Original subtitles

...**

NARRATOR: Tornado Alley,

and a powerful vortex is crossing the Great Plains.

The small mining town of Picher, Oklahoma, is directly in its path.

MAN: Oh, my God!

Within minutes, the tornado tears the community apart.

(TYRES SQUEAL)

MAN: Mayday!

MAN: Oh, my God!

But this is only a single chapter in the violent story of the tornado.

The Great Plains.

Vast flatlands spanning the central United States

from Minnesota in the north to Texas in the south.

But life isn't always this peaceful

for the countless small towns that populate the American heartland.

Every year, this quiet, open landscape

undergoes an ominous transformation.

Warmed by the growing power of the sun,

the simmering fields of the Midwest begin to heat the air above,

creating a dangerous change in the weather.

Gigantic clouds begin to build.

Rising as high as 14km,

these forces of nature begin to intensify,

growing into violent storms.

The gigantic thunderstorms that form here

are among the most awe-inspiring on our planet.

Vast swirling clouds up to 32km wide roll across the landscape,

unleashing lightning, hail and rain upon the fields below.

(THUNDER CRACKS)

But sometimes these weather systems create a force of far greater power.

A power that gives this region its name.

Tornado Alley.

Tornadoes are formed of the most powerful winds on our planet...

...rotating at speeds up to 480km per hour.

These whirlpools of wind are so powerful

that they are one of the most deadly forces on Earth.

(SIREN WAILS)

MAN: Oh, my gosh! There is a tornado right there.

Right there. You look at that and you get in that bathroom.

It is right there on the ground. Oh, my God!

On May 10, 2008,

a powerful tornado hit the small mining town of Picher, Oklahoma.

It was the deadliest twister to strike the state this decade.

In a few seconds, residents saw their town reduced to rubble.

MAN: My first thought was the size of that thing.

It was huge, coming at us,

and it turned out to be, I think, in places up to a mile wide.

The whole system was rotating.

It was just a scary, eerie thing,

and then you'd see smaller vortexes coming off of this thing,

and then you'd get to a point

where you could see the main vortex that went up and funnelled out.

It was... It was huge.

WOMAN: I said, 'We'll be OK.'

I said, 'I've seen so many through the years, and they always go up.'

But this time it didn't go up.

Didn't I yell at you that...

Said, 'It's coming through...'

I think at this time, I'm screaming,

and I said, 'Tommy, it didn't go up! It didn't go up!'

And he's screaming back at me to get in the house.

The citizens of Picher prepared to sit out the tornado

by barricading themselves in their homes.

WOMAN: And you can see it had already started,

and it's right here - it's just a block from me.

And you can just feel the air is changing.

Everything is getting colder,

and he's locking the deadbolt on the door and I'm looking at him,

and I'm going, 'What are you thinking? That won't stop it.'

I started to feel a lot of terror, and I'm screaming,

'What are we going to do? What are we going to do?'

With the tornado directly overhead,

all the residents could do was hold on

as the monster wind tore the town apart.

By the time the tornado moved on, all that remained was destruction.

As you can see, it took the concrete floor clear off the path.

Half of the house, the concrete was even taken off.

The concrete that's laying over there upside down

is the concrete floor that was in this bedroom.

The devastation was just complete.

My first feeling was this is my neighbourhood I grew up in,

and it was gone.

The town was in ruins, but the real cost was in human lives.

Eight people died,

and one in ten of Picher's residents was seriously injured.

*

*

NARRATOR: Tim Marshall is an engineer who assesses tornado damage.

Today he is off to examine the aftermath

of the tornado that hit the town of Picher, Oklahoma,

to piece together exactly what happened.

From the air, the destruction shows the track of the tornado clearly.

It cut directly through the heart of Picher,

destroying everything in its path.

What I'm looking at right now is a devastation

that goes right from one end of town to the other

through the southern end of Picher, Oklahoma.

We have trees that are down - torn, uprooted and mangled.

