If you saw the dramatic footage out of North Texas Tuesday, hopefully from the safety of your living room or gathered around a TV at work, you know that weather events like those tornadoes can make pretty compelling television. And someone has to head straight into those storms to film all that video.
Since 2000, that’s what Hank Schyma, front man for long-running Houston modern-rockers the Southern Backtones, has done for a living. He hasn’t quite started his own storm season yet, but even Tuesday afternoon, “people are blowing up my phone telling me what I’m missing out on,” he says.
Schyma can trace his interest in tornados and weather back to being “obsessed” with the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz, and looking out the windows of his family’s home near Dallas hoping to see a funnel cloud whenever a “tornado watch” would come on TV. But he confesses he doesn’t really know why he decided to pursue storm-chasing as a career.
“I still haven’t figured it out,” he says. “Why do some people become an accountant?”
Then Schyma happened to be working as a cameraman at Channel 11 when the weather nerd struck up a friendship with the station’s popular buzz-cut meteorologist at the time, Dr. Neil Frank.
“I pretty much hounded Dr. Frank,” Schyma says. “He took me in and taught me about forecasting.”
In the past 12 years, Schyma says he’s photographed 38 up-close pictures of tornadoes. He does hurricanes too — here’s Schyma in the middle of Hurricane Ike — and says his real pastime, which can also be lucrative if you get the right shot, is lightning photography. He also filmed a documentary about chasing tornadoes, The Monster Show, he hopes to release in September.
Schyma says high tornado season runs from mid-April through mid-June. Unless something big happens, he’s got one more gig Saturday in College Station — the Backtones released their first album in five years, La Vie en Noir, earlier this year — before putting the band on the back burner and heading off.
He makes his money by selling his footage to cable networks like CNN and The Weather Channel. Although he calls what local affiliates pay “chump change” by comparison, he says they are good about highlighting his local ties, calling him a “Houston storm-chaser” when they use his video.
Schyma sat out Tuesday’s storm because traffic and other factors can make it difficult to chase storms around large urban areas like the Metroplex. (He was actually watching a movie about storm-chasers in local IMAX – “my competition.”) But Schyma will chase storms all over the Great Plains, all the way up into Kansas and Nebraska.
When tornados are active, Schyma says he is “on call all the time.” He knows where to position himself by closely following computer models and keeping an eye on the jet stream, and can know where a storm is likely to occur as many as eight days out.
“The jet stream is pretty forecastable,” he says. “If the jet stream is going through the plains, there’s a pretty good chance of [a tornado] happening.”
Of course, Schyma says the closer he gets to a storm, the better the footage and the more he gets paid. He’s been as close as 50 yards to the middle of a tornado: “That one moseyed up to my car and danced in front of me.”
Last year in Oklahoma, Schyma says he saw a “long-track” tornado that grew to an entire mile wide. Some storms can wipe out large sections of a good-sized, like the tornado that caused an estimated $2.2 billion in insurance claims in Joplin, Mo., last May.
So exactly how dangerous is Schyma’s job, anyway?
“As dangerous as you can imagine,” he says. “Tornados kill people. Just look at the damage.”
Luckily, Schyma says (“knock on wood”), there have never been any storm-chaser deaths that he’s heard of. But even away from the front lines, storm-chasers are not completely safe; even relaxing at their hotel after a day on the job, a followup line of storms could come through and render the crew “a sitting duck.”
Schyma says some things are different from the way storm-chasing has been portrayed in the movies. He’s never seen a cow flying through the air.
“A tornado like that would pick up a bunch of dirt around it,” he says. “Usually those storms are so dark you can’t see anything.”
He has seen clothes, branches, and once a lawnmower flying around, though. And in his truck, he listens to current weather data, not music.
“I don’t think anybody does that, like in Twister,” he says. “You want to focus on the sky, not your favorite band.”
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