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Informationen zum Autor As a professional storm chaser, Roger Hill has witnessed some 400 tornadoes and hurricanes in his lifetime and has captured them on film for every major TV network, plus National Geographic, The Weather Channel, The Discovery Channel, and The Learning Channel. He is co-owner of Silver Lining Tours, America's leading storm-chasing tour company. Peter Bronski is the author of At the Mercy of the Mountains: True Stories of Survival and Tragedy in New York's Adirondacks and the Wilderness Press guide Powder Ghost Towns: Epic Backcountry Runs in Colorado's Lost Ski Resorts . Klappentext Hill chronicles his love affair with storm chasing, taking readers on a suspenseful and dramatic ride across the Great Plains, into the Deep South, even into the eyes of such recent hurricanes as Katrina. Includes eight pages of photos taken by Hill showing many of the storms he chronicles in the book. Zusammenfassung This exciting book details a Storm Chaser's obsession for natural disasters. Inhaltsverzeichnis Chapter Five: Tornado Therapy My first tour as a guide for Silver Lining began on May 9, 2000, in Oklahoma City. It was a ten-day tour, scheduled to conclude on May 18. I arrived from Denver a day early to finally meet David Gold face to face. Until that point our relationship had been restricted to emails and phone calls. Early on the morning of May 9, there was a knock on my hotel-room door at the Holiday Inn near the Oklahoma City airport, our base hotel; it was David. He greeted me in tennis shoes, shorts, and a Silver Lining Tours T-shirt, his usual chase attire. A wide grin extended from ear to ear, and his right hand extended out in a preemptive handshake. I took his hand in a firm grip, thanking him for the chance to be a tour guide on his tours. Extremely intelligent and highly proper, he articulated each word that came from his mouth. We talked about chasing, about family and friends, about this tour, and about our respective thoughts on the forecast and severe-weather outlook for the next ten days of chasing. “We’re also going to be joined on this tour by National Geographic Europe,” David explained. “They’re filming a program called Twister Tours, and an English couple with us for this tour—David and Sheila Winn—are going to be the focus of the show.” The National Geographic crew was headed up by Executive Producer Alister Chapman, David continued. Alister had made a name for himself as a professional cameraman and editor, producing programs for not only National Geographic but also CNN, the Discovery Channel, and the BBC. He ran a United Kingdom–based storm-chasing group and was even an internationally competitive motor-rally driver in his earlier years. Later that morning David and I walked down the hall to the Holiday Inn’s conference room, where the tour clients were all expected to gather. Bill Reid, our driver for Van 2, was there, as were the National Geographic crew, headed up by Alister and his Sony Betacam video camera, a huge and expensive shoulder-mounted behemoth that ran on half-inch tapes. Alister planned to shoot the orientation meeting. As the clients gathered together, I soon realized that each of us in that room chased for different reasons. Some came to get out into the wide-open plains, where they could watch majestic supercell thunderstorms roll across the countryside. Others came for the camaraderie, to meet other people with the same passion, to talk about storms they’ve seen, and about the prospect of storms yet to be seen. All came for the ultimate prize, the tornado. Most people will never summit Mount Everest or swing a baseball bat on the hallowed grounds of Yankee Stadium, or fly a fighter jet at Mach 2. But in storm chasing anyone can experience the ultimate prize firsthand. Tornadoes are within anyone’s grasp, and the job of Silver Lining Tours—my job on ...
