Anatomy of Disaster - Season 1 Episode 2 - Superstorms

a furious whirl of wind rotates on a rampage I just couldn't believe in sizes because it was just too big to be for real the super storms that spawn tornadoes have other serious side effects my god lightning that strikes hundreds every year it's his hidden as he's knocked everyone down hail it falls with a violent force terrible and merge and we were scared and microbursts that drop planes from the sky the devastating weather of super storms nature at its fiercest [Music] [Music] look at their look at a highway trees power line just we're not looking over lines I'm getting everything it's July in Minnesota the goodra family is having a lakeside party when an uninvited guest drops in here comes Erica this beautiful weather display is a demon in disguise in all the lectricity all the power lines are going you are watching a phenomenon few have ever seen the birth of a tornado it is incredible it's coming across the lake right now the rushing wind is what's called an updraft or you can hear you can see it the family doesn't realize it's a sign of deadly weather watcher rolls pulp out spit on attackers look at their crime within moments in metamorphosizes into a monster the goodreads rush for cover three everybody the good reason survived unscathed but their ordeal serves to prove that what we don't know about the weather could kill us beginning it looks harmless as the Sun warmed earth heats moist air it rises and condenses forming clouds this process is called convection and when strong enough the towering cumulonimbus cloud forms the signature of a thunderstorm the rising warm air creates an updraft fueling the storm some thunder clouds can reach nine miles high these thunderstorms can grow into giant weather systems called super cells awesome ominous super storms that can span The Horizon packing gargantuan power that eventually must be released with lightning twisters and here rock-hard balls of ice hammering down in here hail storms can seem like cannon Bell attacks from above [Applause] these on slots of ice caused over a billion and a half dollars worth of damage in the u.s. each year and their deadly farm is called it the white plague where and yet they watch helplessly as hail bombard their animals sometimes killing them and shredding their crops hailstones can be as small as a pea or larger than a baseball that's huge those were up in the clouds to demonstrate their impact and velocity we asked a baseball pitcher to play the part of the thunderstorm his target a common victim of hail his throw hit at over 70 miles per hour the average speed of a large falling hail stone the same thing happened 1,000 fold to a garden nursery in Denver Colorado when a monster hailstorm pummeled the city in 1990 [Music] the storm which hit Denver head-on Unleashed golf ball-sized hail like an iron-fisted barrage for the unwrapping moms and kids trapped atop a ferris wheel It was as if they were in the war zone we were scared if we had more baby one mother used her body as a shield against the hill I was covering two little girls is what happened so I got the worst a lot she was hovering over two girls protecting them from the hell we have no warning whatsoever the type injuries that we've got in there at this point in time are a lot of bumps bruises contusions really no major injuries the injured are rushed to a hospital that had also been damaged by the head tune of its medevac helicopters had their bubbles shattered and rotors damaged both copters had just landed with patients moments before the oil struck elsewhere across the storm's path branches and leaves lay torn to the ground car windows are punched in the storm also wreaked havoc with a pottery shop the hail was coming down so hard that it was blasting through the windows and across the room and breaking pottery inside the building to better understand the storms that bear this white plague meteorologist Morris Weissman wrangles weather balloons that carry instruments which can send back atmospheric data from the environment high up in the towering cumulus clouds that signal wild weather what we were doing is trying to observe the environment around the storms the kind of environment that would determine for instance whether we're going to get ordinary garden-variety thunderstorms or supercell thunderstorms on a given day back in the National Center for Atmospheric Research Weissman works on a computer model of what happens when giant thunder clouds get pushed over by strong winds high in the atmosphere called wind shear on days when there's strong vertical wind shear you actually see the thunderstorm clouds initially tilting over when we generate rotation in the storm we generate lowered pressure that acts like a vacuum clean it that can suck more er up the air that's being pulled upward in the updraft is warm and moist but in the cold troposphere tiny droplets of water begin to form on dust these droplets are blasted up and down in the thunder clouds turbulent winds with each trip they are coated with ice growing bigger and bigger until they fall to the ground the size of that thing but