It’s a sticky Monday in June, and Steve Green is in a rented Chevy Impala, chasing his dream across the Texas border north into Oklahoma. For the past three hours, Green and his team have been tracking a series of explosive storms, any one of which might blow up into a raging tornado. He’s got 200 miles, and maybe three hours, to get to the action.
Tracking tornadoes isn’t an uncommon pastime in the Midwest, and right now Interstate 44 is dotted with hundreds of men and women who kiss their lives good-bye each spring, load into cars bristling with satellite and ham radio antennas, and spend April, May, and June pursuing big weather.
But while most storm chasers are happy to park a mile away and shoot video, that’s not nearly enough for Green. His dream is to drive his car straight in, hit the brakes, and park dead in the middle of a raging twister.
Exactly why Green wants to do this is difficult to pin down. He talks a good game about furthering science by - one day - delivering cameras and scientific equipment into the heart of a storm, but for now it’s just a stunt. This stunt might be important, or it might be absurd. It might make him rich and famous or break him entirely. Right now, the only thing certain about Green’s dream is that it’s unpopular.
To most storm chasers, driving up Mother Nature’s ass sounds a bit extreme - extremely disrespectful, extremely reckless, and extremely technically impossible. Green doesn’t care. He’s got his quest and he’s having fun. At a fit 45, this former stock car racer has the deep tan and sockless-sneaker ease of a country club golf pro (a job he also once held) and the back-slapping baritone of a used-car salesman - which, these days, he essentially is.
And the car he’s selling - he calls it the Tornado Attack Vehicle, or TA-1 - is a monster. From the outside, it looks like an overfunded science fair project, or the love child of a parade float and a Stealth bomber. But hidden beneath the garish red paint and racetrack flourishes lies the most dedicated storm-purposed engineering ever put into a land vehicle. There’s a 700-horsepower V-8 big-block engine that’s big enough for two cars. The windows and wheel well casings are shatterproof Lexan plastic. The plate steel side panels are better armored than some of the Hummers in Iraq. And at the touch of a button, the whole assembly can drop to its belly pan. "I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid," Green says, jerking his thumb out the window toward the car, which at the moment is strapped onto a speeding flatbed being hauled by an aging F350 Super Duty in the next lane. "When I drive it right into the eye of a tornado, drop it to the ground, and just sit there like it’s nothin’, the world will see that." Then Green smiles. "They’ll have to," he says. "It’ll be on Good Morning America."
Yesterday he came close. His amateur forecaster - an unemployed will-chase-for-food weather fanatic named Scott Currens - was tracking a storm that looked prime to blow. Green’s team sped southwest from Oklahoma City on I-44, crossing the state border toward Vernon, Texas. The skies ahead were black; news radio was talking golf ball-sized hail. It looked good.
Then Green got stuck on the wrong side of a grain train, with not one but two funnels on the other side. He sat helplessly at a railroad crossing as the twisters touched down. They tore up a few mesquite groves and disappeared, leaving only the fitful wind and rain of a blown opportunity.
Bad luck - but nothing new for Green this year. In the past 12 months he has lost his sponsors, his TV deal, and his meteorological crew. Now he’s almost out of time and money. Steve Green really needs a tornado.
While Green bombs up I-44 toward the storm that can redeem him, Currens slumps in the passenger seat in a T-shirt and shorts, one hand wrapped around the day’s fifth Slim Jim, his eyes locked on the rush of National Weather Service radar data streaming onto his laptop over the satellite radio antenna.
"Give me a supercell, baby," Green says, "or you’re fired."
It’s a joke that’s been repeated dozens of times over the past 1,500 miles, and Currens smiles obligingly before squaring the laptop to show the Doppler to his boss. The storm fronts are represented by concentric blobs of color atop a grid of state and county lines, like psych-edelic pork chops on a grill. "This is southern Oklahoma," he explains. "And look at this." He points his beef jerky stub to the right of the pork chops, where there’s a rogue blob.
Green glances at the screen. "Is this bitch gonna blow up for us?"
Currens squints at the blob, then straightens as if waking from a dream. "Um, I think it already is," he says. "Just drive fast. And north."
Outside, hammerhead oil wells, armadillo roadkill, and blond fields broil under the Oklahoma sun. Green takes in this bucolic goodness and smiles. The conditions are perfect for the most violent and elusive weather phenomenon on the planet.
