The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (10 page)

It took him awhile, but England finally began to loosen up. While he’d initially tried to dial back his strange sense of humor to sound less like the country boy he was, he now let it all out, peppering his weather reports with the folksy language and homespun colloquialisms of his childhood. There were “good Lords” and “great God almightys” and “gosh darns.” “Jiminy Christmas!” he’d shout when he saw something interesting on the radar. Storms were “big uglies,” “suckers,” and “rascals.” “Hide the women and children! Put the mule in the barn!” he’d say on cold days. He was speaking a language that was distinctly Oklahoman, and listeners loved it. Soon he got the call he had been dreaming about. KWTV was interested in hiring him as its chief meteorologist. On October 16, 1972, England delivered his first television forecast, scratching out the weather patterns on a chalkboard map of Oklahoma. It was primitive stuff, considering what was to come, but he was thrilled.

 • • • 

KWTV had hired him because of his popularity on the radio and obvious skill at forecasting the weather. But when Gary England got on air, some at the station were appalled at how untelevision he actually was. He didn’t have the slick look or polished demeanor of a broadcaster. Though he dressed the part, in brand-new sport jackets and suits, England still looked and sounded a little like that boy from the farm, with his deep twang, cowboy boots, and quirky sense of humor. Following Riggins’s advice, he continued to inject personality into his weather reports. During one Friday-night forecast, he coined his most famous phrase of all, one that he’d use for decades: “Jump back! Throw me down, Loretta! It’s Friday night in the big town,” he’d yell, sometimes doing a little dance. No one knew who Loretta was—not even England. He’d just made it up. But as charismatic and jokey as he was on calm days, his playful banter vanished in an instant when dangerous weather arrived. He was deadly serious about storms.

Still, some of his managers could not get past how he talked and looked, and a consultant told the station that it should get rid of him as soon as possible. But KWTV’s ratings shot through the roof. Viewers loved him, a fact that saved his job on more than one occasion. He used his popularity and role in the station’s surging ratings to do what had made him want to be on television in the first place: to give people the kind of warning he’d never had about dangerous storms. He felt it wasn’t enough to depend on data from the National Weather Service. If KWTV wanted to be serious about the weather, it would have to approach it as scientists would, and for that it needed a real radar. The news director at the time thought he was nuts, but England went over him and appealed to the station’s owner, John Griffin, who had an interest not only in the weather (he was an amateur pilot) but also in keeping the station a step ahead in terms of technology. To everyone’s surprise, Griffin signed off on the purchase of a brand-new Enterprise radar—the same kind that government meteorologists were using.

England was thrilled, but he knew the radar on its own wouldn’t be enough. And so, ahead of the spring storm season, he began assembling a team of ham-radio operators across the state that he could count on as his eyes and ears. At the same time, to the great skepticism of the news department, he begged the assignment desk to send reporters and cameramen into the field where he thought storms might erupt. When they refused, he bribed some of the staff to work on their days off, promising he’d buy them six-packs of beer. They were his early army of storm chasers, and along with the radar, the collective effort gave England one of his first major breakthroughs at KWTV. In May 1973 he cut into programming when the radar suggested a tornado was developing near Union City, west of Oklahoma City. His chasers confirmed the funnel, and he showed his viewers a radar image of what was happening—one of the first times a radar image of a tornado, as crude as it was, was shown on television. He realized only after the fact that he’d issued a tornado warning before the National Weather Service, and it marked the beginning of a tumultuous relationship with government meteorologists and others in the business who considered him brash and reckless for not following the traditional rules of forecasting.

In some ways it was in England’s blood to push the limits. Oklahoma, after all, had famously been settled by the “Sooners,” people who had sneaked onto what was formerly Indian territory to stake their claims on property well before the kickoff of the land run of 1889 that settled the state. People had frowned on them—on their failure to follow the rules. But later they celebrated the Sooners’ spirit, claiming the Sooner as an embodiment of Oklahoman ingenuity. Members of the meteorological community didn’t like people who broke the rules. They didn’t understand England or his vision of how storms should be covered on television and how the public should be warned.