even hail this size is small this is a resin model of the hailstorm that we call the coffee bill hail stone because it fell at Coffeyville Kansas about 1970 it's one of the largest hailstones that has been collected and weighed the final fall velocity of the hail stone this size is about a hundred miles an hour this would kill a person if it hit him on the head Charlie Knight studies hail that is shipped to him from across the world each hail stone tells the story these hailstones came from the storm at Fort Collins about ten years ago it was actually a storm in which one person was killed by a falling hill stone it was it was a small child here in his frigid lab he opens each as if it is an icy gem the ring structure tells you something about the history of the altitude at which the hill stone was growing this one is mostly pretty pretty bubbly so it probably formed mostly rather high in the storm by better understanding how hail is formed Charlie Knight hopes someday to help protect people and property from the white plague until then the very best hope we have is to find shelter of any kind but when super storms are brewing one must seek shelter wisely the wrong choice and you could become a living lightning rod [Music] some call it the autograph of God it's deadly sudden and terrifying like white-hot boats that strike in split second with a hundred million volts of destructive punch igniting forest fires that rage out of control endangering space launches and killing more than 1,000 men women and children in the world each year many more are brutally injured primitive cultures feared and worshipped lightning today we realize it is just a spark a killer spark that can be 60 miles long and as hot as the surface of the Sun what we hear is thunder is actually the pressure waves triggered by an explosion of energy these explosions are ignited when huge opposite charges of electricity build up inside Thunder clouds and then suddenly discharge the build-up of static electricity on the ground can provide an ominous warning of where and when lightning will strike when these Colorado hikers saw their hair stand on end they took these pictures moments later one was critically injured and a nearby hiker dead victims of a savage lightning strike an open field is a dangerous place in the thunderstorm [Applause] when the Decatur Indiana high school football team sees lightning approaching they break for cover but the Lightning won't let them escape a fierce boat slams into the ground beside them knocking several players down and temporarily paralyzing them it's just hidden this is knocked everyone down and I looked up and everybody was on the ground it's not a direct strike but one student says it feels like a sledgehammer hitting the voltage basically flashes over the ground and up the victims legs through their feet and a lot of our victims have reported some pain in their feet some numbness and tingling in our extremities the team will recover and play again Phillip Kurtz may never be the man he once was during a thunderstorm while fixing the plumbing at his in-laws he went to his truck to get a wrench just at that instant when I took hold of that wrench I heard an extremely loud explosion like I had never heard before Phil came through the door and he was convulsing and he had flames rolling down his body and his belt buckle was sparking he took one step inside the kitchen and fell to the floor thousands of miles away in California lightning will tear into lada Andrews life just as suddenly with her good friend Bunny Lana takes her first backpacking trip a challenge for her 50th birthday let's see how nice it was blue sky we were warm we had no inkling this was gonna happen Lana and bunny are high on Mount Whitney where the weather can change without warning just after lunch it starts to sprinkle the leader of our group said if lightning starts happening throw off all the metal that you're wearing and run down to the clearing and crouch down and even then I thought oh okay you know I didn't take it that seriously oh boy I do know the rain turns into hail a horse and rider with a pack mule are in front of them and then we started to hike and that's the last thing I remember the mule and horse are killed instantly the rider trapped under his fallen horse is screaming bunny is stunned but unhurt she sees smoke rising from Lana's body she was facedown in the mud the Bill of her hat was buried in the mud and she wasn't breathing I turned her face to the side and and tried to dig the mud out of her um out of her mouth Lana seemed to be dead but a moment later she began to moan I didn't feel anything except I was felt nausea I felt disoriented and I felt really cold chilled to the bone shaking that was so cold and I said why are those horses laying down horses don't lay down it shows you my mental state when lightning hits a person medical examination often reveals that the charge was conducted by the brain and nerves which can be badly damaged the heart can stop internal organs can be injured and the skin scorched one big myth is if you're struck by lightning you've got to be dead and so I'm alive