We have cars that appear to be crumpled up.

Some of them appear to be thrown.

It's clear that this twister was over five blocks wide

when it crossed through the town.

Tim Marshall documents the extreme damage

so he can understand exactly how these winds tear homes apart.

A tornado has, really, three types of motions.

It has a rotating motion,

and then it has a lateral motion that comes on in,

and then it has an upward motion.

So, you have all three of those coming together in a tornado,

and that's what does a tremendous amount of damage.

The destruction is complete.

This small town stood for 120 years.

It was wiped off the map by the tornado in less than a minute.

Over 1,000 twisters hit the US every year.

That's more tornadoes than occur in the rest of the world put together.

No two are ever the same.

They vary in size, shape, and most importantly, power.

The intensity of a tornado is rated from zero to five

on a scale called the Enhanced Fujita, or EF, scale.

The only way to calculate a tornado's strength on this scale

is for scientists like Tim Marshall to examine the aftermath.

TIM: The tornado track leaves its fingerprint.

We can find a lot about which way the wind came from,

how strong the winds were,

what objects blew, what objects didn't go away.

By assessing the level of damage left behind,

it's possible to accurately gauge the power of a tornado.

The weakest are called EF0s.

They produce winds between 105 and 137km per hour.

Relatively mild, they still have the power to rip branches off trees

and hurl lightweight debris through windows.

Next on the scale, the EF1s.

These create winds between 138 and 178km per hour.

They can take the roofs right off houses

and overturn cars and vans.

An EF2 tornado spins at up to 218km per hour.

This one in Oklahoma threw hay bales hundreds of metres

and uprooted trees.

An EF3.

Winds inside these twisters can gain speeds of up to 266km per hour.

The inside, or vortex, of a tornado this strong

is full of lethal flying wreckage.

This is what airborne objects travelling at 260km per hour

will do to a car.

Jagged pieces of steel, wood and glass propelled by violent tornadoes

are especially deadly.

But this is still only halfway up the scale.

An EF4 generates winds between 267 and 322km per hour.

Cars are thrown around like toys,

well-constructed houses completely levelled.

The most powerful tornadoes in the world are EF5s.

With winds known to exceed 480km per hour.

The damage EF5 tornadoes wreak is devastating.

TIM: The most extreme devastation that I have seen -

people who were unfortunately victims of the tornado

were literally shredded,

and there were body parts scattered across the landscape.

Frankly, I don't see how it could get any worse than that.

Thankfully, powerful EF5s are extremely rare.

They account for just 1 in 1,000 twisters.

All tornadoes, whatever size,

appear to drop down from the clouds as if by magic,

but how do these devastating whirlwinds form?

And what part of the US is most at risk?

Scientists from the National Weather Center, like Robin Tanamachi,

are trying to answer these questions.

We know the general conditions that are necessary to form a tornado.

You need a rotating thunderstorm in most cases.

You need some source of what we call vorticity in the environment,

which is just a measure of the spin of the air.

In order to study these elusive twisters,

Robin patrols the part of the country which gets the most -

an enormous swathe of America known as Tornado Alley.

This vast, flat landscape, over 1,600km wide,

stretches from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to the Canadian border.

It's in this peaceful heartland of the US

that tornadoes so often touch down with devastating effect.

This stretch of land gets so many twisters

because two radically different weather systems collide here.

In summer months, warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico

moved north towards Tornado Alley.

Meanwhile, 3,200km away,

cold, dry air tumbles south from Canada.

As the two collide over the Great Plains,

warm, humid air at the surface rises into the heavier, colder air above.

As it climbs, it condenses into popcornlike clouds

that ascend 11km into the icy stratosphere.

If this rising air soars upwards fast enough,

it begins to rotate and become cyclonic.

This chain of events forms an immense, rotating mass of clouds

called a supercell.

At the trailing edge of the supercells,

the clouds begin to descend.

