Many peoples’ day-jobs have stresses and challenges. Reed Timmer’s day-job takes him into the eye of a tornado.
“It’s important to follow your passion,” Timmer said. “Mine is weather.”
But he is no meteorologist.
Timmer, a storm chaser who has appeared on Discovery Channel’s original show “Storm Chasers,” made a presentation at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center Tuesday night.
He spent two hours describing his efforts to venture as close as possible toward the eye of a tornado. His goal is to study a tornado’s properties close to the ground in an effort to understand how to avoid its damages in populated areas. While he started storm chasing in a compact car during his college days, his team now has much more sophisticated instruments at their disposal.
Over the past several years, Timmer has developed two storm-chasing vehicles — dramatically named Dominator I and Dominator II (there is currently a Dominator III being constructed in Michigan).
These armored beasts are the remains of Chevy Tahoes plated with 16-gauge steel armor. They are built as close to the ground as possible.
“It’s the opposite of an airplane wing, meant to cancel out lift,” Timmer said.
The Dominator II has hydraulics that can lower it to the ground during a tornado, and four-inch hydraulic spikes that can shoot into the ground to anchor it down — they can even penetrate concrete and asphalt. He told the audience he never informed his auto-insurance company that he transformed his vehicle into a storm-chasing vehicle.
“I would drive it up to 7-11, it was my personal vehicle,” Timmer said with a smile.
In addition to the vehicle, Timmer’s team can make use of rockets, small remote-controlled helicopters, and parachutes shot out of air cannons to get sensors into a tornado. All of his equipment is designed to withstand a tornado’s titanic power.
His current project is studying “suction vortices.” They are smaller tornado funnels that are precipitated quickly on the ground from the parent tornado, and cause severe damage due to their focused wind energy. He estimates that winds can reach 500 to 600 mph easily in a suction vortex and can carry debris over 50 miles from the storm.
“That’s why we’ll oftentimes see a house that is destroyed, standing next to a house that is completely intact,” Timmer said.
Timmer showed several videos of his early days as a storm chaser, all the way to a video taken during last year’s season of “Storm Chasers.” He said tornado science has come a long way in the past few years, and people are beginning to understand how serious a tornado can be. Several large tornados, F4 and F5 on the Fujita scale, have plowed through populated areas with little to no fatalities. He said this is due to better warning systems and better understandings.
“People are taking tornadoes more seriously than ever,” he said.
During a chase, however, if any storm chaser encounters a person with injuries or who needs help, he said “their chase is over.”
“Every storm chaser needs to have some level of first aid training,” he said.
His team enjoys chasing storms in unpopulated areas, where no damage to cities can be done. During a tornado chase in a city, their job is limited to reporting the tornadoes to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) and warning local authorities.
But, if they are chasing the funnels in a rural area — caution is thrown to the wind, no pun intended. It seems to be Timmer’s comfort zone.
“I’m more afraid of public speaking events than any tornado, honestly,” Timmer said with a smile.
Storm chaser ‘blows away’ audience