so did I really get struck by lightning but I did my injuries are all internal it's hard to see it's hard for people understand that Phil Kurtz says that when he hears silence now he fears lightning he's been brought to the special lightening strike team at Chicago's Loyola University Phil fights bravely against brain damage internal organ failure and excruciating pain doctors have no cure for what lightning has done to this survivor the areas in the body which are most likely to most likely to conduct electrical energy are going to be the cardiovascular and the in the neurologic systems mr. Kurtz is a good example of that while to look at him he could be someone strolling down the street with his wife he early cannot function at the level that he did why does one victim emerge unscathed another crippled one live and another die scientists are unsure each strike is unique and lightning is too dangerous to study up close Benjamin Franklin one of America's founding fathers risked his life in 1752 by flying a kite in a thunderstorm when a metal key tied to the twine sparked Franklin proved that the air was charged with electricity his discovery led him to the invention of the lightning rod to guide the dangerous voltage safely into the ground but as the human race blazes new paths lightning seems to pursue us in 1969 the Apollo 12 munition was struck twice as it was blasting through the atmosphere NASA was forced to enact tough new regulations that prohibit a launch if lightning is detected within a 10-mile radius we've had a couple of cardiac arrests down here to beat from space lightning makes a spectacular light show at any moment there are more than 2,000 thunderstorms simultaneously raging across the surface of the earth you gotta go orbit you're looking good back on the ground at the Lightning detection Center in Denver Colorado over a hundred monitoring stations produce an almost instantaneous picture of lightning across the United States nevertheless lightning inflicts an estimated 1 billion dollars in damage each year in the US alone the biggest hits come when it knocks out power plants sometimes hold cities are blacked out to help us better understand lightnings awesome force science must draw it from the sky to measurement for study it's a different kind of research it's not like in the lab where you can make something happen over and over again till everything's right and then you make the measurement dr. Martin Ullman is a modern-day Ben Franklin along with his team of lightning chasers at the University of Florida woman is trying to do something man has never done make lightning strike where he commands [Music] woman does this by aiming a research rocket at thunderclouds he connects a wire to the rocket and grounds it to a tower lightning strikes the trailing wire and streaks down to the launching pad to be analyzed but even for scientists the phenomenon remains an awesome reminder of the Furious power of super storms which can spawn an even more terrifying sight a tornado [Music] it's the start of tornado season in the dead center of America a nasty thunderstorm is brewing in the late afternoon over Wichita Kansas City Kansas has issued a tornado warning all day long we've been hearing that there was gonna be lots of tornadoes in the area so I left work a little early thinking I'd come home and be ready for it as retired barber Joe parsley returns to his mobile home park under a murderous sky police in the small town of Andover received the news a vicious twister is on its way but the town's warning siren won't work I was expecting that the big siren to go off which never did so a police car with sirens blaring speeds to Joe's neighborhood to send people to the community storm center as the monster hits nearby McConnell Air Force Base oh yeah it tears off the wing of a hospital rips through a bowling alley and blows a legal Center apart now it heads straight for the trailer park it's coming right towards our house came outside I looked to the west big gigantic tornado I mean the wall of it was walls were straight up and down I just couldn't believe the size of it because it was just too big to be for real the police officer who had come to warn residents Caesar too [Music] he guns the engine knowing tornadoes can move across the landscape at 50 miles per hour I realized that I didn't have time to make it to the tornado shelter I was watching two befores and all that the brief life and I knew that I had to be in place that would shield the only thing I could think of is my pickup truck Joe dives under his truck and grabs onto the transmission just as the tornado hits in my mind I felt well I'm gonna watch as long as I can because this will probably be the last thing I'll ever see the monster slams Joe's truck into a tree then blasts out of town on it's terrible 43 mile journey but it was like the old devil itself had moved on [Music] we have four confirmed that are dead we have one that we just took out in critical condition we have three that are extremely critical this violent interruption of small town life leaves residents stunned and we did see one lady Linton Lane long road