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May 24, 2011 - 3:49PM

In Wake of Tornado, Official Says 1,500 Are Unaccounted For

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JOPLIN, Mo. — About 1,500 people are unaccounted for in this battered city, a Fire Department official said Tuesday, as rescue workers took advantage of a few hours of sunny weather to continue searching for survivors in buildings leveled by the country’s deadliest tornado in more than 60 years. At least 117 people have died.

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In TV Crew’s Hunt for Twisters, More Than They Bargained For

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JOPLIN, Mo. — The crew of “The Great Tornado Hunt,” a show about storm chasers on The Weather Channel, had been suffering through a calm spell for the project’s first two weeks.
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TimesCast | May 23, 2011

A Rush to Protect Patients, Then Bloody Chaos (May 24, 2011)

“Our worst fear was realized yesterday,” said Mike Bettes, a meteorologist for the Weather Channel who was in Joplin, Mo.
“We had chased Thursday, Friday, Saturday — it had been pretty quiet,” said Greg Forbes, the channel’s tornado forecasting expert, who was with the seven-member crew in the Kansas City area.
That changed on Sunday. The team was the first media crew on the scene in Joplin, arriving just 10 minutes after the tornado touched down.
“Our goal, our hope, is that we see a big beautiful tornado over a cornfield in Kansas,” said Mike Bettes, an on-air meteorologist who led the Weather Channel team. Instead, he said, “our worst fear was realized yesterday.”
They set up across the street from the hospital that took a direct hit from the twister, St. John’s Regional Medical Center.
“People were just walking around aimlessly” Mr. Bettes recalled. “People were in a state of panic. It was chaos.”
Storm chasing has long been an extreme hobby, and it has been spotlighted in recent years by the Internet, which allows semiprofessional chasers to share videos and even live-stream their trips.
These days, it is surprising when a tornado touches down without being captured by someone with a video recorder. Now, as “The Great Tornado Hunt” dramatically illustrates, the experience is being broadcast to television viewers nationwide.
Not only is there the Weather Channel project, which is on hiatus while Mr. Bettes and the crew file reports from Joplin, but there is also the Discovery Channel stalwart “Storm Chasers,” which is now gathering material for its fifth season.
The Weather Channel and Discovery are straddling a sensitive line between public service and entertainment, as is especially evident on days like Sunday. They want to educate people about storms, but certainly are not averse to exciting people about the weather — and keeping them watching for long periods of time.
“It’s TV, and oftentimes people want to be entertained when they watch television,” Mr. Bettes acknowledged. He and his crew kept broadcasting until midnight Sunday local time, then stayed the night at a hotel in Miami, Okla., 25 miles to the west. They were awake again at 3 a.m. and on the air at 5 a.m. They left their satellite truck parked outside the hospital overnight in case they were unable to get back to the spot Monday morning.
Mr. Bettes has been able to broadcast live thanks to technology originally used by NBC during the Iraq war, which allows a moving truck to lock onto a stable satellite uplink. The crew is scheduled to chase storms for two more weeks.
“We feel an obligation to get out and watch and warn,” Mr. Bettes said.
Even as the Weather Channel crew made the transition to breaking-news outlet, Discovery was broadcasting “The Sound and the Fury: Behind the Killer Tornados of 2011,” based on the “Storm Chasers” proximity to the twisters that leveled much of Tuscaloosa and its surroundings in April.
As it happens, the “Storm Chasers” crew was far from Joplin, a Discovery Channel spokesman, Joshua Weinberg said. The “Tornado Hunt” team had not started work when the Tuscaloosa tornadoes struck.
Clark Bunting, the president of the Discovery Channel, said that he had complete confidence in the judgment of the storm chasing crew members, but that he worried about imitators.
“My fear isn’t the pros,” he said. “It would be the guy who says, ‘Hey, honey, let’s hop into the SUV and see a tornado.’ ”
Storm chasers monitor severe weather to decide where to go. But predicting tornadoes is inexact, Dr. Forbes said.
Team members are looking to be about a mile away from a twister as it is forming, he said. If a tornado takes a turn toward them, “we are generally pretty good at reading the radar and can drive away from it,” he said.
“We usually position ourselves such that we have vehicles facing away and quickly drive away,” Dr. Forbes said. “If that wasn’t possible, we dive into a ditch.”
On Sunday night, the storm slowed the Weather Channel crew on its way to Joplin. If not, it might have arrived at the same time as the tornado.
“We decided to stop about 10 miles out of Joplin, and it passed nearly directly overhead,” Mr. Bettes said. “Not a tornado, but a nice thunderstorm.”
When crew members did arrive, they underwent a transition that happens to many longtime storm chasers — from appreciators of the natural beauty to witnesses of raw devastation.
On Monday morning, sitting in an SUV on West 26th Street in Joplin, Mr. Bettes seemed clearly still rattled by what he had seen the night before.
“It changes how you broadcast and what you broadcast,” he said as his eyes darted left and right, taking in the landscape that had been sliced open on both sides of the street.
He said he expected the experience to make him speak more seriously when broadcasting tornado warnings. “I think we all get a little numb from them,” he said.
But not today, and not tomorrow.
Brian Stelter reported from Joplin and Noam Cohen from New York.

Kathy G.

May 24, 2011 - 5:14PM