The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado by Holly Bailey

broken up, but it seemed impervious to his intervention and darted onward into a forest. When limbs began to rain down upon him from the sky, Franklin became “apprehensive of the danger,” he wrote, and stopped, watching as the funnel continued through the trees only to dissipate over a nearby tobacco field.
    Franklin didn’t call what he saw a “tornado.” It isn’t in fact clear when that word was first used. The consensus seems to be that it was most likely a play on
tornar,
a Spanish word that means “to turn.” Some people called it a twister, and L. Frank Baum wrote that it was a “cyclone” that carried Dorothy and Toto off from Kansas to the great land of Oz, but by then people knew enough about the word “tornado” to fear it. In the late 1800s the U.S. government went so far as to ban the word “tornado” from its internal weather forecasts, distributed mostly within the military, to avoid inciting panic. The ban wasn’t lifted until the late 1930s, but even after that the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which was in charge of forecasts at that time, still largely refrained from using the word.
    It wasn’t until 1952 that the government began publicly issuing tornado watches and warnings—though they were widely derided as inaccurate. While people spoke of major storms that had hit in the past, it was only in the 1950s that official scientific records began to be kept of tornadoes—where they had hit, how many people had died, and the extent of the damage. But the records were inconsistent because there was no standard and generally no understanding of how to truly measure the impact of a tornado.
    In 1954 Bluestein’s home was hit by a hurricane with winds so strong they tore the tiles off the roof. He and his parents cowered inside, afraid the winds might tear their home completely apart. Between this storm and the tornado that had hit the year before, Bluestein became obsessed with the atmosphere around him, though there was little information in his secondary-school textbooks about the science of weather. It was too obscure.
    When the time came to think of college, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a doctorate degree in meteorology, focusing his studies on tropical weather and severe storms. In his last year of graduate school in 1976, Bluestein met Edwin Kessler, an MIT graduate who had moved to Oklahoma to head up the National Severe Storms Lab. Kessler suggested that he come to Oklahoma to study the violent weather, but Bluestein’s image of Oklahoma was of a vast dust bowl, something that did not appeal to him whatsoever. Still, he could not resist the lure of the storms, and that summer after graduation, he moved to Norman. Over the years, as he liked to joke, Oklahoma had become something of a paradise to him: a weather junkie in the land of tornadoes.
    Starting in the 1970s, thousands of meteorologists moved to Oklahoma to be close to the severe weather. The meteorology school at OU became the largest program in the country—with more than five hundred students enrolled and hundreds more turned away every year simply because there was no room for them. Those who didn’t get in sometimes came to Oklahoma anyway, and they studied Mother Nature on their own, packing the roads alongside other meteorologists from all over the country who came to study Oklahoma’s legendary storms. A running joke in Oklahoma when I was growing up was that during the spring you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a weather scientist. They were everywhere.
    Howard Bluestein hit the open road almost as soon as he arrived. It wasn’t long before he experienced his first tornado, and even now he remembers it in specific detail. It was May 20, 1977, when he and a group of students chased a giant tornado that hit the ground in Tipton, a tiny town in the southwest near the Texas border. Driving down a narrow country road, he stopped the car when he saw a silhouette of a