dead there as we walk out I came back I seen a lot of neighbors a dead make it it was sad other twisters from the same storm wreaked havoc over Kansas 14 people died that day 11 in Joe's community which was obliterated these two trailers were completely done we could not find any other remains they said then he was out out in the field maybe he run back in the ditch desperate parents searched for their child the luckier relatives have tearful reunions beneath the wreckage pinned under his truck Joe sees it all it was clean sweep it was of such gigantic force that it was unbelievable it definitely puts the fear of God into you Joe is rushed to the hospital where the sound of the tornado still rings in survivors ears sounds like a freight train and it didn't seem like it was ever gonna start just kept going and going and all of a sudden it was gone everybody said it sounded like freight train myself it sounded to me like Jets it was so loud it's unbelievable at survivors may disagree but science is trying to recognize the sounds of tornadoes Alba dard is interested in the noises of nature at the University of Colorado this professor of aerospace atmospherics works with students on this unique twister and a tank called a vortex generator with a microphone feeding sound waves an oscilloscope creates the distinctive voice print of a vortex would guess is that the that the vortex is is vibrating or all these little corrugations that you see running around them may be involved with a sound generation process this is a variable capacitor microphone it's not a good visual I proposed by Bedard works with students in the field picking up the sounds of the earth on an ultra sensitive microphone that can receive audio signals for thousands of miles one day while listening for avalanches in the nearby Rocky Mountains they detect this familiar low-frequency sound pattern inaudible to the human ear it appears to be the voice print of a twister later weather dad approves that one has indeed dropped down nearby dr. Bedard starts matching sound data to weather tornadoes we were getting the voice prints of the laboratory vortices and they really did have a unique character to them I have made the analogy of the smaller tornadoes being Sopranos the larger tornadoes being a Basso now the major tornado will be producing sounds over a very broad range of frequencies many of the cells might be the tornado winds whirling around buildings interacting with trees the professor says that learning to listen for tornadoes may someday provide faster better warnings to people in a twisters path if you're living in Kansas or a tornado Road area if anything that we could do to increase reliability of warnings or tornadoes and you'd be more likely to really pay attention to it listening for twisters is one way to eventually improve warnings looking at them an intimate detail was the goal of another remarkable scientific team project vortex the most common job during vortex is basically just trying to keep up we're trying to find out where vortex was and how far we've been left behind dr. Joshua Worman is one of 80 scientists in the largest Tornado field experiment ever staged [Music] for two summers a twister chasing armada loaded with weather reading technology chases tornadoes spawning super storms we would have to target this storm is it does appear that it will fit in 2000 dr. Eric Rasmussen leads the twister troops we had a good idea that tornadoes were associated with what we call supercell storms but the mechanics of how the tornado itself forms were completely unknown to understand the inner workings of a tornado the scientists set out to witness a twister from birth to death Bobby where nature is out of here but Tornado Alley spreads over five states each time a supercell builds the scientists must make a mad dash hundreds of miles across the plains one of the most important tools in finding unborn twisters is mobile Doppler radar by bouncing radar beams of particles suspended in a storm dr. wahrman gets an extraordinary picture with a Doppler radar we can see how much rain or how much debris is in any particular place in the storm and we can make a map of that this map is actually a cross-section a bird's-eye view of a twister generating supercell saying what something looks like as the first step to understanding it if seeing is understanding then Texas Bible salesman Ted Quillin is about to be enlightened a powerful twister is headed toward his town of Pampa and I went outside to see what what kind of a whirlwind it was and just south of here probably a mile was grandpappy huge black mean-lookin my god but after it made the turn and strike partly I had to do something so I come down into the cellar I chained it over and set out on the top steps as cooling Huddle's in the dark the vortex team races in his direction they're chasing a series of super cells that drop other twisters in their path [Music] spinning chaos flings mayhem in the path of project vortex scientists trying to reach the storms causing twisters in Texas there are downbursts that almost forced vortex cars off the road to win back the part ago