Green is no scientist, but he understands weather enough to know that the sun will heat the atmosphere over those blond fields and that air will start to rise, forming a cap of dry, cool air a half-mile above. By late afternoon, a chimney of moist, warm air might even break through the cool cap into the freezing upper troposphere, as high as 50,000 feet, to spew out rain and hail like a giant vapor volcano.
That, generally speaking, would be a storm - the dark red center of the pork chops on Currens’ laptop screen.
Meanwhile, a few thousand feet overhead, tropical air from the south collides with a cool, dry wind from the east-flowing jet stream, as it does each spring above the Midwest. The intersection of these X and Y winds is a region of great instability. And when that intersection meets that rising chimney of air, the whole mass might twist and sheer into something else entirely - something that feeds off itself, something with architecture, something beautiful and terrible.
This, generally speaking, would be a tornado, and if the prospect of finding one evokes a spiritual awe among aficionados, it’s because they are awesome. Tornadoes are as fickle as orchids but pack the punch of a bomb. Their destructive strength is described by the Fujita scale: An F-0 (40 to 72 mph) can break off tree branches. An F-3 (158 to 206 mph) pulls oaks out by their roots. An F-5 (261 to 318 mph) can atomize whole towns and wad boxcars into metal Kleenex.
Until World War II, scientists considered tornadoes unpredictable acts of God, an otherworldly surprise to which the only sensible reaction was a prayer and a sprint. But with the advent of modern weather forecasting in the 1950s, a small fraternity of storm geeks started chasing after them. The pastime was fueled first by Doppler radar in the ’60s, which made storm-tracking possible, and then by newly accurate 3-D computational models in the ’70s. By the ’80s, an energetic chaser could count on seeing a few tornadoes each spring; ham radio, the Internet, and cell phones transformed data-swapping into conversation and turned an eccentric hobby into an intimate community. For storm chasers, these were the golden years.
And then in 1996 came the movie Twister. Suddenly everyone was watching a feature-length advertisement for storm-chasing, complete with Hollywood narrative and special effects. And suddenly, it seemed, everyone wanted to run after funnel clouds.
By the late ’90s, an accurately predicted storm could transform a lonesome dirt farm road into a parking lot, with veteran chasers jockeying with local kids, thrill-seekers, and tour vans for a decent roadside view. This was no longer a close-knit club with its own code of conduct - it was crowd control in the midst of a natural disaster. An Internet rumor about new federal storm-chasing laws made the rounds in 2004, starting a panic. The chat rooms caught fire: The golden years were gone. The Twister newbies had ruined it all.
And no newbie attracted more negative attention than the brash stock car racer prowling the scene with a shiny red monster truck, crowing about "sticking it to Mother Nature."
Green was sitting high in the grandstands of a rodeo in 1994 when he saw the storm that changed his life. It was in the distance, a menace squatting along the curve of the Oklahoma earth, but it was getting closer. And he wondered, what would he do if it got too close? "I looked down at the parking lot," Green remembers, "and started thinking about what I’ve survived in cars." Green had throttled vehicles to tornado-strength speeds before. He’d crashed a few, too, broken dozens of bones, been airlifted from a speedway in Pennsylvania. And he’d survived. And he started to think, was it possible to build a car that could survive a tornado?
At the time, his idea wasn’t about science, or even curiosity; it was about racing. As a 33-year-old race car driver, he needed something extra - an attention-grabbing gimmick, a bit of daredevil flash, anything - to attract some eyeballs and put him back in a driver’s seat. Running a car into a tornado might do the trick. "I figured we’d hit a few dingers out of the park and the sponsorships would come pouring in."
To do this, he needed a car that didn’t exist: a high-performance vehicle that could hunt down and survive a force of nature. It needed to stay on the ground in a high wind. And if it couldn’t, it had to be engineered to roll, fly, and even be crushed without killing the driver.
Working from his home base in Mooresville, North Carolina, Green put his salesmanship into overdrive. He got a loan from a wealthy contractor buddy and recruited Richard Broome, a champion drag boat and funny-car builder, as his crew chief. They started with a $300,000 Baja racing truck, and in the spring of 2001 they started to build.
They bought a transmission from Dr. Evil, a company that builds gear-boxes for 300-mph dragsters. They welded steel around a chromoly roll cage. The six-point harness and custom driver’s seat were made by Kris VanGilder, the guy who builds seats for Dale Earnhardt Jr. To keep the driver’s neck from snapping in a high-speed collision, they flanked the headrest with a spiderweb assembly called a D-Cel restraint.
They installed two quarter-inch-thick Lexan windshields at different angles, just like on competition stock cars. Flying debris that pierced the outer window would be deflected off the inner layer. Then Green’s team coated the windshield with DuPont mylar film. A single sheet can stop a .22. Green used three sheets.
