AccuWeather's Tony Laubach looks back to his days in high school when he chased his first tornado in Ohio on May 14, 1997. This experience would kick start his career in meteorology and storm chasing.
00:00Tony Laubach is out on the road just getting started with this next threat of severe weather.
00:05But today is a little special for him. I see he's representing his hometown this morning, Tony.
00:12What's the shirt all about?
00:16Well, my hometown, Circleville, Ohio, was where all of this craziness started for me 28 years ago.
00:24Today, I was wrapping up my sophomore year as a Circleville Tiger and was sleeping on the couch that afternoon
00:32when my mother, who was working as a traffic reporter from home, came to awaken me to tell me about 30 miles southwest of Circleville.
00:40They had a reported tornado.
00:42My dad, who was walking in the door from work at the time, looks at me and says,
00:46You want to go chase it? And, well, history is history.
00:51We're going to show you something really, really cool.
00:53I found handwritten chase log of my very first storm chase on this date 28 years ago
01:01near Clarksville, Ohio, where I tracked my first supercell and my very, very first tornado.
01:09With my dad behind the wheel, this was the site that we came to just outside of Clarksburg.
01:14A small little funnel with a debris swirl underneath of it.
01:18Back in those days, folks, we didn't have digital.
01:21And I had 24 exposures on a roll of film camera on a point-and-shoot, and I swore to my dad, I said,
01:28This tornado is going to get bigger.
01:29I'm only going to take a couple of shots of it.
01:31And that was my biggest regret for the day, because for the rest of that storm cycle, in terms of chasing it,
01:38it was basically just a debris swirl.
01:39It never got any bigger than it did, and I only have two pictures to prove my first tornado was there.
01:45We tracked the storm for about 30 minutes from Clarksville all the way back to U.S. Route 23, south of my hometown.
01:52I remember my dad's expression when we were sitting there watching this thing.
01:55He had this absolutely dumbfounded look that his little high school nerd had led him to this tornado.
02:02I remember drawing a supercell diagram on a piece of tracing paper, and I put it on a road map.
02:08But I basically was kind of acting like a radar and said, okay, we've got to get to this point by this time in order for us to get through.
02:15And mapped out and saw where the core was going to cross, and I said, we're probably going to get into some rain and hail.
02:19And he was just like, yeah, yeah, sure, whatever.
02:22And we came out of the rain and hail, and boom, there it was, my very first tornado of my very first storm chase 28 years ago today.
02:29I talk about some of the things all the time in terms of, like, looking back at chases of what I would do differently.
02:36Certainly, I wish I had video camera with me at that point.
02:39That would have been a great moment to capture not only the tornado but just our reactions because, once again, this was the first time I had done that.
02:46But what was really cool after the fact, you saw some of those pictures from high school.
02:50That picture of me there in the yin-yang shirt was the day following.
02:53Obviously, that got a lot of attention.
02:55Twister was fresh in people's minds.
02:57Everybody kind of knew I was a weather-obsessed nerd, and I was introduced to storm chasing long before Twisters.
03:03But after this, I became kind of a hometown phenomenon there for the duration of the school year for chasing this tornado.
03:11Everybody thought I was kind of crazy, and certainly anybody watching who grew up with me, probably not terribly shocked to see me 28 years later doing this for a living.
03:20But I wanted to rep the high school because this is where it all got started for me back in Circleville, Ohio.
03:26We were just a little south of my hometown.
03:28It was certainly a day my father and I, even my mom, who wasn't there present, will certainly never forget.
03:33And, you know, the legend continues, I suppose.
