Dangers
There are inherent dangers involved in pursuing hazardous weather. These range from lightning, tornadoes, large hail, flooding, hazardous road conditions (rain or hail-covered roadways), animals on the roadway, downed power lines, reduced visibility from heavy rain (often wind blown), and hail fog. Most directly weather-related hazards such as from a tornado are minimized if the storm chaser is knowledgeable and cautious. Tornadoes affect a relatively small area and are predictable enough to be avoided if a safe distance is maintained. Lightning, however, is an unavoidable hazard. "Core punching", storm chaser slang for driving through a heavy precipitation core to intercept the area of interest within a storm, is recognized as hazardous due to reduced visibility and because many tornadoes are rain-wrapped. The "bear's cage" refers to the area under a rotating wall cloud, which is the "bear", and to the blinding precipitation (which can include window-shatteringly large hail) surrounding some or all sides of a tornado, which is the "cage". Similarly, chasing at night heightens risk due to darkness.
In reality, the most significant hazard is driving, which is made more dangerous by the severe weather. Adding still more to this hazard are the multiple distractions which can compete for a chaser's attention, such as driving, communicating with chase partners and others with a phone and/or radio, navigating, watching the sky, checking weather data, and shooting photos or video. Again here, prudence is key to minimizing the risk. Chasers ideally work to prevent the driver from multitasking either by chase partners covering the other aspects or by the driver pulling over to do these other things if he/she is chasing alone. Falling asleep while driving is a chase hazard, especially on long drives back. This also is exacerbated by nocturnal darkness and by the defatigating demands of driving through precipitation and on slick roads.
Read more about this topic: Storm Chasing
Famous quotes containing the word dangers:
“So closely interwoven have been our lives, our purposes, and experiences that, separated, we have a feeling of incompleteness—united, such strength of self-association that no ordinary obstacles, difficulties, or dangers ever appear to us insurmountable.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Anyone with a real taste for solitude who indulges that taste encounters the dangers of any other drug-taker. The habit grows. You become an addict.... Absorbed in the visions of solitude, human beings are only interruptions. What voice can equal the voices of solitude? What sights equal the movement of a single day’s tide of light across the floor boards of one room? What drama be as continuously absorbing as the interior one?”
—Jessamyn West (1902–1984)