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Excerpts

Introduction

On the first warm day of each spring, an elderly American Indian woman would grab a hoe and a flashlight and head down into the storm cellar. This six-foot-square concrete bunker doubled as a frost-free refrigerator for the canned beans, peaches, and assorted other fruits and vegetables she had harvested the previous fall. Wielding the hoe like a makeshift guillotine, she cleared the room of any hibernating rattlesnakes, copperheads, or other small creatures that might have found their way into the shelter during the winter.

With the cellar swept clean, the spiderwebs and animal carcasses removed, my grandmother was now ready for the tornadoes and thunderstorms that would surely come in April, May, and June. Well, almost. She had one more weapon in her arsenal. At the first sign of a dark cloud rumbling in from the west, she would take an axe, point it at the clouds, and swing the blade hard into the ground, certain that this bit of native magic would cause the storm cloud to split and keep us safe from the tornadoes. I always suspected there was more to tornado safety than that, but in the 1960s and 1970s, an axe in the ground was just as accurate as the next day's forecast.

I spent many hours as a child in my grandmother's dank cellar, listening to the winds whistle through the cinder-block vents and the hail hammer the tin door, imagining what was happening outside. My grandmother's fear of tornadoes was hardly unique and not at all unwarranted. The small eastern Oklahoma town of Tahlequah, where I grew up, was the capital of the Cherokee Nation. The site was chosen in a valley because it was believed to be protected from tornadoes. That's one of many myths about the twister; in fact, there are no safe locations.

The tornado remains a great puzzle, its many myths steeped in folklore. This book is the life story of one tornado on one day and its consequences -- not just any tornado, but the most powerful twister ever to strike a metropolitan area. It is the life story of a tornado researcher and his legacy -- not just any researcher, but the most brilliant meteorological detective of the twentieth century. And it is the story of the lives touched with such a harsh hand on May 3, 1999.

Meteorology is one of the most complex of the sciences. Indeed, it took a meteorologist to develop one of the new fundamentals of science: chaos theory. The breakthrough happened in 1961 while American Edward Lorenz was working with a numerical computer model for weather predictions. While attempting to repeat one weather pattern, in order to save time, Lorenz entered only three decimal places, .506, instead of the six, .506127, the computer could store. He entered his sequence of numbers expecting to see the same weather pattern take shape on the screen in front of him. What appeared was a radically different prediction. He'd assumed that the difference of one part in ten thousand would be minimal, that the picture that emerged would be at least similar to what he'd seen before. Instead, the two patterns bore no resemblance to each other.

In 1979, Lorenz wrote a landmark research paper exploring this phenomenon, "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?" Eventually, chaos theory also became known as the Butterfly Effect, referring to a small act that creates great consequences. Like a small break in the clouds over Oklahoma on May 3, 1999. Like a missed target in Japan on August 9, 1945. Like a mother's brief moment of indecision. Like my grandmother burying an axe blade in the ground.

Chaos theory has been much on display since Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in September 2005. All actions -- or lack of actions -- have consequences. The hurricane and the tornado are different meteorological animals, but they send us the same message: we are at their mercy, and we ignore them at our own peril.

-- Nancy Mathis