The Inevitable Has Happened

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If you've ever watched the Weather Channel during severe weather coverage, or even local news coverage from "tornado alley," you've seen the storm chasers going all over the place. These are people "out in the field" who report back to stations about weather as it's actually happening. Inevitably, there's going to be disaster. The inevitable happened today. Three storm chasers were killed in a head-on collision near Spur, Texas. According to local news reports, one of the storm chaser cars (which was displayed on the news article as having a Weather Channel logo on the side of the car) ran a stop sign. A storm chaser on Twitter said that the storm chaser had just signed off live TV on the Weather Channel when the accident happened (or else it would've been broadcast on national TV). Storm chasers do a tremendous service, and I certainly appreciate it. They provide "eyesight proof" of what is showing up on the radar, which helps improve the quality of radar detection of severe storms and save countless lives (although, if you look at the fatality count of the 2011 "Super Outbreak" compared to the 1974 "Super Outbreak" [the latter generally credited with the development of things like doppler radar and the Fujita scale], there were 13 more fatalities). But, if you've ever watched their videos on You Tube or local TV you've seen that they drive like Kyle Busch trying to take out half of the field in a NASCAR race. I'm genuinely surprised that these are the first storm chaser deaths since 2013. Those three fatalities were different, too: it wasn't a car wreck; rather, the tornado made a sudden, dramatic shift in direction, and the storm chasers' "safe" location was instantaneously changed to ground zero for the twister. I am somewhat of a weather enthusiast: anytime there's severe weather I'm online, watching local news coverage from the regions affected. But there's no way I'd go out there and chase. The dangers from the tornado, the lightning, the hail, and the possibilities of flash flooding are just too much to make it something I'd want to do. Sadly, we have to now add to that the dangers of automobile accidents caused by people trying to get to the storm. My condolences to the family and friends of the storm chasers.