If the spinning motion gains intensity,

the clouds drop all the way to the ground in a funnel shape.

MAN: Oh, my God! Look at the funnel!

WOMAN: He's going to be right in the middle of that.

Once a twister drops from the rotating storm system

and touches down,

it can and will destroy anything in its path.

MAN: Oh, my God! The whole house came apart.

*

*

NARRATOR: The supercell hovers over the landscape.

From the depths of these ominous clouds, tornadoes are born.

But a tornado only becomes destructive

when its swirling funnel cloud

drops from the supercell and reaches the ground.

When this giant twister landed near a highway in central Kansas,

it created chaos for motorists.

Caught in the path of the 320km/h EF4 was Randy Applegate.

MAN: I was headed east on I-70, and all of a sudden, I looked up,

and over on the right-hand side of the road,

probably about the two o'clock position,

there's this big cloud.

With the twister bearing down on him, Randy thought he could outrun it

before it reached the freeway in front of him.

I was almost past it, I was on the back edge,

and the back edge caught me, and as soon as it hit me,

the car just started to fishtail,

and it just got pushed right off the side of the highway.

(TYRES SQUEAL)

It was like being in a clothes dryer.

My head was just being, you know, banged around back and forth.

At that point, there's nothing I can do.

I have no control over the car.

I don't know if I'm going to be alive when it's over,

and that was the last thing I remember.

The tornado had effortlessly thrown the 2-tonne car off the freeway,

and 100m out into a field.

Randy was lucky he survived.

Approximately one in ten of all tornado fatalities

are motorists in their cars.

A car offers little protection.

But that doesn't stop one group from using them

to hunt down violent weather.

Tornado chasers.

MAN: OK, we got to go!

Go back, go back, go back!

MAN: Hey, we're OK. We're still OK. We're still OK.

Tornado chasers risk everything to document extreme weather.

Back up! Back up! It's coming back towards us!

WOMAN: It's getting closer and it's growing.

MAN: Tell me where it is in relation to the car.

It's to the right and it's coming toward us.

OK, I see the road. I see the road. Keep shooting.

MAN: Those houses! Oh, man, look at them!

Oh, man, look at that!

Sometimes the supercell thunderstorms that produce twisters

don't produce just one.

They can drop multiple vortices,

known in the chaser world as a bundle.

This creates unpredictable and dangerous situations,

because the chasers can quickly become the chased.

We pulled up literally right here. Yeah, it was right...

Right... Right by that sign.

Yep, and that's where we got out.

Oh, my God. This looks so different now.

Today veteran storm chasers Scott McPartland and Dave Lewison

are returning to the exact spot

where they saw five tornadoes drop from a single cloud,

touching down all around them.

MAN: It was just such an intense experience.

I'm still amazed when I look back my my video logs

at the entire sequence of four or five tornadoes,

and the incredible video we shot.

That took place in a span of about 45 to 60 minutes.

We pulled into Attica, Kansas,

and the thing just basically dropped in a field

about a half mile to our south,

and proceeded to get stronger and kind of move at us.

MAN: Come on. We're done. Oh, my God.

With the first tornado racing directly towards them,

Scott and Dave had no choice but to run.

MAN: These tornadoes are the most powerful force on the planet

and these things do turn people's lives upside down.

Anybody that takes these storms lightly

is really running a risk of, you know,

being a casualty of one of them.

Look at the spinning motion in this!

But as they fled, they couldn't know that the violently rotating supercell

was about to drop secondary, or satellite, tornadoes all around them.

The last thing you want is to be transfixed on one tornado

and having another one coming along the side and getting you.

WOMAN, ON RADIO: We're going around.

They're going left.

What's that up ahead?

Whoa! Tornado crossing the road right in front of us!

(RADIO CHATTER)

DAVE: It actually, yeah, it was over the left side of the road,

crossed the road, and it started ripping branches off!

Yeah, right here.

DAVE: That's not good! SCOTT: No.

