If you’ve always wondered watching those videos of people chasing storms how they manage to do it and come out alive there is a sad answer today:
They don’t always.
Tim and Paul Samaras and Carl Young, who had been on the former Discovery Channel show “Storm Chasers,” are dead.
Three storm chasers were among the nine people killed in powerful storms that struck Oklahoma on Friday night, relatives told CNN on Sunday.
Tim Samaras, 55, his son Paul Samaras, 24, and Carl Young, 45, died while chasing a tornado in El Reno, relatives said.
“Thank you to everyone for the condolences. It truly is sad that we lost my great brother Tim and his great son, Paul,” Jim Samaras wrote in a statement posted on his brother’s Facebook page.“Our hearts also go out to the Carl Young family as well as they are feeling the same feelings we are today. They all unfortunately passed away but doing what they loved,” he wrote.
Tim Samaras founded TWISTEX, the Tactical Weather Instrumented Sampling in Tornadoes Experiment, to help learn more about tornadoes and increase lead time for warnings, according to the official website.
Two children were also among the dead from Friday night’s storms. Scores of people were injured.
Tim and Paul Samaras and Carl Young were known to viewers of the former Discovery Channel show “Storm Chasers.”
“We are deeply saddened by the loss of Carl Young, Tim Samaras and his son. Our thoughts and prayers go out to their families,” the network said in a statement.
Part of a “Storm Chasers” segment from 2009:
Tim Samaras, one of the world’s best-known storm chasers, died in Friday’s El Reno, Oklahoma tornado along with his son, according to a statement from Samaras’s brother.
“They all unfortunately passed away but doing what they LOVED,” Jim Samaras, Tim’s brother, wrote on Facebook, saying that storm chaser Carl Young was also killed. “I look at it that he is in the ‘big tornado in the sky.'”
Tim Samaras, who was 55, spent the past 20 years zigzagging across the Plains, predicting where tornados would develop and placing probes he designed in the twister’s path in to measure data from inside the cyclone. (Read National Geographic’s last interview with Tim Samaras.)
“Data from the probes helps us understand tornado dynamics and how they form,” he told National Geographic. “With that piece of the puzzle we can make more precise forecasts and ultimately give people earlier warnings.”
Samaras’ interest in tornados began when he was 6, after seeing the movie The Wizard of Oz. For the past 20 years, he spent May and June traveling through Tornado Alley, an area which has the highest frequency of tornados in the world.
Samaras’s team used probes that Samaras designed to measure the pressure drops within the tornados themselves, but The results were often frustrating. Tornados developed from only two out of every ten storms the team tracked and the probes were useful in only some of those tornados.
But when the probes did work, they provided information to help researchers analyze how and when tornados form
Tim Samaras talks about the mystery of tornadoes and what needs to be solved:
A Tim Samaras interview on CNN:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72G92AVVa48
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.