Word: truck
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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...
...Hell yes, it's going up!" He throws the pickup into a fast U-turn. He turns on the AM radio just in time to hear an unmistakable crackle. "If I didn't know better," Moore shouts, "I'd say that was lightning!" As the truck speeds through Cheyenne, the skies grow darker...
Seconds later, Moore lowers his 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...
...Vici, after pulling into a gas station, Moore rushes to a phone booth for one more call to the Norman lab. Back in the truck, he exults: "This is it! They're going crazy back there." He floors the accelerator, heading for the tornado's path, so he can get pictures. At 4:09 p.m., the first heavy drops splatter on the windshield, washing away the dead insects. A jumble of blue gray shapes rushes across the sky. Soon chilly blasts of air shake the truck. A windmill in a nearby field whirs crazily. "It's only...
Within minutes, the western sky has turned a stunning emerald green, and huge hailstones are smashing on the truck's roof. It is 6:16 p.m. Moore pushes east as the hailstones, some of them literally the size of golf balls, threaten to crack our windshield. 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...