YouTube storm chasers are wasting my time.
YouTube suggested a storm chasing channel to me this evening. It’s not completely out of left field, I subscribe to channels like Tim Vasquez’s Forecast Lab to help me better understand weather from a pilot’s perspective, but it’s more sensational and voyeuristic than what I’ve watched in the past.
It’s also a bunch more compelling to watch.
I was kind of torn as I sat, glued to the TV, watching twentysomethings race down rural roads looking for disasters to wrap around themselves. Is this a problem? It feels like this could become a problem. If one of these guys gets injured, or, heaven forbid, injures somebody else, I sense a pending change in YouTube’s acceptable use policy. There is a lot that can go wrong here.
On the other hand, damn can it suck you in (no pun intended.)
There is a lot of young male adrenaline feeding this. These guys seem to be hoping for something bad to happen. It doesn’t look right. But does that matter? You can hope and wish for the weather to do or not to do anything you want, it’s not going to change what the weather does or does not do. The weather is going to do what it’s going to do.
If you doing what you are going to do increases awareness of hazardous weather, even if that’s not necessarily at the core of why you are doing it, have you done anything wrong? I feel like you haven’t.
For now I’m going to say it looks a little distasteful at times but it’s a net positive. That could turn on a dime, however, so I hope they’re careful and/or lucky enough that nobody gets hurt.
I get it, I really do
The most surreal moment I’ve seen thus far involved a guy with a smashed windshield driving down a dirt road alongside a “condensed” (visible) tornado–maybe a few hundred feet off his passenger side–while apparently sensing no danger at all in what he was doing. It seemed insane, but it made me think back thirty years to being in similar positions while fighting forest fires with the Wisconsin DNR.
At a certain stage there’s this immense wild danger out on the horizon. Maybe it’s a black cloud that could drop a tornado on you, maybe it’s a smoke dimmed sky flickering orange that could send a wall of flame sweeping toward you. You feel the danger, you worry about it, you kind of want to run away. But eventually it passes a certain point, it gets close enough, and now it’s no longer a danger; now it’s an enemy and you must pursue it and you must destroy it. Regardless of whether you’re looking through a smashed windshield or breathing through burning lungs, your brain doesn’t register danger anymore.
Dudes in their twenties.