May is peak tornado season. Here’s to the chasers who bring us the ‘ground truth’ of deadly storms.
Storm chaser Doug Crisp stands beside his chase vehicle on April 28, 2026, in Emporia. Crisp, an independent contractor for a Topeka television station, said he strives to document the "ground truth" of deadly storms. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
Something told Lanny Dean to hit the brakes.
The battered Honda CR-V skidded to a stop on the wet black pavement of U.S. 183, its array of antennas quivering. The anemometer poking above the roof was twirling madly, driven by the 50-mph rush of air being sucked into a massive, wedge-shaped tornado less than a mile ahead. As Dean watched, the twister crossed the highway and began chewing up an electrical substation at the southwestern edge of Greensburg, Kansas.
Ordinarily, Dean — then an athletic 33-year-old weather buff who had been pursued and caught by more storms than anybody else in the adrenalin-drunk world of storm chasers — would have stood on the accelerator and kept the twister a few hundred yards off his right front fender.
He’d done just that hundreds of times, while shooting video and downloading weather data to his laptop and phoning in reports. He’d been on the air with meteorologist Jay Prater at KAKE in Wichita that night, warning the audience to take cover now, good advice that Dean never seemed to follow himself. The roof of the CR-V, in fact, was still crumpled from an encounter he’d had two years before in the tiny community of Fowler, not far up the road from Greensburg. A twister had picked up the Honda and left it spinning on its top, with the windows blown out and Dean strapped upside-down in the driver’s seat.
Fowler had been a small tornado, a writhing dirty white snake, EF1 or maybe EF2 on the Fujita. The adventure had gotten Dean scrapes and bruises and an Emmy nomination, because his video camera had never stopped running.
This one was something different.
Dean knew the twister was big, but he didn’t know exactly how big. Greensburg had gone dark, just a blot on the prairie where a glittering oasis of light had once been. But as a bank of transformers at the substation arced and then exploded, the night sky briefly turned to day. The tornado was a wedge-shaped monster that filled the horizon.
It was 9:03 p.m. Friday, May 4, 2007.
The twister would kill 13 people, destroy 95 percent of town, and be the first ever EF5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, a storm so strong that its official designation goes beyond “devasting” to “incredible.”
Had something not told Dean to hit the brakes, the CR-V would have been in the path of the killer storm as it crossed and re-crossed Highway 187. Dean would spend the next few hours walking through the surreal rubble of Greensburg, trying to help but feeling mostly helpless. Images from that night would haunt his dreams: a black cow impaled on a gas pipe and bellowing pitifully, cell phones chiming and beeping in the debris, the bloody bubble on the lips of an elderly woman as she lay near death.
Dean told me the story of that night during a long phone interview a few months after it happened. I still remember the pain in his voice. For a while, because of the Greensburg tornado, Dean may have been the most famous tornado chaser in the world. The pursuit was turned into popular culture by the 1996 Jan de Bont film “Twister,” which takes some liberties with the science and melodrama but gets the anxiety of living in tornado alley right.
Tomorrow is the 19th anniversary of the Greensburg tornado.
Each spring, those of us on the Great Plains keep an extra eye on weather, especially when a warm day yields to a cool evening. May is historically the peak month for severe weather. But the danger of tornadoes is that they can happen at just about any time, not just during May or when the sky turns a weird color of green. In 2007, for example, the National Weather Service predicted only a “moderate” chance of severe weather in the hours before the storm hit Greensburg. But once the storm was identified by radar, and confirmed by spotters on the ground, warnings from the NWS and broadcast media saved lives.
Greensburg, in southwestern Kansas, was a town of 1,600 residents when the twister hit. Despite a major initiative to rebuild the city as a model “green” community, the town never really recovered. Its population is now 740, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The consequences of major storms, both in human and economic terms, make Plains inhabitants especially sensitive to weather and weather forecasting. I was in Greensburg a few days after the storm, and the devastation was disorienting. Photos don’t convey the feeling of standing in a rubble pile that used to be a town you once knew, with only a few landmarks standing and the trees sheared off as if a giant lawnmower had passed overhead.
I was reminded of the upcoming Greensburg anniversary on Thursday, April 23, when a line of severe storms swept up from Oklahoma, bound for northeast Kansas. We don’t have the Weather Channel anymore since our local internet provider here in Emporia dropped it from the lineup. While I was punching buttons in frustration on the remote, Kim had her laptop out and said that it must be serious because Jeremy was down to his suspenders.
I didn’t know what she was talking about.
Jeremy Goodwin on WIBW in Topeka, she said.
When he dons his suspenders, that’s a sure sign of a serious weather risk. Kim, who lived in Joplin, Missouri, during the devastating 2011 tornado that killed 158 — the worst twister of this century — reads weather forecasts with a practiced eye, and she knows who she trusts.
I watched with her online as Goodwin talked about reports he was getting from his storm chasers, including Doug Crisp from Emporia. The NOAA weather alert radio in the bedroom upstairs was going off every five minutes, or at least it seemed like it was that often, with severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings for our county. The storm sirens in Emporia sounded once, but luckily there were no monsters that “miss this house, and miss that house, and come after you.”
That’s from “Twister.”
It’s the line Kim quotes most often this time of year.
As we watched Goodwin track the storms, he seemed more than a bit frustrated that the NWS radar in Topeka was glitchy. He later posted on social media that there had been 11 tornado warnings in the area that Thursday.