To keep the car from being swept into the sky in heavy wind, they trimmed its bottom flank with an upturned steel brim - the same "Gurney lip" Nascar racers use on the back of their cars to turn speed into downthrust. But the best way to prevent his car from flying was to keep wind from getting underneath it in the first place.
This challenge attracted the attention of Pat Parker, chair of multibillion-dollar motion-control manufacturer Parker Hannifin. He sent one of his top systems engineers, Gregg DiGiacomo, to North Carolina to check it out. "I was half expecting to find a bunch of rednecks with cinder blocks in their pickup," he says. Instead, he discovered "a wicked truck, a beautiful piece of automotive engineering" - and a unique hydraulics problem.
"It wasn’t like going out and trying to make your lowrider bounce," recalls DiGiacomo, whose most recent project was the tilting 150-ton stage for the new Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas. "It had to drive like a truck, do a controlled drop, and then crank back up to 3,400 PSI. You have to move a huge reservoir of oil - fast."
With financial backing from Parker, DiGiacomo poured 100 hours and nearly $100,000 into the problem, emerging weeks later with a hydraulics system that could drop the chassis to the ground at the touch of a button, thus preventing strong winds from turning the TA-1 into a flying supercar.
Green had spent about $250,000 on the project. Sponsors had kicked in more than $100,000. He had his ultimate tornado truck. Now all he needed was a tornado.
The Midwest produced a bumper crop of tornadoes last year; 124 touched down in Kansas alone over a three-month period. Green set out to catch his with a camera crew and several meteorology students from the University of Oklahoma. He had also reached a tentative agreement to join forces with Joshua Wurman, a weather-science rock star who controlled the Doppler on Wheels, one of the hottest new pieces of storm research equipment in the field. On June 12, 2004, Green says, he finally got close enough to mount his first tornado attack. He caught an F-0, spawned by a storm that later pulverized several houses outside of Mulvane, Kansas.
On the video, you see a funnel maybe a half-mile away, stretching from a city-sized cloud to a farmer’s field. Green gives a double thumbs-up, buttons into his big red truck, and revs off toward his dream.
Later, he described trees lassoing overhead and debris whacking his door like "a million midgets with ball-peen hammers." He posted the video to his Web site, along with vague, catchall mission statements about humanitarian work, science, and "excellent marketing opportunities."
Just one problem: In the chaos of the storm, his crew failed to turn on the TA-1’s cameras. He was left with lo-res video shot from a handheld camera half a mile away. It was impossible to tell whether he’d entered the cyclone, but Green claimed absolute victory anyway. He was already talking up a reality TV show starring Steve Green and boasting of his journey into a tornado’s "eye" - a term generally associated only with hurricanes. Then he waited for the sponsorships to roll in.
But for hardcore storm chasers, it was as if Green was doing everything he could to push all their buttons. That spring someone put sugar in his gas tank, and his attempt to auction off a tornado ride in the TA-1 was sabotaged (an anonymous email warned eBay bidders that Green was ripping them off). Online hubs frequented by scientists, TV meteorologists, academics, and hobbyists erupted in a frenzy of abuse. Some even wished him physical harm ("I just hope I get zoomed-in video of that thing flying away like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz!").
What had Green done wrong? It wasn’t that he was lying. He did, in fact, have the ultimate tornado vehicle. And he was talking to Fox about a TV deal. He even had some scientific instruments on board, like an anemometer and a data recorder. But what he didn’t have were scientists: By that spring his deal with the weather rock star and the Doppler on Wheels had fallen through. The meteorology students left soon after. And without scientific legitimacy, Green’s dream seemed to benefit nobody but Green himself. To storm chasers, Green looked like a brash daredevil, hell-bent on crashing a storm-chase party to defile Mother Nature for money and fame.
"Basically, it was like Twister all over again," explains Reed Timmer, a 2004 member of the TA-1’s crew who, as an Oklahoma University meteorology PhD candidate, was admonished by department higher-ups not to associate the school’s good name with Green’s tornado-ramming project. "A lot of people are afraid that Steve’s just going to give storm-chasing a lot more publicity. They’re not worried about his death. They’re worried about how his death would affect their hobby."
When Wurman signed on to work with a competing tornado car - a Ford 450 Super Duty pickup covered in rough-welded steel and driven by a mohawked, skate helmet-wearing Imax cinematographer named Sean Casey - the same storm chasers who had pilloried the TA-1 now championed Casey’s mission and scientific cred. Never mind that Casey’s vehicle didn’t have half the engineering or safety features of the TA-1. It had all of the TA-1’s thunder, and Casey had a TV deal of his own.
