Thursday, March 13, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
How we spent our summer vacation, by Phil and Kathy Henry.
Day 1: Left Amarillo, Texas. Drove 500 miles. Looked for tornadoes. Let a barefoot, overall-wearing, tobacco-chewing fella named Bocephus fill the tank. Had fun.
Days 2-14: Repeat.
The Henrys are still three months from engaging in their favorite hobby (chasing twisters), but only two days from their second favorite (talking about chasing twisters).
The former requires a pilgrimage to Tornado Alley (Texas, to be precise), the latter just a short drive to the Westward Ho, site of the second annual International Severe Storms Interceptors conference.
The Las Vegas couple and Warren Faidley, that storm-chasing, tornado-photographing madman, will be on hand to talk twisters and display the vehicles they operate during the chase season -- the time of year when weather conditions are ripe for tornadic activity.
The season starts in the spring and ends in the summer for most chasers, but constitutes two weeks in May for the Henrys, whose various businesses -- casino marketing consulting, fuzz-busting (explanation forthcoming) -- preclude them from pursuing their passion full time.
"This is a sport that I would never, ever want to give up," says Kathy, contesting the hobby notion. "Like any sport, it requires a lot of preparation, planning and strategy. Then there's the actual event."
That's when she becomes "totally psyched out."
Her emotional condition is more the product of anticipating a tornado than encountering one, which the Henrys have done just once in the five years they've scoured Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas in the hunt for their capricious quarry.
Phil actually puts the count at 1 1/2.
"One real one and one that started to spin (but didn't touch down)," he says.
The one that did touched down near Childress, Texas, last year. The Henrys, Faidley and a film crew had stopped their three-vehicle caravan along a highway and stepped outside after they noticed the unmistakable vortex.
"We watched a formation and all of a sudden..."
"We had a tornado on the ground," says Phil, finishing Kathy's thought.
Prepare yourself, now. They're about to behave like a 15-year married couple (which they are).
"It was right next to the vehicle," she says.
"No, it wasn't. It was about next to that building," he says, pointing to a structure a couple of hundred yards away.
"The point is," says Kathy, returning to the original thought (why the chase vehicles are all full-time four-wheel drives), "is sometimes you don't have time to make an adjustment (from two-wheel drive into four-wheel drive)."
Phil says they were far enough away, but admits they probably shouldn't have been as close as they were.
"If that had spun out fast (started gaining circulation momentum), we could have been in trouble. It started to gain circulation momentum enough that it was pulling debris off the ground, but it never got more than 100 feet in the air. It never hooked up with the wall cloud."
Even if it had, he says, "we had the cars running and pointed in the right direction. We woulda been outta there."
Meet the Chases
The Henrys own two of the three vehicles Faidley, a technical consultant on the movie "Twister," utilizes in his treks through the plains in search of twisters to photograph.
They're dubbed Chase I, Chase II and Chase III. The Henrys own Chase II and III. Faidley, from Tucson, Ariz., tools around in Chase I, a Ford explorer that Phil calls "command central." It is used primarily for photographic purposes. Chase II, a GMC Typhoon, is used for navigation and Chase III, a 1997 Olds Bravada, is the communications vehicle.
Phil, also a "Twister" technical consultant (he wrote the vehicle specs), made some technical modifications on the Bravada to give it extra muscle in tornado alley "just because you never know when you're going to need it."
In addition to reprogramming the computer to coax another 25-30 horses out of its stock 200-horsepower V-6 engine, he removed the stock air filter and replaced it with one that will take in and let out more air with less resistance.
"We want this thing to go as fast as we can go," he says, adding that he kept modifications to a minimum "because reliability is as important as horsepower."
Chase III is loaded with bells and whistles, including a ham radio (to talk to spotters in the field), a CB radio (to receive weather reports from truckers on the road), a weather scanner (to monitor weather alerts), a phone, a radar detector and what the Henrys call a Bear Tracker.
It differs from a radar detector in that it gives drivers a three-mile advance notice on the highway patrol. Whereas a radar detector only sends a warning when patrolmen use radar, the Bear Tracker homes in on dispatchers and sets off a warning through the Tracker's mobile extenders.
"The other advantage is you can listen to what they're saying," Kathy says. "Nine times out of 10 you get locations."
The Henrys own a company that manufactures such scanners for Uniden.
Not that dealing with the highway patrol has proven much of a problem. During a tornado, Phil says, the cops are usually speeding away from the storm while the chasers are speeding into it.
During tornado season, the Henrys also rig up two televisions in Chase III -- one a 4-inch set that sits on the glove compartment door and picks up local TV broadcasts, the other an 8-inch model that picks up broadcasts from a satellite dish affixed to the roof.
The televisions have become an essential tool in locating tornadoes, which is tantamount to finding a needle in a haystack. Before, the chasers were chasing mainly on intuition.
"There may be three or four really bad storms in one day," he says, "and you have to pick."
With television access, the chasers can spot the most severe radar as fast as the National Weather Service can put it up and head directly to the location that seems ripest.
"Before, we were blind," Phil says.
How they got sucked in
The Henrys became interested in storm-chasing after watching a Weather Channel video on tornadoes. Being from Texas, Kathy always had fascination for them, what she describes as the most awesome form of weather one can witness.
"We saw this guy (Faidley) chasing them around in a Honda Civic, and we decided we had to get with him," she says.
Phil contacted the Weather Channel and asked about the man in the videotape. They gave him his name and a number where he could be reached.
"Not that he needed any help," she says, "but Phil and I have a lot of knowledge in vehicles and communications, and with his knowledge in storm chasing we knew we could make a good team."
After completing classes from the National Weather Service on tornadoes, identifying formations and reporting them, the Henrys were ready to hit the road.
Reel life vs. real life
Like most things in life, it's the thrill of the chase that drives them.
"If you're going out just to see tornadoes," he says, "you're not going to like tornado chasing."
Phil says the camaraderie and kinship of the storm chasers depicted in "Twister" is about the only thing with which the film didn't take dramatic license.
Kathy says the fun of storm chasing is driving into some backwater town and becoming instant celebrities.
"The best part is, you get to talk to the people. And everybody has a tornado story," she says.
"It's like, 'A cow went right over that barn there,'" he says. "A lot of these we take with a grain of salt."
But they also take a lot with them -- the memories of towns seemingly untouched by time and friendly grease monkeys seemingly untouched by soap.
And this, the only tornado joke Phil knows:
"What do a divorce and a tornado have in common in Texas? No matter which one you get, somebody's gonna lose a trailer."
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