Chasers take weather by storm

      When Kathy Henry was 5 years old, she sat transfixed on the tip of her backyard slide, watching a tornado spin around the drive-in theater behind her Texas home.
      "I didn't go into the cellar until my mother came out and grabbed me," Henry said.
      That was her first introduction to one facet of nature's awesome force and the start of a lifelong intrigue. As an adult, Henry is still out looking for the funnel clouds most people flee -- only now it's part of her job. She and her husband, Phil, are International Severe Storm Interceptors, better known as stormchasers.
      "We do it just for fun," Phil Henry said.
      The Henrys, longtime Las Vegans, teamed up with tornado expert Warren Faidly to give the public a glimpse of the profession featured in the movie "Twister." The trio will be at the Westward Ho between 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. today to answer questions and display the customized vehicles used in their work. At noon, a slide show will illustrate road life in the tornado zone, allowing spectators to see the gap between reality and Hollywood.
      " 'Twister' was a great Hollywood film," Kathy Henry said. "But no chaser would ever go that close to a tornado. The debris would kill you."
      In addition, no tornado season is ever that action-packed. The Henrys are in their fifth season of tracking twisters in the Great Plains and have only seen one small tornado. They set aside two weeks each year during prime tornado season, which lasts from spring to summer.
      "You have to have patience," Phil Henry said. "You don't come across them every day. But you do have to do a lot of driving. To us, this is as much a motor sport as anything else."
      The three use a trio of sleek black four-wheel-drive utility vehicles, customized for speed and equipped with satellite capabilities. Each one also has a BearTracker scanner, invented by Phil Henry, which is capable of locating law enforcement vehicles and emergency responders within a three-mile radius, a valuable source of information in the middle of a potential disaster.
      What the Henrys and the Faidly are in search of is A: Information; and B: Really great photos and video footage. The information is forwarded to the weather service and the footage and videos, which are sold commercially, help subsidize the chasers.
      Faidly, whose background is in journalism, has made a career of tornado tracking. He was a consultant for the movie "Twister," as was Phil Henry, who took the the photo used for the movie's promotional poster.
      "A lot of people want to know why you do it," said Faidly, who works out of Arizona and Colorado and has been chasing storms full time for 10 years. "It's not so much for the thrill of it. Ninety percent of it's very boring. I think I do it because it's the unknown. You start each day not knowing what's going to happen."
      Kathy Henry shares his enthusiasm. But she acknowledges it's a difficult to explain to people who don't have the urge to rush headlong into clashing high and low weather fronts in hopes of seeing a brutal display of nature.
      "My mother thinks I'm nuts," Henry said. "But my father's envious. He'd like to come with us."