there is lightning striking too close for comfort and there is hail that shatters the window of this vortex car these close encounters have helped the scientists understand how the rotating forces in a supercell can spin into killer tornadoes you could take something that's rotating like this and if part of its caught in the downdraft cause of the rain and part of its caught in the updraft you can take that rotation and turn it into a rotation like that and then that rotation gets drawn in like a skater pulling in their arms and it spins faster and faster this is the force that now tears off Ted quillin's chains cellar door I was fear for my life because I thought the vacuum alone with killing and if dearly tried he tried to something along run out of my body the twister is ripping from ABBA at 250 miles per hour [Music] downed power lines prevent the vortex team from reaching the besieged town below ground Ted Quillin hangs on for dear life and prays this seller was shaking so bad the only real thought I had much it's going to pull this out of the ground and grow me down the street be in it because it was actually moving this so I mean dramatically and I looks at my looking inside a single vortex tornado outside the monster rips up industrial buildings Perls steel beams and rotates with enough force to throw cars 100 feet at 90 miles an hour I don't remember one piece of debris and it was a huge tree trunk it was very little debris in the center of Toledo if any as the monster moves out of Pampa it leaves unbelievable wreckage in its wake and an unforgettable snore the smell is like wet mud if you ever smell it it's like the sound you'll never forget it the Bible salesman has seen what the vortex team has been chasing for two years the inner workings of a tornado just two weeks before project vortex is scheduled to end the scientists still haven't witnessed the birth of a twister but finally the winds of luck change after a white-knuckle supercell chase across three states they raced down a Texas Road into a hammering hailstorm there were power lines down there was a a 18-wheeler jackknifed across the road there gas lines that were open tomato sirens were going it was pretty obvious to the eye the dis storm meant business it was just a wonderful-looking supercell is showing rotation it is a violent plastic supercell producing violent tornadoes in the tiny burg of Dimmit texas the convoy of weather equipment is finally in the right place at the right time the supercell is about to give birth to a twister head of a major company no vortex has the funner so surrounded that it almost lands on a scientist on the far side of the field as it forms the rapidly growing infant rips up highway s wagon I had teams all around it I knew exactly where the tornado was in time yeah we knew we had it meaning we had it nailed I'm Charlie remember that is one of the absolute best days of my life it was just amazing data like no one had ever seen before and I was basically just glued to my computer screen seeing the inside of the tornado the Dimmit twister became the most thoroughly observed tornado in history new insight into a tornadoes anatomy emerged as the Doppler cross-sections were analyzed scientists were amazed to see how this tornado made radical structural changes from minute to minute a downdraft is observed plunging through the eye at 50 miles as the air spreads toward a common center from from all sides in this downdraft when it gets to that common center that abruptly turns upward and and spins stronger and as the tornado itself this was just the beginning of the revelations for the men fortunate enough to see the inside of a twister and live to tell about it for me as a radar meteorologist seeing the data coming out of them and really seeing inside the storm and seeing the velocity structure and it is really fascinating I mean they're they're beautiful they're very violent they're rare and he's coming right toward us here so I'm gonna back off and begin to take some cover I'd always want to see one of these things up close this was a close one I wanted but it was so beautiful and everything just what you think it would be the power an awesome perverted powers the power of a superstorm has one more weapon of destruction an invisible killer feared by all who fly unfriendly skies pilots dislike thunderstorms give me Stefan to the left right orbiter and it's not just lightning hail and turbulence they fear when the warm hair and a thundercloud rises to high altitude it gets cold wet and heavy then it falls sometimes with a force so great that any plane in its path is doomed this force is called a microburst we kept going up and coming down and going back up and coming down we thought there weren't any place maybe on the runway for us to land Annie Edwards is one of a hundred and thirty-four passengers on a Delta flight from Florida that circles of violent thunderstorm over dallas-fort Worth Airport but looking out the window you can see that was rain because we did come down low enough where we thought we were going to land and we had to go back up [Music] what finding come after circling the field