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.
03:35Mm-hmm.
03:36Mm-hmm.
03:37Mm-hmm.
03:38Mm-hmm.
03:38Mm-hmm.
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