Sunday, June 2, 2013

3 More

Trey Smith


Of the more than 12,000 posts that have been featured on this blog to date, the three that have been viewed the most often have nothing to do with Taoism. Those three posts concerned the suicide of meteorologist Matt Hughes of the Discovery Channel's documentary-style reality television show, Storm Chasers. Though the show is now off the air, I learned today that two more of the featured storm chasers have died, Tim Samaras and Carl Young. They were killed doing what they loved: chasing tornadoes.

As a weather nerd, I love watching shows of this nature. Since I'm down with a respiratory infection (which explains why there are fewer posts on the blog), I've been watching a lot more TV than usual the last few days and I've been viewing a lot of the coverage of the recent spate of storms pounding Oklahoma, Arkansas and nearby states. Samaras and Young were killed by one the tornadoes that touched down Friday near Oklahoma City.

It just goes to show that, while storm chasing has been glamorized on television, it still is a dangerous pastime. All the competition to get the best videos and data seems to be causing more folks to take more chances. Mike Bettes and his film crew from the Weather Channel were injured by the same tornado that claimed Samaras and Young. While I love the riveting footage these brave folks obtain of storms, it is not worth their lives.

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