Don't worry about that now, man. Focus on what's at hand, man.

Don't get panicked.

I remember thinking, 'Should we turn around or keep going?'

They were now racing for their lives, surrounded by EF3 tornadoes.

When they did finally manage to stop,

they had the rare chance to witness close-up

just how destructive these storms can be.

I remember getting the tripod set up really quick,

hitting 'record', and zooming in.

DAVE: Tornado crossing the road a quarter-mi...

There goes... Look at the house! The house is coming apart.

It was within seconds that the roof came off,

and when that happened, it rapidly went to horror.

Oh, my God!

Did you see that? The whole house came apart.

I hope, God... We got to go back after this goes by to see if...

The house is gone.

We should go... We should go back to that house.

SCOTT: When you see damage like that,

it's a very sobering experience.

You know, it really drives the point home

that people's lives can be turned... turned around by these events,

can be ended by events like this.

These storms mean business and they should never be taken lightly.

A powerful tornado can level a house in under ten seconds.

So, when a violent twister strikes a metropolitan area,

the destruction can be catastrophic.

No city knows that better than Oklahoma.

MAN: This is a long-track, potentially deadly tornado.

Take your immediate tornado precautions.

It is best if you are below ground level.

The more slowly a tornado tracks across land,

the darker it becomes, as it churns up the Earth's surface

and pulls dirt and debris into its vortex.

But when a twister hits a built-up area,

the debris cloud radically changes form.

(WIND RUSHES) MAN: Wow!

As a powerful tornado moves over a city,

it rips apart buildings and cars,

sweeping them into its churning cloud of flying wreckage.

It's this high-speed storm of urban rubble

that makes tornadoes so destructive and deadly

when they hit heavily populated areas.

MAN: This is a long-track, potentially deadly tornado.

Take your immediate tornado precautions.

It is best if you are below ground level.

So, what can residents of Tornado Alley do to protect themselves

against these airborne killers?

The answer comes down to tornado forecasting.

MAN: Now, first weather with Gary.

MAN: OK, storms to our west and south-west.

Some of these storms have tornado warnings on them,

but I think the range is not going to be in until quite a bit later.

Gary England has been broadcasting to Oklahoma City

for over 35 years.

His job is to warn the half-million residents of any imminent tornadoes.

Big low pressure is still to our west.

Gonna cause a few problems tonight as it comes up over us.

GARY: You know, when I started a long time ago - 1972 -

I could only warn Henry because it blew John's house away first.

That was about the size of it,

but through the years, the technology has come along.

Today, mobile weather radar, known as doppler,

and a sophisticated communications network

allow weathermen like Gary to track tornado-creating thunderstorms

anywhere on the plains.

Yeah, the warnings are much, much better.

In some cases, you know, we're able to give 15, 20, 25 minutes warning.

Gary faced the greatest challenge of his life on May 3, 1999.

That day, his weather radar detected the most powerful type of tornado -

a giant EF5.

It was bearing down on Oklahoma City.

The state capital was in extreme danger.

It was a frightening, frightening thing!

This thing grew, and it became a mile wide.

At times, it was so large and unusual,

you couldn't tell it was a tornado,

and it was moving directly toward a populated area.

As the tornado began tearing apart the outskirts of the city,

Gary broadcast critical warnings to residents in its path.

I knew people had to be dying cos you could see the powerline flashes.

Pow, pow, pow, pow! It was not a good feeling

There was a strong awareness

that this was something that we have never seen before.

Wind speeds inside the vortex reached more than 513km per hour.

It was the most powerful wind ever recorded on Earth.

In just 15 minutes, the tornado killed 44 people,

and left 10,000 residents homeless.

But without Gary's live broadcasts,

the death toll would probably have been much higher.

MAN: A severe thunderstorm warning has been issued

until 4:15pm Central Daylight Time for Thursday evening.

Hourly weather updates have become a lifeline

for people living in harm's way.

