Martin Lisius and Tempest Tours are at the center of storm-chasing’s past, present and future.
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“Tempest Tours was not created to make money,” he says. “It wasn't created to monetize chasing. I created it because people kept asking me to go storm chasing and they couldn't go. I'd say, ‘Hey, can you go tomorrow?’ ‘I can't go. I have to work.’ And I go, ‘Oh, OK’ After that happened many times, then I said, ‘You know what? We just need to make a little tour company, publish the schedule six months in advance or whatever. People can sign up and they can pay us a fee for it.
At the Fort Worth premiere, Lisius enjoyed the final version of the film, pointing out Easter eggs to other storm chasers and even monitoring tricks used in the movie that he has applied to his chases. “There's these things that go up in a tornado, we spin around and then has a graphic that makes a tornado picture," he says."OK, so we know that it spins now that we had this probe, but we kind of knew that already. Just by looking at the tornado, you can see it spinning. So usually Hollywood, if you watch the Hollywood depiction of storm chasing, they usually have a mission and it's usually to deploy some kind of probe or something, but the probe doesn't make any sense.
According to Lisius, what was once a small community has grown into a mass phenomenon of thrill seekers. Those chasing a viral moment have made the activity even more dangerous. “As the hurricanes I've chased, it was definitely the most difficult,” he says. “We had some challenges that I hadn't seen in other hurricanes. The guy that I was with was not a chaser. He was an ATV producer. And he was scared. He would normally be a really funny guy.”
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