a final time the pilots have no idea they're approaching a monstrous microburst but at a critically low altitude they sense that something is wrong [Music] well yeah suddenly a huge force from above pushes the plane like a giant unseen hand everybody was holding on because they knew something was wrong the pilots gun the engines with all 130 thousand pounds of thrust it is no use [Music] the fire was approaching me I could feel the heat but it did not burn not singe so I said God was there with me miraculously Inez left dangling in the severed tail section with 26 other survivors but the bodies of 134 passengers lay strewn across the field I heard nobody scream I heard nobody cry out anything it was complete silence then the thunderstorm that killed them lets loose again there was terrible rain hail and life that's when I thought we must have gone right into the center of a car needed we said the crashing killers nor please we hope the lightning worth killing because it was just a fuse the violent thunderstorm had undoubtedly caused the crash but what part wind shear was suspected but the facts didn't add up investigators combed through the wreckage of flight 191 and pored over the data from earlier crashes the culprit is shown in this computer animation a savage breed of wind shear called the Microverse wet heavy air that drops at up to 60 miles an hour slowing a plane so it loses the lift it needs to stay aloft it's now believed that microbursts caused half of all air disasters before that fateful day their sudden and you get no warning you can fly for 30 years and never have an experience with one and all of a sudden you find yourself out of ideas and airspeed and a very crucial point of the flight pilot Dick Yenni has become a microburst Pro he's part of a NASA team created in the wake of Delta flight 191 its mission to develop microburst detection technology for commercial aircraft Viennese orders seems to recycle fly directly into microbursts at low altitude where they occur and where their most dangerous this was the real spot see right through safety precautions have been taken Yanni and his co-pilots have extensive microburst simulation training the plane's fuel tanks are specially sealed to prevent lightning from exploding the plane onboard technician study prototype microburst detection equipment they really like the red arrow near the center of this screen shows where the plane is the oval represents a storm system the small square within the oval is an oncoming microburst on the radar screen sudden shifts from orange yellow to blue indicate the severe wind shear of a microburst if the plane hits the dark red at low altitude it could crash that's so axial that's a microburst that's the see the pilots use the detection displays to avoid the deadliest down drafts but a lightning strike could knock the instruments dead leaving the pilots blind to the arm I think it's trip coming yeah we heard hot back here well what do we ever do ever like expect the only thing I see back here is that Dave Hinton is glowing red is here as all kinky important luckily the microburst detection equipment still works the crew that could joke about danger has defied microbursts many times and survived through their efforts NASA and the FAA have perfected similar wind shear and microburst detection systems which now give pilots a warning 30 seconds or more eliminating a deadly surprise the NASA flights help create new microburst survival guidelines for pilots that evolved into this virtual reality simulation pilots can hit the severe wind shear of a microburst in cyberspace to learn to handle the real thing but after you fly through it a couple times and you know it's there you can fly right through that with this warning of 30 to 40 seconds am I going to say this should be no reason whatsoever for a wind shear accidental even an incident I'm really proud to have been a part of that research in the world of weather science research can be as rewarding as it is risky no two storms and oh two tornadoes are the same so there's always something new and you know watching one forum and watching one move across the countryside they really are beautiful the miracle of weather renews life on earth as rain waters the crops nitrogen created by lightning fertilizes the soil super storms help regulate the temperature of the planet and in tornado ravaged farm towns like Andover Kansas the weather brings lessons in life itself twisters survivor Joe Parsley's community has been rebuilt and after many operations so has he despite the trauma Joe somehow has positive memories of the day the twister ripped through town of how his neighbors pulled together and of his first thoughts as death passed him by all of a sudden I realize they have survived this sucker you know I'm still alive unbelievable to me [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Anatomy of Disaster

Views: 180,842

Rating: 4.7713308 out of 5

Keywords: Anatomy of disaster, Disasters, Storm, Thunder, Lightning, Rain, Hail, Microbursts, Weather

Id: s2YMUY_1sPk

Length: 46min 58sec (2818 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 19 2016