To a baseball fan, one of the most exciting things to see is also one of most boring – the perfect game. That’s when a pitcher or combination of pitchers pitches a victory that lasts a minimum of nine innings and in which no opposing player reaches base (thanks, Wikipedia). No hits, walks or hit batsmen.
It’s so rare that it has happened only 21 times in all of Major League Baseball since 1900. Seeing one happen must be awe-inspiring to the baseball purest, even if the lack of action might inspire a few yawns for some of the others.
July 27, we might have just seen a perfect game in the crazy pursuit known as tornado chasing.
Regina’s Greg Johnson, the self-styled Tornado Hunter, posted this on his Facebook page before noon: “If I could be anywhere on planet Earth today and I wanted to see a tornado, I would want to be somewhere along Saskatchewan Highway 18 between Estevan and Gainsborough.”
I watched his progress on his website’s location tracking page throughout the day. I had hoped to catch a glimpse of his team in their distinctive orange and black Ford F-150 passing through Estevan, but it didn’t work out. Other people did, however, and posted photos online.
About eight hours later, he posted this: “My heart is going out to folks in SW Manitoba tonight. We intercepted a very large, violent and damaging tornado around 7:30 p.m. north of Pierson, Manitoba.
“Several farm yards were destroyed, power poles torn down, asphalt ripped from the surface of the highway and at times the tornado was up to a kilometre wide and had multiple suction vortices.”
A tornado a kilometre wide is right up there on the scale of rare happenings. Tornados are rare. Big ones are rarer still. Kilometre-wide tornados, in Canada, no less, are among the rarest beasts of them all.
And Johnson and his crew, eight hours before it happened, fingered where it would happen within about 16 or so kilometres. Pierson, is just 11 kilometres east of Gainsborough.
As Johnson and many others have said, tornadoes are unpredictable. But this is a freakily accurate prediction. This is beyond “years of research and knowledge.”
Now, let it be said that weather forecasters had been calling for severe weather in the area for the better part of a day. Other storm chasers converged in the same region. The armoured Dominator 3 chase vehicle was seen early the same morning in the parking lot at the White Bear Casino. There were several more.
I have to admit, I got a bit of a storm chasing bug a few years back. I only did it a few times, and didn’t get much in the way of results. I would set up two cameras on two tripods and have them timed so that one or the other had its shutter opened at any given time. But then I realized this probably wasn’t such a good idea, and now that I drive a vehicle I would prefer not getting hailed on, I’ll leave that to the professionals. Well, most of the time.
Earlier this summer there was a promising storm just north of Estevan. I took my daughter out with me, handed her the camcorder while I had my still camera. We saw some lightning but soon almost got caught in the middle of it and some serious hail on the way home. Let’s just say I was exceeding something while we raced home to get ahead of it. We ended up sheltering in a farmyard just north of Estevan after the hail started. That’s when I realized taking my daughter out on fool’s adventures like that might just be a step too far.
Yes, I know there are computer models and Doppler radar and all that wonderful stuff. But to figure out at least eight hours in advance where a large tornado would show up, within 16 kilometres, that’s something beyond intuition, experience and technology. That’s beyond voodoo.
We’re talking Jedi, here. Or maybe it was a perfect game in tornado hunting. I don’t know.
I’ll just watch Twister again tomorrow, and then I’ll think I know something.
— Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.