“The event had a special kick to it,” he said, “because the Topeka National Weather Service Radar was compromised at times. This was a hard night for tracking these storms.”
Last June, I wrote about how DOGE staffing cuts to the NWS had resulted in the overnight closing of the forecast office at Goodland, Kansas. The lack of 24-hour staffing at the Goodland office was alarming because so many violent storms happen at night. A few weeks ago, the Goodland office stopped sending out weekly briefings to emergency managers, schools, and transportation officials. After a tornado tore through Ottawa on April 13, U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids questioned whether reported cutbacks in weather balloon launches have hampered the weather service’s ability to produce timely forecasts and warnings.
Anxiety over the continued ability of the NWS to respond to severe weather was exacerbated recently by reports the Trump administration plans a reorganization of the service. The president’s fiscal 2027 budget request to Congress calls for a $1.1 billion decrease for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, of which the weather service is a part. The total request, $4.54 billion, represents a 20% cut.
The NWS said the reorganization was about efficiency and did not necessarily mean decreases in staffing. The service has already begun “modernizing” some of its forecasting using artificial intelligence. Some forecasts, including a recent one from Montana, say predictions beyond the fourth day are made with “little or no human intervention” and should be used with caution.
Such a disclaimer has not yet been attached to recent Topeka forecasts.
I asked the weather service about what caused the glitchy weather radar that had Goodwin’s suspenders twisted.
“The 88D site in Topeka (KTWX) lost cellular data communications on Thursday, April 23, during severe weather,” NWS spokesperson Erica Grow Cei told me. “The outages were caused by the storms that were moving through, and data was sporadically available beginning at 6:21 p.m.”
The radar functioned properly, Grow Cei said, but the transmission of data from the radar site to the Topeka forecast office and to other users was impaired. Because of redundancy built into the network, she said, forecasters were able to rely on radar from Kansas City, Hastings, Omaha and Wichita.
The farther away you get from a weather radar site, the more information you lose. This is because of the curvature of the earth and basic physics. To get an accurate report about what’s happening on the ground, you need a weather spotter.
Or a storm chaser.
Mark Svenvold brings a poet’s sensibility to storm chasing in his 2005 book “Big Weather.”
“A tornado represents many things,” Svenvold writes, “beginning with its own extreme unlikelihood. Every tornado represents a supreme, if momentary, trouncing of the second law of thermodynamics, the glum law of entropy that states that all things move from order to chaos.”
Storm chasers seek a transcendent moment of wonder.
That seemed also to be the motivation for Crisp, the independent storm chaser who reports to Goodwin at WIBW. I recently met Crisp at a local coffee shop, where he explained how he got into storm chasing and where I went to the parking lot to admire his white Jeep Renegade chase vehicle. The windshield of the Renegade was cracked from a recent barrage of hailstones.
In 1974, when Crisp was a kid, he and his older brother snuck a glimpse of an F4 tornado from a window of their Emporia house. The tornado killed six individuals, with most of the fatalities at the Lincoln Village Mobile Home Park.
“I can vividly remember that tornado,” said Crisp, who is now 57. “You could see stuff going through the air. That’s the point that sparked my interest.”
A high school earth sciences teacher was encouraging, Crisp said, and later he attended weather spotter training and took online classes in meteorology. In 2007, he launched his career as a storm chaser. He now has his own Facebook page and is part of Live Storm Chasing, an online site.
Crisp, a former detention officer and volunteer firefighter, works nights as a security guard for the local hospital, but each May he takes three weeks of vacation to go storm chasing. His primary task, he said, is to document the storms. Getting close requires skill and the knowledge to do it safely.
Some chasers, he said, call being near a tornado the bear’s cage. Others, including Crisp, prefer to call it the notch. That’s the inflow zone where the storm is sucking up air, increasing the likelihood of a violent tornado.
“You have a sense of accomplishment to see what’s going on and being able to give that ground truth,” he said. “The (meteorologists) rely on us to give them that information. They ask, ‘What are you seeing? Is there a low ring, do you see a rotating wall cloud?’”
Crisp said he doesn’t chase storms for the thrill.
“I do it because it’s something I feel is important,” he said. “These storms are historical events.”
He said he’s never been frightened by a tornado, but that he is often concerned about the behavior of other drivers on the road and was once rattled by a nearby lightning strike while out of his vehicle.
Storm chasing may be thrilling entertainment, but it can be a dangerous venture in real life. Four storm chasers were killed in the 2013 El Reno, Oklahoma, tornado. Three of the dead were members of TWISTEX, a tornado research experiment.
Many of us who grew up in Tornado Alley have a false sense of invulnerability. We’ve been seeing twisters all of our lives and none of them have hurt us yet, so why worry? The problem is that human imagination cannot grasp the destructive force of the storms that hit Greensburg or Joplin.
Nineteen years ago, when the memory of the deadly Kansas twister was still fresh in his mind, Lanny Dean told me he had a recurring dream. He was back in Greensburg to receive an award, with the crowd nodding and clapping, and suddenly the brick walls of the auditorium parted to reveal a wedge-shaped monster bearing down.
Dean would open his mouth to warn the crowd … and nothing.
He could not utter a sound.
I haven’t talked to Dean in a long while. I sent him a message recently to see if he still had that dream, but I didn’t hear back. I don’t know if he received it. I also sent Goodwin a couple of messages saying I wanted to talk about his suspenders, but I didn’t hear back from him, either.
That’s okay. He’s probably busy this month.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.