If any potential tornado-producing systems

approach the metropolitan area,

the network sends out its team of storm trackers.

Veteran tracker Val Castor is on the road.

MAN: Gary, yes,

we are a quarter of a mile away from the tornado.

It is moving north-north-east.

This thing is gonna pass, Gary,

probably a couple of miles west of Arnett.

I've seen tornadoes as close as 100 yards or less,

actually in the flying debris.

Now, keep in mind, that's not by design, OK?

The most recent addition to the team is pilot-reporter Mason Dunn.

Yeah, Gary, we're in the location.

We're right under the thunderstorm, looking at the wall of cloud.

The trackers follow and report on incoming weather.

They are the eyes and ears of the city.

Val, can you hear me? VAL, ON RADIO: Go ahead, Gary.

Tell me what you have.

We're just a few miles north of Shawnee right now,

and we're sitting here watching as three separate storms go up.

Yeah, I see that too.

Mason, what's your location? What do you have there?

OK, Gary, right now we're right next to the whirl cloud.

It is starting to rotate quite a bit.

All right, stand by. We'll go live momentarily.

In the wake of the '99 killer tornado,

residents of Oklahoma City learned to take weather warnings more seriously.

Proof of that new awareness came in 2004.

Gary and his team found themselves tracking another violent twister

in exactly the same part of town.

This time, the tornado destroyed 4,000 homes.

At first it seemed like a horrifying re-run of the 1999 tragedy.

But despite this monster's incredible power,

there was one major difference.

This time, residents tuned in to the live broadcasts

and listened to the warnings.

Incredibly, there wasn't a single fatality.

It's a testament to the importance of forecasting

for towns all across Tornado Alley.

(WOMAN CRIES OUT)

MAN: Get up under the girders!

If you know what to do when a twister bears down on your home,

it could mean the difference between life and death.

*

*

MAN: Get up under the girders!

MAN: Is that where we want to go? Yes!

NARRATOR: It's a nightmare situation -

caught out in the open with a tornado heading directly towards you.

These people scrambled under a bridge for shelter -

a potentially fatal mistake.

The bridge acted like a giant wind tunnel.

Just hang on! You'll be fine.

Hang onto the girder.

WOMAN: Arggh!

It's fine. We're OK. You're OK.

You're all right. You're OK. You're OK. Talk to me.

You're OK! Talk to me. What happened?

It sounded like a freight train. It just passed right on top of us.

Survival inside the swirling wind tunnel of a tornado

is a matter of luck.

But there are ways to improve your odds if you know what to do.

Back in Picher, Oklahoma,

a week after the most deadly tornado to strike the state this decade...

...wind engineer Tim Marshall is picking through

the astonishing aftermath of the twister.

The shiny stuff that we see here,

this is a roof from a manufactured home.

All I'm finding are bits and pieces of houses.

Down here, I've got a piece of roof shingle.

Up here, I've got a carpet pad.

This actually goes underneath the carpeting.

Over here, this is a piece of wood fibreboard.

It goes behind the siding.

The tornado acted like a huge blender,

churning up the town and throwing pieces out in all directions!

In several locations,

the twister reached an EF4 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale,

with winds of more than 290km per hour.

Well, if I was standing here at the time the tornado occurred,

I would probably have been killed.

Probably couldn't see more

than a couple of feet visibility in that tornado

because of all the debris that's flying around,

and that's what it kind of feeds on itself.

As it hits one house, and then another and then another,

you get more and more debris.

So, it churns it up, like a blender,

and it ends up shredding everything in its path.

There's an average of 62 tornado fatalities in the US every year.

Nearly all are due to flying debris like this.

Unless you live in a concrete bunker...

...your home won't protect you.

Many of the buildings in Picher were generations old.

When the tornado struck,

they provided no effective shelter for their residents.

What I'm looking at today is houses that are gone.

There's no safety in these houses,

and I see this time and time again, where homes just simply blow away.

