstate shoulders are for emergencies in most states, and module 11 covers the law properly.
  4. Look at the shoulder before you commit to it. Soft ground, a ditch, a culvert or a drop-off will take your vehicle out of service in exactly the conditions where you need it.
  5. Look before you open the door, and get out on the side away from traffic if there is any traffic at all.
Dirt roads
Avoid unpaved roads in the wet. A thin layer of mud over hard-packed dirt is extremely slick, far worse than it looks, and a road that was fine on the way in can be impassable twenty minutes later. A road you cannot leave is not an escape route, which is lesson 5.

Two people, two jobs

This is the single highest-value countermeasure in the module and it costs nothing but a passenger.

The driver
Drives. That is the entire job. Does not look at radar, does not type, does not work a net, does not take photographs. If the driver needs to see something, the vehicle stops first.
The navigator
Everything else. Radar, maps, the escape route, the net, the report, the clock. Also has the authority to say the words "we are leaving", which matters more than any of the rest of it.
And if you are alone
Then you are doing both jobs badly, and the honest answer is that a solo spotter should be a stationary spotter. Park, observe, report, then drive. Never all at once. Lesson 7 makes the case that fixed-location spotting is a legitimate and valued thing to be rather than a consolation prize.

Which gives the hard rule this platform works to: a report is never composed while driving. Not typed, not dictated into a form, not photographed. Module 7 said the report carries the time the event happened rather than the time you sent it, and that is precisely what makes it safe to stop first and send afterwards. The time stamp does not degrade while you find somewhere to pull off.

Fuel, and other boring things that end trips

  • Top up before half a tank, not when the light comes on. Stations close, and after a damaging storm they lose power and cannot pump at all. Half a tank is your reserve to drive out of an area.
  • Tires, including the spare, and something to change it with. Debris on the road after a storm is mostly nails, glass and wire.
  • Wipers and lights that actually work. Replace wipers before the season, not during the storm that revealed they were finished.

Crowds

Where spotters and chasers converge on one storm, the road network stops working. This is documented rather than theoretical: the Service Assessment for El Reno found that a mass evacuation by car led to traffic jams and accidents that day. A blocked road is a blocked escape route, and it blocks emergency vehicles trying to reach people the storm has already hit.

Fatigue is a weather hazard

Severe weather happens in the late afternoon and overnight, after a working day, and the drive home is the most dangerous part of the outing. OSHA, citing the sleep science literature, puts the impairment from being awake 17 hours at roughly the equivalent of a 0.05 blood alcohol concentration, and 24 hours at about 0.10.

The sentence worth carrying
NIOSH: fatigue impairs reaction time and decision-making, and "no amount of experience, motivation, or professionalism can overcome your body's biological need to sleep." You cannot decide your way out of this one. Roughly a fifth of fatal US crashes are estimated to involve driver fatigue.

So the last decision of the night is a real decision, not an afterthought: can I drive home, or should I stop? Nobody has ever regretted sleeping in a car park for two hours.

Check yourself

You are alone, driving, and you see a wall cloud with clear rotation. What do you do first?

  1. Find a safe legal place fully off the roadway, stop, and then report
  2. Report it immediately by voice so the office gets it fastest
  3. Photograph it while driving, then pull over to send the report
  4. Keep driving to maintain visual contact, and report once the storm is clearer
Hint

One of these takes about forty extra seconds. Module 7 explains why those seconds cost the report nothing.

Answer

Find a safe legal place fully off the roadway, stop, and then report

Stop first, always, and alone that is not negotiable because you are already doing two jobs. The report carries the time the event happened rather than the time you sent it, so pulling over costs the report nothing at all. Voice reporting while driving is still reporting while driving.

Sources

  1. NWS Paducah, "Safety for Mobile Spotters", produced from an essay by C. A. Doswell III
  2. NWS 2014, Service Assessment: May 2013 Oklahoma tornadoes and flash flooding
  3. OSHA, motor vehicle safety and drowsy driving
  4. NWS Weather Spotter's Field Guide (YPA-201154, June 2011)
  5. CDC and NIOSH, work and fatigue research, driver fatigue
  6. AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, drowsy driving prevalence estimates