May 29, 2011
I have said time and again I don’t want to be on TV. Monday over the lunch hour I received an interesting email from a news producer in D.C. Apparently NRK (The Norwegian Broadcasting Company) wanted to do a story about Joplin and Storm Chasers and wanted to know if I could meet them in Joplin for an interview.
Obviously I was not chasing Joplin so I was not the best person for the task. In addition I knew someone who was so I called them and asked if they would do it… “No I have 40 different people wanting to do interviews”. So I called another friend who did not have the time. Not wanting to throw away a lead I decided to offer to meet them so long as they “Covered my expenses” for the day figuring that would be the end of it. Well in the end it was not!
After exchanging some emails we decided I would pick them up at Wichita the next morning and take them chasing on a “High Risk” day, amazing how all that came together over about 45min. I ran home grabbed my gear and headed for ICT.
Anders (the reporter), Leiff (the camera man) and I left ICT at around 11:30 am with a target of Enid. I was a little worried about early initiation and thought if we played north we could avoid the hoards of chasers on OKC. Turns out I was right on both and not in a good way. I introduced them to Freddies in Enid which I think they both liked (both spoke very good English) however stalling there getting “ready” would cost us a day of chasing.
Storms were firing but we just could not catch up all day long. I did not want to punch the core with them in the car so we did a lot of structure shots.
I have to hand it to the Discovery people… taking time to get “mic’ed up” and explaining every thing you do takes a lot of work. Having this massive camera in my face all day was creepy. I tried to be as general as possible because as Lieff told me they don’t even have much wind in Sweden (Where he was from) so I doubted they had much use for cape and winds aloft. Looking at the pretty SPC graphics, MD’s, watches and warnings told you enough about what was about to happen anyway. We spent a lot of time talking about chasing, weather and culture. I would have done just about anything to get 3 more hours before storms fired but you chase the storms you got, not the ones you want.
Needless to say we had a fun day of swapping stories and these guys were well traveled. They had covered both the Tsunami’s in Japan and Haiti and had me thinking about growing up I wanted to be a TV Cameraman and tour the globe.
We ended up attempting to chase the El Reno to Guthrie storm but as I said watching the radar I was not getting into that thing we ended up passing thru the west side of Guthrie where it tracked a few min after the fact, the damage was interesting because all the trees were laying the same way so I questioned if there was a Tornado there or not. Steve Polley had caught back up with us and we stopped at I-35 to swap stories. The guys got some shots of Adam, Jon, Steve and Fred and they took off for Wichita however as is in news the NRK guys needed “the rest of the story”.
Facebook was a buzz with the distruction down by OKC and although I don’t like seeing things destroyed I took them down there. After fighting around the roadblocks we found a horrible sight. A home completely destroyed.
I could not bring myself up to walking up to the owners and stood in the street a while, Mike Ratliff drove up and we exchanged words about a friend of his who lost their home. I don’t like this one bit… but it happens. After a while I made my way up to the family. Some strong people. Blessed they had their lives and “ok” with losing the home. More than likely the attitude you would find me with if this ever happened to me. Some things you can control, others you can’t. You move on. After a while they invited us to the back side of their property to see something I never thought I would ever see in person.
This WAS a 4 Door F-150 pickup, there were parts of it everywhere leading up to the completely crushed shell in that tree. I was at a loss for words. They said the truck’s “home” was about a mile away and it ended up here (according to Mike it belonged to the neighbor of his friend)
This was an eye opening experience for me… until now I had NEVER seen destruction like it first hand. Sure broken trees, awnings off of gas stations, roofs off houses but never a clean foundation. The grass, the weeds, everything was flat. Parts of everything everywhere.
After wrapping up I took them back to Tulsa and found a room for the night. I’m still at a loss for words over that devastation. One thing I can say is those guys were the most professional news people I have ever met. No need to add drama to the event they were VERY good at what they do. Given the opportunity to do something like that again I would love to do it… hopefully with a little more time to get the dialog. Above is the story they did on Søndagsrevyen (The Sunday Review) about storm chasers (or me at least) it was great to be a part of it and I hope I represented our “group” well.