The air was jaundice-yellow under a sky like bruised flesh when Todd Thorn and his three vanloads of tornado-chasers lurched to a stop by the side of the road in the wheat fields of north Kansas one evening at the end of May.
Danielle Elvery of England was one of the first to pile out. She stooped and gathered up a hailstone the size of a yo-yo.
"It's almost there," Thorn said, scanning the smoking clouds. "It's going to be a huge tornado. It's going to be a monster."
This is high season in Tornado Alley, the swath of the Great Plains from Texas to North Dakota where heat, moisture and shearing winds create just the right brew for the whirling funnel storms that are one of nature's most terrifying spectacles. In late May, a swarm of twisters ravaged the region, one record-size tornado leaving a path of destruction 4km wide near the southeastern Nebraska town of Hallam.
With a tornado warning, most people in the Midwest head the other way or hunker down, as anyone who has seen The Wizard of Oz knows. But lately growing ranks of aficionados come barreling in, the vanguard of a booming mini-industry of storm-chasers whose passion translates into tourism dollars gratefully harvested by small-town motels and restaurants. Sometimes, too, they help sound the alarm and assist victims.
"More people are curious to see Mother Nature's wrath," said Mike Theiss, 26, a film archivist who founded Cyclone Tours with another career storm-chaser and film partner, Jim Leonard, in Miami last year. In the latest Midwest storms, they said they rescued a couple and their baby whose house was collapsed by a tornado in Jamestown, Kansas, north of here.
Since the success of the 1996 film Twister, about a dozen outfits with names like Cloud Nine, Silver Lining, Tempest, F5 Tornado Safari, Twister Sisters and Thorn's Storm Chasing Adventure Tours have sprung up to cater to those eager to get as close as reasonable -- and sometimes dangerously closer -- to a fearsome storm, paying thousands of dollars for the thrill. Thorn's latest group of 16 included some from Britain and one from Papua New Guinea.
`Like great sex'
"Seeing a tornadic storm is like great sex," said Charles A. Doswell III, senior research scientist for the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, and a 30-year storm-chaser affiliated with Tempest Tours. "You never get enough and it never lasts long enough."
So on many stormy evenings, the country roads slicing through the farmlands of the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and beyond are lined with vans sprouting electronic gear and the pickup trucks and cars of avid hobbyists and the idly curious, as well as police, fire and rescue vehicles. At times, there are so many cars that drivers carelessly staring at the sky can be a greater risk than the storms themselves.
"You get people who aren't paying full attention to the road," said Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, the leading tornado research center.
Groups like Thorn's, which rely on vans equipped with Doppler radar, global positioning systems and access to the Weather Channel, and those like Theiss' that stress experience and local knowledge to read the sky and forecast, as he said, "the old fashioned way -- the real way," generally approach tornadoes from their southeast side, away from the most violent spin, and try to stay out of reach of the fierce winds and flying debris. The companies say no fatalities have resulted, but storm-chasers have been struck by lightning and suffered other injuries.
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