Of the residents in Picher who survived,

almost all did so by following one golden rule.

Well, if you live in a standard house

that's bolted down to the foundation,

you want to put as many walls between you and outside as possible,

so get into an interior bathroom.

The bathroom is a better place to be

because you have more plumbing in the walls to hold down -

more anchoring to the foundation, and that's the best place to be.

Seeking shelter in their bath was the only thing

that saved residents Tom and Gloria Workman from certain death.

As the tornado struck, they could only watch in terror

as their house, made of wood and drywall,

disintegrated around them.

The tub used to sit right here.

TOM: Yeah, right there. This is where the tub...

It was sitting there, and when I came in,

you could hear the house starting to go.

Glass was coming through the front.

Things started hitting, spinning,

and it got extremely dark and my ears was popping,

and as I was laying there, something hit me on the back

and it just felt like it pushed me down.

This wall above my head just went out,

and it was rock and grey, and it was nasty,

and everything was just flying around.

And I got down as low as I could in the very bottom of the tub,

and then I felt Tom being lifted and then I looked.

I opened my eyes again because I'm screaming,

because I really didn't think we were going to make it.

And then the wall just kind of lifted off of me,

and I could stand up and I looked round.

I said, 'Gosh, it's all gone.'

Tom and Gloria miraculously survived because they did the right thing -

using their bathtub as their bomb shelter.

But their hometown was razed to the ground.

The recovery process following any tornado is a slow and difficult one.

But when a town is hit by the most destructive type of tornado, an EF5,

it changes the community forever.

MAN: Come on, man. We need to go now.

MAN: The house, the house! Oh, it's gone!

Oh, my God! I hope they're OK!

Please be OK!

The initial destruction tornadoes leave behind

is both physically and emotionally devastating.

The wounds tornadoes inflict on people's lives

take a long time to heal.

Greensburg, Kansas.

On the night of May 4, 2007,

this rural town suffered the full force

of the most violent type of tornado, an EF5.

It's only the second time in history that a twister this powerful

has hit an inhabited area.

Worse still,

this tornado was only moving across the landscape at 30km per hour.

Once the vortex was over Greensburg,

it took a full 20 minutes for it to move on.

(WIND ROARS)

95% of all buildings were destroyed.

11 people lost their lives, and 400 families were left homeless.

A full year since the tornado struck,

the town that Sheriff Kevin Smith patrols is still unrecognisable.

Most residents have not returned.

Greensburg is like a ghost town.

You can see, like, right here where there's this hole in the ground,

there used to be a house with a basement there.

That over there used to be the city's shop,

but you can see where it's been pretty much demolished.

All along here were people's houses.

Of course, the night of the tornado, everything was out in the street.

You couldn't hardly get down the streets.

Brand-new vehicles, homes - everything was just everywhere.

The destruction residents witnessed was the worst scene in a decade.

I've seen the power of a tornado do things

that I didn't think were possible.

You know, things like a semi truck wrapped around a telephone pole,

and you know, this house destroyed but the one next to it's, you know,

just the windows are broke out of it.

It's so chaotic that it's almost like putting a town in a box

and shaking it up and dumping it out.

Driving around Greensburg a year later,

it's clear the town will never be the same again.

Despite all the broken glass and rubble,

the most significant damage

has been inflicted on the residents themselves.

You know, some of these things, like your home when you're living in it,

you feel pretty safe,

but when something like this comes along

and it takes that from you, it's hard to get it back.

You know, cos when you're at home,

there's where you feel your most safe and secure.

The tragic chain of events that unfolded the night of the tornado

changed Greensburg forever.

In moments, Mother Nature all but wiped the town off the map.

When violent tornadoes hit, people lose everything they have -

cars, houses, loved ones.

MAN: Oh, God! Look at the funnel! WOMAN: He's gonna be in the middle!

MAN: Oh, my God! Mayday!

MAN: This is a huge tornado. Take shelter now.

MAN: Shut the door!

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