I finally caught my first rope tornado, and first up close and personal tornado–I was on one a

I finally caught my first rope tornado, and first up close and personal tornado–I was on one a couple years back but quite far away and it’s hard to sum up my experience in a tidy way. The tornado itself was beautiful beyond what I hoped even if the funnel wasn’t clearly visible all the way to where it was laying waste to the world below. That happens. It was everything that came after the tornado, and the technical problems I created for myself during that don’t have me entirely satisfied. I’ve been on hundreds of storms. Dozens of tornado warned, and still this has eluded me for years now. but you never quite think past your goal do you?It happened just a few kilometers from my house and it lasted only a few minutes. no humans or animals were hurt even though it barreled right through a horse boarding farm. But I didn’t know all that when I drove up (the first on scene) to this 29 foot destroyed holiday trailer. All I knew right then is someone could be hurt or killed, something I suppose I knew logically but suddenly knew in a tangible way emotionally. I got out and called for anyone and waited long minutes listening. I scanned the area as best I could for people and decided the trailer was empty at the time it got hit and doubled back the ¼ kilometer to the nearest farm. I was literally thumping with adrenaline by that point. walking up to their door the trees were broke and the planters were strewn about but the house looked intact and no one answered my banging on the door. I went out back and found them trying to seal off the horse pens, which the tornado ripped right through, flipping a shed, ripping a topper off a pickup and sucking the water straight up from a trough. but everyone was okay. the storm was now too far off to continue the chase so I kept updating twitter. Then the media frenzy started with reporters from all the major outlets reaching out for the video I made. Then a phone interview I don’t even remember doing. Then the CBC came out and I did an interview about it and though the reporter was good people I still think the story got missed. the story wasn’t the trailer as much as how quickly a storm like this can cycle together, defying radar, defying all the things we look for for tornados and just explode in seconds. the lady on the farm watched from her kitchen window. she had no warning. The alerts didn’t go out till after I’d already posted the trailer photos. Up till then it’s a funnel cloud warning which is a very different beast. some 100,000 twitter views/impressions of the video later, and a couple days of people trying to find me through even my parents phone numbers I was kind of over the entire thing. When I got back home I wasn’t even sure I had a single photo in focus. I made a tactical error trying to setup a time-lapse (which btw would have been utterly epic) but then got hailed into moving. Grabbing the camera off the tripod without switching back to auto focus means very few frames are actually sharp. it’s weird to wait and work and hope for something and it all comes so unexpectedly and ends so quickly you’re mostly left with all the ways you weren’t prepared. you weren’t prepared for the toilet bolted to the trailer bed and the rest of the trailer strewn about. or the idea people could have been in it. you weren’t prepared for the non stop twitter onslaught both by the media and by every asshole with an opinion about how you handled yourself. you weren’t prepared for the back ache for two days from the stress that followed the tornado, or the technical questions you had no way to answer till you were in the middle of it. you weren’t at all prepared to see it, experience it and store it inside yourself, safe, away from the news angles, the weather geek angles, the curiosity seekers. it got away from me and now the moment is less the moment and more a collection of things that came after and overshadowed the moment. I have to sort of try to set all that aside now and review what happened both technically from a weather perspective and from a gear/process perspective and I guess as much as I don’t want to a media perspective. Somehow it never connected in my head a tornado is a news story. I’ve taken a couple days off real storm chasing since it happened. Worked on some time lapses and just thought about things as much as I could. What could I have done better? Was my idea of safety the same thing as actual safety in this situation? and on and on. this is how we learn and grow and get better at things. We experience them in ways we can’t even begin to handle then we do it again and it’s a bit better, then again and over time we grow capable of managing the many things that make a situation unmanageable. In the end though, I did get the one picture I really love and I’m going to print it up this week, and print an extra and drop it by the farm for the folks whose worlds got turned inside out. Doesn’t count for much, I know but I still want to do it. ps. The twitter video: https://twitter.com/ruzz/status/1150500330137763841 -- source link

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