Which is currently allowed and far too many senators and politicians use it as an escape. Question in the back . Citizens united gives rights to corporations as a person. Have they talked about mandatory sentencing . That is the flip side; they can be prosecuted. There is a provision in the federal code that if a company is convicted of a crime can be sentenced for up to twice the gain that the gain it made. So if it does terrible crimes and just has to give back . The time it gets caught it has to give back its profits. Big deal. It is rare to see that provision every used. Companies when caught and pay a fine pay a fraction of what they could be charged. And that is a winning proposition. If at the most you have to give back the profit and not fined something extra. Other people pay the fines so they are not enough. You need individuals held accountable, too. There are companies that to terrible things to people in the country and you would think they have to do more than just give back profits but that is not the case. Brandons book has a section about what it means for your first and Second Amendment rights and so forth. It is an interesting chapter. Time for a few more questions. Dr. Lewis, have you known journalist would retract statements and then set the record state or is this pie in the sky . I am not. There are occasionally corrections in the newspaper. The problem is it is often stated the mistake may be on page one and the corrections are buried and only a few sentences. The biggest scandals since the 70s with internal problems like plagiarism or stealing things. You did see some back happened apologies regarding the iraq war. The back page acknowledged it and they could have been more aggressive in their reporting or critical of the bush administrations statements. And they did it years later. But i have to say most of them didnt say anything and went with it. There are important stories that were censored before the war in iraq the papers wouldnt allow. There is not a lot of candor or accountability within the media. That is a separate issue. The number of articles in papers have been decrease. They are not sure about doing that for ego. That is why we watch john stewart. Time for one more question. Up here in the front. This is a question for mr. Garrett. I was surprised to find out corporations are considered people and in your book you tell us for the purpose of the federal code the u. S. Code, that corporations can be guilty of virtually all of the same crimes people can except rape and murder. Almost out of time. And yes corporations, as you explain in your book get rebilitative types of punish where we get punitive. How is this allowed by law . Where is the 14th amendment on this . You are right. That is why i wanted to write the book. I wish more individual people got defered prosecution and the focus was on rehabilitating and focused on recovery. There are time doing a lot of time for nonviolent crime. And to eric holders credit he has done and said good things in the last year. But there is a lot of balance that needs to be restored. We care about rehabilitating companies but not so much individual people. I think it is a terrible contrast. I think we have to stop in the interest of time. I want to say thank you. [applause] sir, please. Please. We turn the evaluation forums and please stop by afterward and talk to the authors and by book and have them signed. Thank you very much. The final panel will talk about super storms and Climate Change. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome. We will get this train rolling down the track. Wonderful to have you here as part of the virginia festival of the book 2015. We have a fine selection of panelist and wonderful authors today and hope to enlighten you with everything under the sun. Literally and figuratively. Introduce yourself. Director of the Climate Office and it is my pleasure to introduce kim cross author of that stands in a storm three days in the worst superstorm to hit the souths tornado alley. She is the awardwinning future writer and editor at large of Southern Living magazine. She has written many articles and has been an avatar for many wellknown writers. Before i turn it over to kim i would like to make a comment from my perspective, the scientific perspective, this book is incredibly wellwritten in that regard. She did a great job conveying the science of the storms conveying it correctly and in a way that the nonscientist picks up on what is going on and what is being told. Travis has something to say. Wonderful to have you here. I know you are running on little sleep. Hopefully the aadrink drikeeps you up. This book is worth reading for sure. Follow me on twitter. Vabooks vabooks2015. If you wish to follow the hash tag you can get more. This is a free of charge event and if you want to make a contribution you can go online. That is what keeps it going. This event is a big part of the book and film festival. It is very important to the culture and important we keep them going. We have evaluations as well. You can actually do those online at vabooks. Org evaluation. We encourage you to pick up one of kims book and in that i agree with jerry it is wellwritten and informative. And from a broadcast standpoint having witnessed the storms actually happening verses hearing it from friends or other peoples perspective it hit on all and i thought it was fantastic. Without further ado i give you kim cross. I have also wanted to come here and it is great to have science experts because i try to stick to the story telling when i do these things for fear of saying something wrong. I would like to start by saying in a way this isnt a book about tornados. It is a book about people. It is a book about resilience and the power of people to