Episode #3 Blown Away

Narrator: This is the terrible story of a tornado chaser show. Or rather, two tornado chaser shows. The earlier of the two shows, the original, was an old style tornado chaser show on the Science Channel. It had actual humans, Steve and Eddie, in the front seat of the chaser car so there was a special appeal because of the possible danger. But you knew no one was really going to get hurt. Still, it was great to see and hear those big storms. One day, another channel, the Technology Network, decided to make tornado chasing more of a competition by introducing . . . a driverless car. Now the producers of the first show were worried. The new show was amazing. No humans in it, just the car. These driverless cars were programmable, though only up to a point. They could get closer to a tornado than any human driven car, but they were pretty much uncontrollable. They used sophisticated sound sensing, allowing the car to follow the roar of the tornado so they could skirt along the path of the rotating storm, getting closer and closer. . . long enough for some great video recording. But sometimes, the car would get too close and cross some kind of invisible line into the area where the tornado's vacuum pressure would sieze it, tug at it, draw it in, lift it way up into the air and destroy it. It looked pretty incredible when it happened, especially since it was repeatedly replayed in slow motion . . . though anything recognizable vanished almost instantly and the visual feed immediately became only dark, roaring dirt and debris. It was great.