Back then England heard people within the weather community complain that he was an outlaw, but he simply didn’t care. Weren’t they all in the business of trying to save lives? It only made him want to do more. As weather technology improved, he begged the station to invest more money in his operation—and usually he got it. In 1977 KWTV became the proud owner of a weather-satellite machine that offered the clearest images of the clouds and storm fronts over Oklahoma the public had ever seen. Later that year it became the first station in Oklahoma to have a color radar, an incredible development for viewers, who now could more graphically see the violence of the storms.

 • • • 

That radar had barely been unpacked and installed when England began to dream about an even newer piece of technology. It would be his biggest ask of all—and his riskiest. Years earlier the National Severe Storms Lab had captured a full scan of the Union City tornado with a Doppler radar. Now, England read, the lab was studying whether Doppler radars could be used to add minutes to the warning times before storms hit. Preliminary tests suggested that the Doppler could add at least twenty minutes’ advance notice of a storm because of its ability to measure rotation in the clouds beyond where the human eye could see. If the technology were proven, it would be an almost unbelievable step forward. At the time, the top-of-the-line radar typically gave about three or four minutes’ warning. Twenty minutes seemed like an eternity by comparison—if it actually worked.

England was thrilled by the concept, but having worked in college with meteorologists whose studies were funded by federal grants, he worried that the government would take forever to unveil its officially sanctioned Doppler. He didn’t want to wait. He called Neil Braswell, an engineer at Enterprise Radar, the Alabama firm that had built KWTV’s last two radars, and asked him if he could build a Doppler—and, if so, how much it would it cost. There was long pause on the other end of the line. Doppler radar technology was so new that few people had actually built one—much less for a television station. Even the government wasn’t entirely sure it would offer the breakthrough in warning times that people wanted. Braswell told England he would get back to him.

England heard nothing for several months, then finally, on a crisp day in the fall of 1978, he got the call. Braswell told him he could build a Doppler for the station, but it would take at least two years. The preliminary price: at least $250,000—more than KWTV had spent on all of the weather equipment England had requested so far. It was a major investment for technology that had not really been tested and might not work, but England had a hunch the Doppler would change forecasting forever. Still, he was nervous. How would he ever persuade the station to go for it? In a series of meetings with Griffin over the following weeks, he made the case—arguing that the radar could save lives in a way no other technology had before. It could change the very nature of weather forecasting, and KWTV had the chance to be on the front lines, to make history.

In their final meeting England nervously sat at the end of a long conference table, wondering if he’d gone too far. He was in the room with Griffin and several other station executives, who thought he was crazy. The news director, one of several he had worked under at this point, made it clear he wanted him out and was not so secretly shopping around for a replacement. In the meeting Griffin suddenly looked up and gave England a stare that made the weatherman wonder if he was about to lose his job. “We have spent large sums of money in your area,” Griffin said. “Not once have you misled me on what this television station needed. We’re going to buy this Doppler radar.” As the meeting ended, England sat there stunned, unable to move as everyone else filed out.
This radar had better work,
he thought.

And it did—though it took longer to build than Braswell had anticipated. Three years later, in May 1981, England became the first person in history to use a Doppler radar to warn the public about a coming storm. Getting there was a bumpy ride. No one had ever used a Doppler in real time before, and when England finally sat down and turned on the radar he had spent years dreaming about, the monitor produced an image of storm clouds over Oklahoma that, to him, looked like a giant mess of scrambled eggs. He had no idea what any of it meant—and no one to ask. He was the first person to use the radar in this way, and he would simply have to learn on his own. He barely had time to decipher the radar’s output before the first dangerous storms took aim at Oklahoma City. Again he angered the National Weather Service when he issued a slew of tornado warnings before they did—but now he was working with better technology. As he’d suspected, many Weather Service offices wouldn’t get Doppler technology until years later. In fact, the full National Weather Service Doppler network, which it called NEXRAD (for Next-Generation Radar), didn’t come online until the early 1990s.

