Return to Transcripts main page

American Morning

Storm Chaser Has Close Encounter With Powerful Tornado

Aired June 14, 2001 - 10:14   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DONNA KELLEY, CNN ANCHOR: Chad Myers has joined us from upstairs to talk about some unbelievable pictures that we got from Nebraska. What's happened? Explain to us what happened last evening?

CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Amazing. When we saw these pictures come in, I mean I must have had six phone calls at one time, look at the router, look at the router, look at these pictures that are coming in. This is what a storm chaser from Tulsa picked up yesterday in Seward, Nebraska. His name is Jeff Piotrowski. Actually, I have to admit he's a friend of mine.

LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: He's a crazy friend of yours if he's going to drive around looking at this stuff.

MYERS: We chased together back in Oklahoma City when I worked there. And Jeff, I know you have a real job -- and he's on the phone with us now -- but, in fact, the real thing is you don't spend a lot of time at your real job, but this really is what your passion is, no?

JEFF PIOTROWSKI, STORM CHASER: Yes, it is, Chad. It is my passion. I love to chase severe weather and tornadoes. I've done it for 25 years and this is another, you know, a spectacular tornado that we shot yesterday in Nebraska.

MYERS: Jeff, long time no see, long time no talk to. But you're still out there beating up cars all the time.

PIOTROWSKI: Right. Yeah, there's, you know, quite a bit of tornadoes and, you know, yesterday and of course today there's going to be another big outbreak it looks like.

MYERS: All right, so I have to ask you, we're watching this video here, probably an F-2, F-3. What did you think?

PIOTROWSKI: Yeah, F-2, F-3 and a couple times because there's a weakness it may have been lower, more like a, you know, at one time it have may have shrunk to maybe even a weak F-4.

MYERS: Really?

PIOTROWSKI: Yeah. A couple of times it really intensified but luckily it was in the middle of a wheat field and there was not really a lot of property around, per se. MYERS: Jeff, we saw you get very close to this thing and this video is going to run for a while. It kind of looked a little bit like the movie "Twister." I think you got a little too close to this one, didn't you?

HARRIS: That's what I'm thinking.

KELLEY: That's what I would guess.

PIOTROWSKI: Well, the roads were hard to navigate and I found a trail on the ground about five miles west and when I went west I looked toward me. It was trying to become rain. You'll see rain coming over the lens camera. It was very hard to photograph. But, you know, after 25 years of doing this, you've got to kind of get in close to see it and I just let the tornado come right at me until the last second.

And it did some really unusual things. There should be a place in the tape there as the tornado passes just north of the road that...

MYERS: Yeah, we'll get to it. It's a little frightening. It's even frightening for me, who lived in Oklahoma City for a while. I have to ask you, were you by yourself? You're the only voice I heard on the tape.

PIOTROWSKI: Right. I was driving by myself, navigating by myself.

MYERS: Jeff, that's trouble. You know that, right?

PIOTROWSKI: Yes.

MYERS: That's trouble when you don't know the area. I really want to stress to people that if you are going to chase -- and it's so very difficult to do without professional help -- that you need a navigator. How did you try to get through Nebraska with all these dirt roads without a navigator?

PIOTROWSKI: Well, just good maps and you look at where you're driving and you always know where you're going all the time.

MYERS: The big thing is to not get on dirt roads that have been rained on because dirt roads become impassable and then you are in the way and you can't get out of the way. Luckily, you got in the way of this one but you were able to turn around.

PIOTROWSKI: Yes, I was. I was very lucky to get out of the path of it, but it was very difficult at the same time in order to be able to do that.

KELLEY: Hey, Jeff, this is Donna on the set with these guys, too. What do you do when you feel like you're too close? Do you just have to just turn tail and hope you can get out of there? How do you do that?

PIOTROWSKI: You just fail. I mean you have to put yourself in a position where you can escape if you have to and sometimes in those positions when you're, you know, basically at ground zero, you have to watch out what's going to happen constantly around you to be able to move. And you constantly have to keep your eye on the tornado because you never know what it's going to do. And that's it.

KELLEY: Why do you do this? I mean I understand to a point the adrenaline rush, but what is the big thrill for you?

PIOTROWSKI: Well, I mean I enjoy...

MYERS: Now you're getting very close here. We have the pictures of you and you're already turned on the roadway sideways looking at this thing.

HARRIS: Oh my god. Hey, Jeff, Leon Harris here. I hate to interrupt, but I've got to ask you at this point, because I still think you're crazy, but how close are you at this point in the tape? How close are you to this thing?

PIOTROWSKI: Leon and Chad, you guys, I think that at one point it may have been 150 yards from me. You know, I was behind some tress and it was about 100 mile an hour winds that were passing at the time with debris flying overhead. So, you know, I had to take shelter. The scariest part was when the tornado actually turned and it started coming east down the highway. That was pretty scary at that point.

