Another tragic storm chasing incident has occurred: a traffic crash on rural roads in the Texas Panhandle. There were three fatalities - 2 in a vehicle that ran a stop sign, and 1 in the vehicle into which they collided. All three victims of this were storm chasing at the time. I wrote about an eerily similar incident that happened in 2015, here. The evidence is mounting that being on the highways is indeed the most dangerous threat to chasers (and others). I wrote a guide to safe, responsible storm chasing decades ago, and I rated being on the roads as the #1 threat before anyone had been killed. At least 7 people have died in road wrecks during storm chases, that I know of. Additional fatalities are inevitable. It only takes a few seconds of inattention to the task of driving to result in terrible consequences.
I am not somehow invulnerable to all this. I could be distracted by something while driving on a chase and be responsible for a fatal crash. Like the tragedy of the 31 May 2013 deaths of the Twistex team: Tim and Paul Samaras, and Carl Young - bad things can happen to anyone, even someone trying their best to behave responsibly. However, these recent traffic fatalities both involved a chaser running a stop sign. It might be possible to do so in relative safety on a rural road, but even on rural roads, it's both illegal and foolish to do.
These are unnecessary deaths. The so-called "chase community" (which really isn't a "community" at all, but rather a group of people with a shared hobby) needs to take a long look at their behavior during their chase activities. If someone has done some irresponsible driving in the past, this might be a good time to resolve to discontinue such practices for good. This is the 2nd recent wake-up call, folks. The time is long overdue to get serious about ceasing illegal and unsafe driving during a storm chase [or any other time, for that matter!] No one gets a free pass on the roads, and this includes people chasing for TV.
Supplement: Some news media have gone into attack mode on storm chasers as "thrill-seekers" as a result of this tragedy. If someone can witness the grandeur
and beauty of the atmosphere and NOT get an adrenaline rush, I would
have to wonder for what reason they're chasing. I see no problem with being a thrill-seeker - as I noted in my 2014 talk at ChaserCon. That doesn't
mean we all have a death wish or are intentionally putting ourselves in imminent
danger.
The media narrative they always
pre-suppose is that the people who do this are all crazy fools with a
death wish. They struggle to grasp why people choose to chase and their
pre-supposition blinds them to what chasers actually say. They look
for a sound bite to support their already-written storyline about crazy
storm chasers. Their usually crappy stories show they don't get it and
likely never will ... see here.
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