Oklahoma death toll could rise

Storm chasers die in US tornado

Three veteran US storm chasers were among the 10 people killed when a violent tornado barreled into the Oklahoma City metro area on Saturday.

Stuff,

2 June, 2013

Tim Samaras, 55, a leading storm chaser and founder of the tornado research company Twistex, was killed in the Oklahoma City suburb of El Reno along with his son, Paul Samaras, 24, and Carl Young, 45, a Twistex meteorologist, according to a statement from Tim Samaras' brother, Jim Samaras.

Five tornados touched down in central Oklahoma and caused flash flooding just 11 days after a twister categorised as EF5, the most powerful ranking, tore up the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore and killed 24 people.

Severe storms also swept into neighboring Missouri, while Moore experienced only limited damage.

The Oklahoma Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has increased the death toll to 10 after earlier listing nine fatalities.

As usual, so-called storm chasers closely tracked the storm to measure its power, gather research and take video to feed the television and Internet appetite for dramatic images.

''It is too early to say specifically how this tornado might change how we cover severe weather, but we certainly plan to review and discuss this incident,'' said David Blumenthal, a spokesman for The Weather Channel, for which Tim Samaras and Young had worked in the past.

Three employees of the channel suffered minor injuries when their sport-utility vehicle was thrown about 200 metres by the winds while tracking the El Reno storm on Friday.

In a field known for risk-takers seeking the most dramatic video images of tornados, Samaras was seen as a cautious professional whose driving passion was research rather than getting the ''money shot,'' said friend and fellow storm chaser Tony Laubach.

''Tim Samaras was the best there was and he was the last person you would think this would happen to,'' said Laubach, a photojournalist who had been storm chasing with Samaras since 2007.

''It's going to bring everybody down to earth. A lot of chasing has been getting very, very careless, and Tim is not a careless person. He is as nimble and skilled as he could be,'' Laubach said.

Among the other dead were two children - an infant sucked out of the car with its mother and a 4-year-old boy who along with his family had sought shelter in a drainage ditch.

The EF3 twister touched down a few kilometres north of Moore, the Oklahoma City suburb pounded by a monstrous EF5 tornado on May 20 that killed 24 people. EF5 is the strongest rating for a twister on the scale used to measure tornado strength.

The national Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, said predicted a slight chance of severe weather in the Northeast today, mainly from the Washington, DC, area to northern Maine. Hail and high winds were the chief threat, though a tornado could not be ruled out, forecasters said.

In in the southern part of the United States, thunderstorms, high winds and hail were expected as part of a slow-moving cold front. Heavy rains could spawn flash flooding in some areas, the National Weather Service said.

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Oklahoma wasn't the only state hit by violent weather this weekend. In Missouri, areas west of St Louis received significant damage from an EF3 tornado night that packed estimated winds of 240kmh.

In St Charles County, at least 71 homes were heavily damaged and 100 had slight to moderate damage, county spokeswoman Colene McEntee said.

Northeast of St Louis, the town of Roxana, Illinois, also saw damage from an EF3 tornado. National Weather Service meteorologist Jayson Gosselin said it wasn't clear whether the damage in Missouri and Illinois came from the same EF3 twister or separate ones.

A total of five tornadoes struck the Oklahoma City metro area on Saturday, the National Weather Service said. Fallin said Sunday that 115 people were injured.

It formed out on the prairie west of Oklahoma City, giving residents plenty of advance notice. When told to seek shelter, many ventured out and snarled traffic across the metro area - perhaps remembering the devastation in Moore.

Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Betsy Randolph said roadways quickly became congested with the convergence of rush-hour traffic and fleeing residents.

"They had no place to go, and that's always a bad thing. They were essentially targets just waiting for a tornado to touch down," Randolph said. "I'm not sure why people do that sort of stuff, but it is very dangerous."

Terri Black, a 51-year-old teacher's assistant in Moore, said she decided to try and outrun the tornado when she learned her southwest Oklahoma City home was in harm's way. She quickly regretted it.

"It was chaos. People were going southbound in the northbound lanes. Everybody was running for their lives," she said.

When she realised she was a sitting duck, Black turned around and found herself directly in the path of the most violent part of the storm.

"My car was actually lifted off the road and then set back down," Black said.