Tornado-chaser catches one

By: David Noack For the last 25 years, J. Pat Carter has been chasing tornadoes, snapping pictures of their destructive power, but he has never come face to face with one. That all changed last Monday evening.
"I just got home from work, and I turned the TV on, and they were starting to talk about these massive storms. The office called, and the chase was on," says Carter, who lives near some of the most damaged areas around Oklahoma City.
Carter, 50, an Associated Press photographer for the last three years, was able to capture a picture of a mother and daughter huddled under a highway overpass as a tornado swirled nearby. The storm was approaching the Oklahoma City area from the southwest, along the H.E. Bailey Turnpike.
When he left the house that evening, Carter went out in search of the storm photos. He found what he was looking for and also became a hero of sorts in the process.
"I drove to within half a mile of the funnel, turned around, got out of my car and started shooting pictures, got back in the car. Stop, shoot, drive some more. I did this for every half mile or so and finally at this last bridge on the highway, I realized I had no place to go. The storm was going to catch me out in the open," says Carter.
As he approached the overpass, Carter says there was a woman struggling to free a child from a safety seat in her van.
"I yelled at her to get under the bridge. She starts yelling something about her kids. I reached in and grabbed one of them, and together we got the other one out," says Carter, a former staffer at The Sun in Baltimore.
At this point, the storm was quickly closing in and there was no time to get up under a section of a overpass which provided more protection. His biggest concern was that they were going to be sucked out from under the overpass.
"I had barely enough time to stop my car, get this woman and her kids under the bridge against the concrete pillar, and by that point the funnel was about 150 feet away. I got them down behind a pillar and turned my back to the wind. I shot a couple of frames and by that time the funnel was about 150 feet from us. Some pieces of debris hit me. I had my cameras, they were flapping and I kept telling the little girl that everything was going to be OK. At one point I looked up, and the tornado was in the dead center of the overpass," says Carter, who adds that the one of his beepers was whisked away by the storm.
Carter says after the storm passed them, he tracked it to a neighborhood near his house that had been ravaged.
"My house was only a quarter to a half-mile away from there, and I looked over there and I could see rooftops on my neighborhood still on. I was trying to call my wife. After I took some more pictures, I checked on her. I had called her after my experience (at the overpass) and told her to get in a closet. She hid the cats in the washing machine and she put the dogs in the garage. When I saw her, I gave her a hug," says Carter.

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