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

vortex crossing the road directly in front of them. Tall and slender like an elephant’s trunk, it looked like none of the photographs he’d ever seen. He began to photograph it, the first of many pictures he would take of the thousands of tornadoes he would see in his career.
    The excitement of seeing something he had been captivated by for so many years sent adrenaline coursing through his veins, but afterward Bluestein felt guilty. Driving up the road, he found a house missing its roof and scores of power lines that had been ripped apart and thrown to the ground. It was minor damage compared with the things he would see later in life, but he suddenly felt a sickening feeling. How could he have been so excited to see a storm that might have killed someone? It was a tension that everyone who follows storms for a living will at some point experience: You want the storms to be interesting, and when you are chasing one, you have that feeling of anticipation, that excitement and hope that it will develop and produce the tornado you so desperately want to see and study. But that desire often competes with the guilt of knowing how truly terrible storms will ruin people’s lives. Over the years, Bluestein had to remind himself and his students, who went through the same emotions, that they were doing research that would contribute to saving people’s lives, that they were not complicit in the devastation, though they were its witnesses.
    Back in the 1970s almost nothing was known about what was happening inside a tornado. Radar technology offered only so much insight. Bluestein knew that the secret to understanding tornadoes was to somehow get inside them—to measure the winds and gather data on their structure so as to gauge what was happening inside the storms at the moment when they produced a funnel. People had dreamed up ways of doing this before, but none had come to fruition. In the 1970s a scientist offered to drive an armored tank into the path of a tornado, but it was dismissed as a crazy idea—though storm chasers almost thirty years later would eventually do just that. In 1979 Bluestein met Al Bedard and Carl Ramzy, two scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and together they came up with the idea of racing ahead of a tornado and deploying a device in its path that would be strong enough to withstand the winds and sophisticated enough to provide actual data about what was going on inside the storm. At a cocktail party in the summer of 1980, the trio, slightly inebriated, came up with the name of their four-hundred-pound, barrel-shaped device: the Totable Tornado Observatory, or TOTO, named after Dorothy’s dog in
The Wizard of Oz.
    The following spring Bluestein and his colleagues tried to put TOTO in front of a tornado, but almost every time, as if it knew what they were up to, the tornado shifted course or simply lifted up and disappeared back into the sky. As the men struggled to get the massive machine loaded back into their truck, lighting often struck around them, exposing them to another danger: The device was basically a lightning rod in the middle of storms. In 1982 Bluestein and his team began to take risks they’d never thought they would in a desperate effort to intercept a tornado. Near Altus, Oklahoma, they drove directly into a storm. Their caravan of cars was pelted with gigantic hailstones and shaken by winds that seemed likely to blow them off the road at any moment. They were putting their lives at risk, Bluestein realized, but the allure of scientific discovery was too great to resist. They raced forward, trying to catch the tornado, but suddenly realized they were too close. The twister crossed the road just to their right, about one hundred yards from the front of their truck. This was closer than Bluestein had ever been before. Power lines fell across the road, shattering the windshield of their van. As they watched in horror, the tornado uprooted trees and