So Green guns it. North to Ardmore. West on 70, northwest on 5, until the oncoming cars have their headlights on and their windshield wipers slapping. We’re deep in farm country now, with a grid of grain fields spreading to the horizon and the storm front filling the sky like a great gray battleship. "This bitch is looking good," Green yells, craning up through the windshield.
And indeed she is - a classic anvil shape, topped with an overshooting updraft, like a blossom of cauliflower. "Well, it’s looking good on radar," Currens says. There’s an excitement in his voice now, a glint in his eye. Something’s going to happen. Green puts a hand up for a high five and Currens slaps it.
"Yeah, baby!" Green says. "We’re going in!"
Currens clicks through a sequence of radar images to see if the cloud is starting to rotate. It is. His pupils bloom. Then he clicks over to a GPS DeLorme Map program, directing Green along the farm roads until the storm supercell is nearly directly above, an upside-down wedding cake floating in a weirdly yellow sky. We’re close, closer than most people would ever get on purpose, and now the lightning starts. Trunks of raw electricity part the air with the sound of ripping fabric. Suddenly, Green’s big red machine looks rather small.
The storm overhead is awesome. It looms like a dark mother ship lowering to the ground, and the center, just above us, is nippled by a colossal mesocyclone, a twisting, rotating eye of God that sucks up wind and spits out lightning. Green and Currens scramble from the Impala, and the mechanical crew jumps out of the Super Duty. The wind is hot as breath; the wheat fields ripple and bow. Suddenly, everyone is talking extremely fast.
"Look! My God, my God."
"Whoo-hoo!"
"That’s the whole goddamned mass. The whole thing is turning!"
"Hey!" Green screams against the wind. "Right now! I need this truck down now!"
He strips to his tighty-whiteys and slips into an insulated fire suit that buys him an extra 16 seconds in case the 60-gallon fuel tank under the seat blows. "Man, I hate this goddamned lightning," Green says. Even with the insulation and circuit breakers, the lightning is a concern. Green’s star-spangled Evel Knievel-style helmet has a radio hardwired into the vehicle’s electronics, and his steel car is topped with a 4-foot weather antenna. Forget the danger of a tornado; a direct hit turns the TA-1 into a half-million-dollar red, white, and blue electric chair.
"Steve!" Currens screams. "I think it’s lowering!"
"It’s coming down, man, it’s coming down!"
"Holy God."
Green stares up, ignoring the lightning, and zones in on the mother ship corkscrewing down on our Oklahoma cornfield. A thin white cone of twisted vapor pokes from the rotation and probes slowly toward the ground.
"Yeah, baby!" Green says, yelling into the gale. "Come on, baby! Tomorrow morning you’re watching me on Good Morning America!"
In the Steve Green dream scenario, as told to Diane Sawyer, the story might go something like this: Green revs toward a swirling F-1 tornado stretched between Oklahoma and the heavens like the tree of life itself. Debris smashes against the side panels and nicks the Lexan, and Green hits the hydraulics, drops, and just - watches, utterly and fantastically alone.
Diane might roll a clip from the headlight cam - the mini-tornadoes spinning off from the main vortex, uprooted trees swooshing overhead like broccoli. And then, as the center passes like a winking eye, bright blue sky, too blue, the way heaven might look. Diane Sawyer says, "You’re either brave or crazy, I don’t know which, but - my God." And Green just turns on that smile and shakes his head, knowing that this, my friends, is just the beginning.
But that’s just a reverie. Instead, weather happens. Before he can even get behind the wheel of the TA-1, the updraft suddenly blows the other way in an icy sigh. It undercuts the inflow, and the big engine in the sky stops pinwheeling. Then the tornado cone loses its tightness, goes vague and vaporous. And as suddenly as it appeared, it’s gone.
Leaving a man standing alone in a fireproof racing suit in an Oklahoma cornfield - still needing a tornado. The sky is clearing. There’s always next year.
Correspondent Charles Graeber (cg111000@hotmail.com) wrote about competitive lock-picking in issue 13.02. 
credit Michael Elins
Green spent four years building his $ 550,000 Tornado Attack Vehicle.
credit Michael Elins
Controls
credit Michael Elins
Vent
credit Michael Elins
Body
credit Michael Elins
Crash safety
credit Michael Elins
Hydraulics
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