Oct

28

The greatest storm chaser, Tim Samaras devoted his life to unlocking the mysteries of extreme weather (his father placed an ad for used tv sets for him to fix). Then came the tornado of May 31.

The monster storm. 

"His mother had given up making him play little league baseball after she noticed that he would spend game time gazing not at the ball but instead at whatever in the sky interested him"

"And if it happens,  I die chasing the tornado), I'm going to go out collecting my data."

"The Oklahoma city mortuary director refused to be paid or his efforts. He was doing research, trying to save lives". "Winter (his son who didn't know who his father was until 28 years old ), pleaded to be allowed to stand outside to watch the tornado while the other kids clambered into the basement."

Perhaps Nassim will live and I will die chasing a 10% decline.

Note that the reason for unusual and premature deaths like that of Tim Samaras are usually from romance or getting in over the head about money. Tim was in a small Saturn car rather than the land rover because he only had 10,000 to spend on the rest of the year for all his gas and employees. The son died with him. 

Pitt T. Maner comments: 

A couple of more quotes from an excellent article by Brantley Hargrove in Dallas Observer News:

'Their deaths have forced the insular storm-chasing community to search its soul. None from their ranks had ever died in a tornado. And this wasn't some amateur yahoo with an iPhone. Samaras was the godfather of this pursuit. Now he and the compacted hull of his white Chevy Cobalt had become the glaring evidence of their own fallibility. If so great a man could not save himself, how could any?'

and 

"There's always been chasers who pushed the limits, got too close, and I've certainly done that a few times myself," Robinson says. "You'd think maybe it should have been somebody who did something reckless or careless. It shakes you up when you realize that someone with his experience can end up in that situation."

One of things Samaras loved about the study of tornadoes was that it remains a wide-open frontier. So many fundamental questions continue to go unanswered. How much can the pressure fall inside of a tornado? Why do some mesocyclones produce tornadoes while others do not?'


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