MYERS: Obviously amazing pictures, Jeff, but did anybody get hurt with this tornado that you know of?

PIOTROWSKI: I believe there may have been some minor injuries in a couple of farmhouses on the southeast side of Seward right over the town of Seward and just northeast from that point.

MYERS: Yeah, I lived in Lincoln, Nebraska a long time and I know Seward well. I have to ask you this, because I am sure you're out there chasing again, where are you going today?

PIOTROWSKI: Well, today I'm actually boarding a plane and heading back to Tulsa. It looks like we're going to have a significant outbreak of significant weather all the way from Minnesota all the way through Oklahoma down to Texas. So those hot areas today are going to be the Tulsa area and the area down in Dallas up to south central Oklahoma looks very volatile for possibly some more damaging tornadoes today.

MYERS: So, Jeff, was this a rental car you had?

PIOTROWSKI: Yes and no.

MYERS: Do you buy the insurance when you rent these cars, I guess, is another thing. Actually, I do have those graphics on my weather computer to show where this severe weather will be again for today. Two moderate risk areas, Jeff, one to the north up by Minneapolis and one actually down where you live, down toward Tulsa. Is that where you're going to be chasing today, from like the Texarkana area right on down into about Ardmore or so? PIOTROWSKI: Yeah. We'll probably be in the Tulsa area on down to Dallas today, in that area.

MYERS: So folks there are going to have their heads up already and a lot more tornado activity today. This is a significant storm rolling out of the plains. It had 30 inches of snow in parts of Montana and Idaho yesterday. It's the cold air wrapping in behind it. Jeff, all I can say is be safe. I know you do this for a living and we have this stormproductionsinc.com. We dialed up your Web site. Some pretty amazing pictures on there.

PIOTROWSKI: Well, I appreciate all that and thanks, Leon, and everybody. It was, the first thing, nobody really got hurt in this particular event. But, you know, with weather at this time of year when you have these big systems that come out in June like this, you know, the weather gets really wild and crazy and that's what we're seeing right now.

HARRIS: Yeah. Jeff, you are one guy who will never borrow my car. I can tell you that right now with a certainty.

KELLEY: That's a safe bet.

MYERS: I have seen many dents in his car and most of the windows blown out by hail on some of the old Blazers he used to drive back in the early '90s.

HARRIS: Oh, my god. Well, that's why it wouldn't be smart for him to say whether or not that was a rental car for his own protection.

KELLEY: I don't know what happened.

MYERS: I don't know what happened to that.

HARRIS: God, almighty. That was a great tape. Thanks for finding that stuff for us and finding Jeff.

KELLEY: Yeah, thanks, Jeff.

HARRIS: We want to advise folks that what we're going to do is we didn't get a chance to listen to that tape. So we're going to play it again after a break here and let you folks listen to some of the sounds that came on that tape. And you're not going to believe what you're going to hear, just ahead. Don't go away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HARRIS: All right, welcome back. And back by popular demand, we're going to play again some of that videotape that we just saw before the break, incredible tornado video that Chad Myers' friend actually provided for us.

MYERS: Yeah. And Jeff has been chasing tornadoes for so long, he knows what he's doing. We don't recommend you going out there chasing tornadoes. It is difficult. It's almost impossible to do if you don't have somebody backing you up on the phone saying where is this storm going, which way is it going and 99.9 percent of the people don't have somebody like Jeff does to call and say where is this thing on Doppler right now, where's the rotation, where should I be?

Because you don't want to be in front of the storm because then you're in it and then you get the hail and then you can't see the tornado. You actually want to be on the south or kind of on the southwest side to be able to -- or the southeast side to be able to see the tornado without the rain core ahead of you. So like we always say, don't try this at home.

KELLEY: Yeah. So we'll mention, this tape goes about six minutes. What we do want to tell you, in case you have little ears or people that should not hear one bad word when they get a little bit into the excitement of this. It's about midway through the tape. So about three minutes in they'll hear a bad word, so that we don't get blamed for that. It's on the tape and if you don't want to hear it, that's where it is.

HARRIS: But when you see what's coming toward this guy in this car, you'll understand why he said it. Here it is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PIOTROWSKI: It's coming right toward me. Blue sky. The whole sky is rotating above me. It's still rotating. It's still a tornado, the northeast side of Seward, coming right at me. Large wedge tornado. It's going to hit this house, I'm afraid. It's wedging out really hard now. I don't know if it's going to hit this house or not. (UNINTELLIGIBLE) I'm going to get blasted with another big belt of rain. It's turning into a big trunk, code. This tornado's anchored.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARRIS: I'm sorry, folks. We really hate breaking into this tape. We'll try to get the rest of that to you some other time. But we want to go now live to Gothenburg, Sweden. President Bush is about to address the press there in his press conference after his meetings with the leaders of the European Union.

(INTERRUPTED BY CNN COVERAGE OF A LIVE EVENT)

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com