Blurb about the tornado tank in "Petersen's 4 wheel off

Ben Engle

EF1
Joined
Jan 28, 2004
Messages
75
Location
Blairstown, IA
Being an avid offroader, i subsribe to Petersen's 4-wheel & Off-Road magazine. 4 wheelers like to use rhino liner on everything, from fenders, to underbodies, truck beds (duh), and complete inside floors of Jeeps. So since that guy covered his car in that rhino-linings, i guess they thought it would be cool to put his story in here about how he drove into a tornado;

"Rhino survives tornado"
"Steve Gren has taken the act of storm chasing to a whole new level. Not content to drive near a funnel cloud and videotape it for the evening news, Green has built a vehicle to with-stand the forces of a twister so he can drive into it. That's right, drive into it.
He did just that last summer, wheeling his converted Tough Truck racer into an F4-rated tornado in Kansas. He's not just some nut with adeath wish; Green has scientific data-collection equipment on board to help study the devastating storms. To protect himself from flying debris generated by the 150-mph-plus winds, Green liberally covered portions of the vehicle with a thick Rhino Lining coat. You can see it along the bottom of the truck in the photo. What was it like in the twister? 'I watched a tree levitate over the top of my vehicle while it was pelted with rocks, sticks, and other debris,' Green recounted. 'The inside of the tornado looked like the top of a cinnamon roll.' We'll never look at Cinnabon the same way again.




So, has anyone validated this guys story yet? I still think it's bogus.

-Ben
 
this Rhino press release has been all over the place, it is a distortion of what he did, he came close to what was at the time perhaps an F2 tornado, but there is no visual proof available (I should say, released for public viewing), to suggest that he actually was in the vortex.

Rhino liner is really pumping this for all it is worth, and the boys playing with the rhinolined truck are not in any hurry to step forward and deny.
 
I'll bet he gets about 5 miles per gallon with all that
coating due to poor wind flow.

Mike
 
That press release was sent out on PRNewswire... that's a service many media outlets use for those sorts of announcements.

Very few folks question what is sent out there. One thinks how someone would/could put something over on folks... but it obviously does/did happen.

But when that came out, and I heard about the problems with the "story", I told the folks at the outlet where I work to not run anything off PRNewswire on that supposed tornado penetration until firm proof was given.

The proof is in the video pudding... and I don't think it ever congealed.

mp
 
THe inside of a tornado looking like "the top of a cinnamon roll" just sounds like looking up at a striated wall cloud — which is what you'd see if you were close to the tornado without being inside it, and there would be rotary winds levitating trees there . . . but that's not really the same. The description would make even more sense if the funnel cloud was not on the ground. I can't remember what tornado this was in case I saw it on anyone's website, so I don't know if it actually looked like that at the time, though.
 
So many 'news' stories are nothing more than thinly-veiled advertisements. The segments that show up in the local television news Health Report sections (many of them being prepackaged stories) are probably the most prominent examples. This particular magazine article does show a poorly-disguised bias, as the product itself was cited in the headline.

Tim
 
THe inside of a tornado looking like \"the top of a cinnamon roll\" just sounds like looking up at a striated wall cloud — which is what you'd see if you were close to the tornado without being inside it, and there would be rotary winds levitating trees there . . . but that's not really the same. The description would make even more sense if the funnel cloud was not on the ground. I can't remember what tornado this was in case I saw it on anyone's website, so I don't know if it actually looked like that at the time, though.
Click to expand...

A condensation funnel not in contact with the ground can look like a cinnamon roll if you're looking straight up at it from very close range - like this funnel in Sunnyvale CA.....

http://tornado.sfsu.edu/geosciences/StormC.../Sunnyvale.html

As for Tornado Attack, the date of the alleged intercept was 6/12/2004. Looking at the pics on their page http://www.tornadoattack.com I think if they did drive through a tornado it would have had to have been the first Mulvane tornado, which was rated F0 (not F4). The strongest tornado that day was rated F3, and from looking at the pics on their page I don't think they got close enough to drive through that one. The first F0 didn't have a condensation funnel going all the way to the ground, so I think it's possible it could have looked like a cinnamon roll from underneath it (or at least very close by). Whether or not they were that close to it remains to be seen, although I won't form an opinion either way until I see footage or pictures that either proves or disproves their claims of driving into any of the tornadoes.
 
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