Word: moyers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...alto-cumulus clouds begin to cast shadows across the truck stops and red-dirt farm lands of western Oklahoma. Moore and his aide, Bill Moyer, another O.U. meteorology student, keep peering at the sky, noting the cloud peaks tilting to the southeast, indicating that jet-stream winds are active. "That's good," Moore notes, "real good." Two essential ingredients for a tornadic storm seem to be present, and just as surely moving inexorably toward a showdown. If the cold, swift-moving jet-stream wind persists and clashes with the warm, moist lower air from the south, the atmosphere will...
...radio announces a tornado watch for a wide corridor stretching from Abilene, Texas, to Enid, Okla. "Ha!" Moore cries, his judgment vindicated. Overhead, the underside of the clouds is heavy with moisture. Bill Moyer begins to check out the cameras...
...camera and looks in horror as, 100 yds. away, the tan blur of a 100-m.p.h. tornado wind crosses the road on which the truck is parked. That wind could easily send it rolling end over end like a kid's toy. Moore dashes into the cab, Moyer on his heels. "Get in!" he screams. "That son of a bitch is coming right at us! Now! Let's go!" He jams the truck into gear, and we race north. Behind, hardly the length of a football field away, the ground beneath the tornado is suddenly lost...
...After plowing through a curtain of hail and rain, the truck turns south and breaks through the devastating storm. As it rolls through tiny Covington (pop. 605), every light in town blinks off and on, twice, because of storm-blown power lines. "Look for an escape route," Moore warns Moyer...
...force. They move faster, roiling and dipping over a wheatfield. It is now 7 p.m. Suddenly, 1 ,000 yds. away, a charcoal sky seems to extend a smoky finger that stabs down at the earth, then withdraws. "There it is!" shouts Moore, screeching to a halt. He and Moyer scramble out and hoist their cameras as the monstrous sky, churning and converging, forms a crooked funnel once, twice, half a dozen times. Each time the terrifying funnel snakes earthward and scratches the grassy field, dancing unsteadily, then retreats...