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 Travel & Outdoors | March 2006 
Storm Tours: Our Disaster is Their Thrill
 Noaki Schwartz - MiamiHerald.com
| | A new breed of tourist may be heading to Florida, and they aren't in search of sun and sand. They want wind and rain, and are paying big bucks to find it. |
With a predicted increase in hurricane activity in the coming years, Florida may also attract an unexpected kind of tourism this season: hurricane safaris.
A handful of companies in Florida, Texas and Oklahoma have started offering "hurricane tours" as the ultimate in storm-chasing experiences. Started largely by self-described "weather freaks" who began offering tornado tours years ago, a few branched out to hurricane tours.
"You can climb a mountain or jump out of a plane but can never tame a hurricane or tornado - that's for sure," said Roger Hill of Silver Lining Tours in Houston. "It's one of the last frontiers that no one will ever conquer."
The willing pay $1,500 and more for three days of little sleep, canned tuna and crackers and miserable weather. Customers are on a 48-hour e-mail notice list. They fly out to the site of a predicted landfall, jump in vans decked out with reclining seats and The Weather Channel and drive miles to a parking structure to wait for the storm.
After it passes, the tours wander around to see the damage. Storm chasing protocol dictates that it is in poor taste to boast about one's experience in what one chaser described as "mixed company." In other words: Don't talk about the great hurricane you just witnessed next to a native who just lost his home.
Hill had several trial runs before officially starting his tours with Hurricane Rita in September - the first group visited Port Arthur and Beaumont, Texas. He charges about $500 a day for three- or four-day trips. Silver Lining's website is stripped with black clouds, lightning and tornadoes and the pitch: "Are you ready for the atmospheric adventure of a lifetime?"
Including the trial runs, Hill has followed Hurricanes Charley, Jean, Rita and Katrina along the Gulf Coast and in Florida, including Marathon, Melbourne, Vero Beach and Punta Gorda. Hill expects he'll be back in the Sunshine State this season.
DANGEROUS VACATION
David Gold, who offers logistical support at Silver Lining, admits the business is controversial. But he said they don't celebrate the outcome of these natural disasters: mobile homes with crumpled roofs, downed power lines and snaking gas lines.
"There are people that will think it's disgusting that someone would take people into harm's way," said Gold, who says he has a doctorate in atmospheric sciences from Texas A&M University. "But if we're staying out of harm's way, I don't see the problem."
Tour operators say they do their best to avoid unnecessary risks. Clients are warned of the dangers of hurricane tours, which Gold believes are more life-threatening than tornado chases. While tornadoes can be viewed a mile or two away, with hurricanes, "you're in the elements and can't get out," he said.
Gold says Silver Lining has taken about 15 people on tour so far. Customers have included a doctor and his 70-year-old mother and a couple from England. Most, say tour operators, are adrenaline or weather junkies. Among them is Stuart Robinson of Mountsorrel, England, who was determined to experience more than his rainy homeland where, he said, "one inch of snow would bring the entire country to a standstill."
Robinson, a computer analyst, schedules work around storm season and from August to October has a bag packed and ready. He set up a command station in his house where he monitors weather patterns around the world.
Robinson says he "cried in his soup" when he missed Hurricane Katrina to go to his parents' 50th anniversary celebration. His girlfriend, he says, doesn't share his interest in storms and refers to herself as "the weather widow."
Those close to Robinson struggle to understand - and he struggles to explain his passion.
"Flying 5,000 miles and putting yourself in the direct path of a hurricane doesn't appeal to too many people," he said.
Robinson met other like-minded individuals when he traveled with Silver Lining to witness Hurricane Rita in Texas. Robinson said the images he captured of victims helped people back home understand just how devastating a hurricane can be.
"It's not just the weather per se, it's witnessing people evacuating, the devastation and emergency surveys rebuilding," Robinson said.
Tour operators can relate.
Brian Barnes, co-owner of Violent Skies Tours in Tulsa, Okla., started offering the hurricane tours this year. His fascination with severe weather started in 1993, during his junior year prom night in Oklahoma when a tornado ripped through Tulsa, demolishing his car. He threw himself atop his prom date to keep her from flying off and after the tornado passed, discovered baseball size bruises on his body.
"It triggered something inside me to figure it out," said Barnes, who experienced his first hurricane in 1998. "I started with one type of severe weather and moved onto others."
Perhaps the most exclusive of these tours is headed by Vero Beach resident Richard Horodner, who says there are very few true hurricane chasers. He bills himself as the "most experienced and oldest hurricane chaser still alive."
These new guys, Horodner said, "eagerly hunt TV trucks so as to get interviewed, love to take pictures of themselves grandstanding instead of the storm itself, have no respect for the science. . . ."
Hill called Horodner one of the biggest showboats around. Horodner regularly criticizes others and promotes himself on online news groups, Hill said. "Any other hurricane chaser has absolutely no respect for this guy at all," he said.
EXCLUSIVE TOUR
Horodner's extensive hurricane chasing résumé, however, would suggest otherwise.
It starts in childhood, when four hurricanes passed over his house over a period of several years and lists just about every storm that's hit the South since, including Katrina. Most of his income comes from taping and selling video footage of hurricanes.
Horodner has two spots for passengers a year and says he has only taken producers filming storms for TV shows. One woman approached him recently about going on a safari, but after talking with her, Horodner decided he didn't want to be cooped up with her for days.
Bemoaning the commercialization of the industry, Horodner wondered out loud whether he should shut down his website that advertises his trips at $3,000 to $4,000.
"The negative attention they get," he said, "only shrinks the respect the scientific community gives to our generations of endeavor and public service." |
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