ENID—Don’t believe everything you see in the movies.
While many Oklahomans take great pride in the fact that “Twister” was filmed in their part of the country, it’s not real. It is purely entertainment, according to Oklahoma-based storm chasers.
There is no doubt that seasoned storm chaser Mike Bennett, who attended junior high in Wakita where the “Twister” movie museum is, waxes nostalgic about the perennial tornado film.
However, he said, “’Twister’ was one of the worst things to happen to storm chasing. It created an absolute circus.”
Bennett has been chasing weather for as long as the movie has been out, first with the Garfield County Emergency Management, then with Oklahoma City’s KFOR Channel 4, primarily covering Northwest Oklahoma.
Meanwhile, OKC’s KOCO Channel 5 storm tracker Tucker White wasn’t alive when “Twister” came out, but even he knows that one of his favorite films is highly dramatized with a twinge of reality.
“99% of the time it isn’t like that,” he said. “It’s hours and hours of driving.”
Storm chasing versus thrill seeking
The 2024 companion film to “Twister” was “Twisters,” which stirred up fascination with tornadic storms for a new generation, this time elevating the thrill of storm chasing with modern technology and social media.
Unfortunately, between both movies, the roads have been crowded, making it difficult for professional storm chasers to do their jobs providing storm warnings for area residents as they dodge thrill seekers and YouTubers.
“Highways are so clogged up, it’s impossible to chase a storm when you’re bumper to bumper,” Bennett lamented. “We went from two vehicles to 200 vehicles on the road.”
Since “Twister” came out, there have been numerous tour companies caravaning across the Midwest during storm season which typically starts around April.
What is infuriating about that isn’t the tourism aspect, Bennett said, but rather that those visitors will suddenly jump out and run across the road to watch a tornado.
And with the advent of social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, there is no escaping the release of instant data and live feeds.
If a meteorologist announces it’s a high-risk weather day and a storm tracker reports he or she is 3 miles west and 1 mile north surveying a cloud lowering, everyone chasing storms converges on that spot, Bennett said.
“I love having a storm to myself,” he said.
Tracking the weather
For the 23-year-old White, who grew up in Illinois, the passion for weather began when a tornado roared by his house.
“There was a guy in our yard with a huge camcorder filming it,” he said. From that moment on, White started studying storms to understand how weather works.
When he turned 18, he moved to Enid (his family had already relocated to Oklahoma by then) and connected with seasoned storm tracker Shane Helton.
Helton called him one day to alert him he had a driver position open and White jumped at the chance to be his chase partner. He joined the weather team at KOCO Channel 5 in late 2023 as a contractor, meaning White takes his own personal vehicles to spot and track storms.
KOCO outfitted him with a 360-degree camera on the roof, a dash cam, and a computer in the back that’s hooked to the cell network to transmit his footage. But if White wants any other equipment such as scanners, radios, flashing lights, or a mounted laptop, that’s all on him.
Bennett concurred.
“The truck is mine. I own it, take care of the insurance, and am responsible for any dents or damage (sustained in a storm),” he said. KFOR outfitted him with the same type of equipment as White.
Of course, when he started for Channel 4 over two decades ago, the standard equipment was a bag phone, a transmitter on the truck dash hooked to the phone, and a video camera that he would have to rewind the tape, pause it and then send the still image back to the station.
“It was old technology then. No live video; I’d talk live on the air,” Bennett said. The still image “would take forever to go through, like 10 minutes to download. Look where we are now, the live video in real time and high-definition too.”
Putting safety first
Both Bennett and White pair up with at least one other person when storm chasing. Rarely do they go at it alone.
“My chase partner runs the camera and navigates the road options. I’m driving, focusing on safety and what to say to 500,000 people on the air,” Bennett said. Sometimes he even has a third person in the truck to take the navigation duties so the second person can run the camera on high-risk days.
Navigation during severe weather can be complicated, Bennett said, because it entails monitoring where the road and river crossings are, looking for bridges, staying off the turnpikes and interstates, and finding escape routes.
It’s all about safety first, both he and White emphasized.
“The main hazard of storm chasing is driving,” White said, and that is what separates the professional storm chasers from the amateur storm chasers.
Amateur storm chasers are aggressively focused on the storm, which is extremely dangerous because they forget common sense in the process. Many a time they break laws, White said, and the risks they take makes them accident prone even to the point of death.
Whereas professional storm chasers know when to back off and stop chasing, he said, “because they want to come home at the end of the day.”
Bennett agreed.
“Keep your distance,” he said. “That’s why God invented zoom lenses.”
More than riding out tornadoes
Professional storm chasers aren’t seasonal like amateur storm chasers who only come out for tornadoes; they track all kinds of weather in every season. They also cover wildfires.
“It’s all about public safety and advance warning,” Bennett said.
Both he and White have been called upon to provide footage for other disasters since they live in the Enid area and can reach other parts of Northwest Oklahoma fairly quickly. Bennett recalled one time serving as a videographer for the plane crash of a local cropduster.
Like most storm chasers on contract with a TV station, they have full-time jobs to pay the bills.
The perk of owning and operating Enid Storm Shelters is Bennett can chase weather whenever he wants without having to ask anyone if he is allowed to take off.
White’s day job is with Dense Mechanical in Enid as an HVAC apprentice. He moonlights with Storm of Passion, a storm chasing group based out of Great Bend, Kan., during the spring season for a couple of weeks outside of Oklahoma when he’s not on duty with KOCO.
“My end goal,” White said, “is to storm chase for a living.”
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Photo credit: Ruth Ann Replogle
See the article and photos in full-color in the March-April 2026 edition of ETown: etownmagazine-cnhi.newsmemory.com