England’s use of the Doppler radar was big news both inside and outside Oklahoma. National reporters from the
Washington Post
and
Wall Street Journal
descended on the station, curious about the renegade weatherman who had come to use a Doppler radar to publicly forecast tornadoes before anyone else. “I absolutely love this new equipment,” England gushed to the
Post.
“If it had hair, I’d marry it.”

 • • • 

But the radar was only one step: Now he planned to take storm coverage to new heights. In 1981, the year he got his Doppler, England persuaded KWTV to send the station’s helicopter,
Ranger 9,
out toward a storm in western Oklahoma. Suddenly a tornado dropped to the ground and the station went to live video from the helicopter. It was not only the first time a helicopter had been used to chase a tornado but also the first time live video of a tornado had been captured by a camera mounted on a helicopter. But before anyone knew what was happening, the helicopter was sucked into the inflow of the storm. If viewers at home were getting a closer and closer look at the tornado, it was because the helicopter was being dragged toward the funnel. Suddenly, as England and his colleagues watched, the helicopter appeared to break free of the storm, but as it did, the live video went black. England worried the helicopter might have crashed, but seconds later the pilot radioed in: The crew was shaken up but fine.

Exhilarated, England kept dreaming of different ways to cover the storms and warn the public—and as he did, he continued to break new ground. In March 1982, now more savvy with the Doppler (which the station had christened its Doppler StormScan), England spotted rotation in two separate storms about 60 miles south of Oklahoma City. He cut into programming and issued tornado warnings for both—showing viewers the Doppler radar image of the storms and their circulations. It was another first. Viewers had never before seen live Doppler images of a tornado as it was forming, much less of two. England meticulously tracked their movement, talking until his voice was rough and hoarse, urging viewers, “Take your tornado precautions.” One of the tornadoes eventually hit a tiny town called Ada, wiping out fifty-one mobile homes and killing one person. But the death toll could have been much higher. Thanks to his Doppler data, England had warned Ada residents an hour before the storm actually hit that it was potentially headed their way. The station’s investment in the Doppler was paying off in ways that England had only dreamed of.

At the same time technology was beginning to change the industry. The computer revolution helped to introduce better on-air graphics and offered access to a slew of new forecast data. Suddenly England had access to real-time weather information and forecasts through the National Weather Service. KWTV invested in two new radars: an updated Doppler that offered even more specific, closer-range images and a machine called the LiveLine 5 that allowed England to create detailed satellite weather maps of the storms over Oklahoma and put them in motion so he could play them on air for viewers. The radar also helped him develop a more detailed five-day forecast—which was highly unusual back then. The days of standing in front of a weather map with chalk seemed like ancient history. Now England stood in front of a green screen, giving him the ability to walk right into an image projecting radar or satellite data so that he could point out where storms were likely to form. He was not just a forecaster; he was a teacher, and suddenly Oklahomans who had always had some awareness of the sky around them became fluent in the scientific terms of weather—learning about mesocyclones and barometric pressures. At last they were given the tools to understand how it actually worked.

 • • • 

By then England was on his way to becoming an Oklahoma legend. He wrote a book,
Those Terrible Twisters,
and traveled the state to share stories with rapt, standing-room-only audiences about the wild weather and how they could protect themselves from it. He marched in parades. He signed autographs at the grocery store. He even rode a bull at a rodeo to promote the station and its weather coverage—not that he needed to. Everybody knew the name “Gary England” by that point. After initially dismissing his brand of forecasting as over-the-top, other stations scrambled to catch up to KWTV in the ratings, both with technology and staff. In the late 1980s Channel 4 got its own Doppler radar—the first color Doppler radar in the United States. And KOCO brought in a big name: Wayne Shattuck, a longtime meteorologist who had worked in Miami and Dallas and had once been rumored to be in the running for the weatherman spot on
Good Morning America.
The local weather wars among the stations were about to begin in earnest.