weather the unthinkable and lift each other up. When you go into the this keep that in mind. You will learn about tornados. If i did my job right you will learn about the science. I try to embed it into the narrative like i would sneak vegetables on to pizza for my kids. I wanted it to be interesting and informative so the characters you care about pull you through the pages and you will learn about tornados along the way but i hope is the characters embed them in your psyche so the next time the weather turns and you think of them. If you were complacent you might think to get in the closet. Most people ask how did you get started writing the book. I was a Senior Editor at Southern Living at the time based in birmingham where i live. We went to work that day. Oh you brought it. There is an extra in the march 2015 Southern Living. I highly encourage you read it. Thank you. When the storm happened we knew because of the weather man saying there was a storm coming. I dont think i remembered paying that much attention but my husband is from california and didnt grow up with tornados and paid close attention and was very worried about it. On the day of the 27th we were sent home from work. I remember sitting in my living room on my couch with my husband and our son who was three at the time. We were watching tv. We were watching james band who is maybe the only who has a bauble headed doll. People really love and trust him. He can call out the intersection and the cat fish restaurants in the path of the storm instead of saying county roads. He will say where the bbq used to be over by the walmart and people know exactly where he is warning. Anyway i was sitting there with my family watching tv and we see the df4 tornado coming through about an hour drives away where i went to undergrad, moved away, and came back for grad school. My husband lived there, too. It was like watching the twin towers falling and we were like oh my god people are dying as we are watching this. Then it started coming straight for our house and at some point it was caught in downtown birmingham and we watched that. It was huge. Even bigger. Then the power cut out and it was one of those moments where in the modern world you dont hear pure silence where the buzzing things grind down to a halt. And without tv we learn today our smart phones and tweets and warnings and we tweeted a link to the live stream coverage so we could watch it on the phone. He called out our neighborhood at one point. We got our son and put a bicycle helmet on him and we dont have a basement so we got in the laundry room at the bottom of the stairs and there is a moment if you live in storm country you think we could die. What are the things you say to your kids if it might be the last thing he ever hears. If he survives and i dont what will i want him to say. It is a horrible feeling. We were lucky it touchdown seven miles from us which isnt far. And afterwards there is this collective feeling of wow that could have been me. Why them . Why not us . Everyone in the state knew someone touched by this or knew someone one degree away from it or they were touched directly by it. It was an intensely personal storm for us. The editor of Southern Living said we need to cover this. We dont normally do news but we felt this was our 9 11 or katrina. The magazine has a four month story line so it would not be published till august. So we thought what can we say that will be interesting and people will want to read them. We sent reporters to five states quickly after the storm and started looking and gathering at what was happening and reconvened and looked for similar things. We found three buckets in how people cope would the storm. Faith, food and fellowship. People turn to their faith, immediately after they lean on their faith to make sense of things that dont make sense. Food is universal. I like to think southerners do it. There is no ill in the world that can not be cured by casserole. I thought everyone would relate to that but my favorite was fellowship. People turned to each other. They didnt wait for authorities to come in. I dont know if katrina taught us that but people turned and started biging for each other and digging and social media played an interesting role in the storm. Instead of as it was before you would give to the red cross and give the canned goods to a faceless organization. You can see a tweet about a mother who needed diapers and formula and retweet im coming. And you could gave face to face and that changed and made it more personal than it already was. You could give to another person oneonone and there was healing on both side. So we wrapped it up into a beautiful story. Rick and i teamed up and worked on this feature that got some critical words but generated a lot of reader letters and comments from people that said me also and i saw that in my neighborhood and it made be proud to be southern. This captures what our region does in times of trouble. Kim i am going to understand here, we are yankees. Its true. I guess that i had to let that mare mari skare marinate a little. I went to the literary nonfiction conference and met my agent and we were talking about book ideas and this came up as this is a nobrainer. I had a year to report and write it which really isnt a lot of time. I spent most of the year gathering information. And i feel like i am going on and on. Feel free to jump in. This event is about you. Sorry. I slept one hour. I had a deadline on a 700,000 piece today. So it was really fun and interesting. I cast a wide net. I had to start by trying to understand the event itself. I dont think even being in it i understood how complex it was. People remember the tusculusa storm. After this happened within a few weeks joplin missouri was hit very badly. It wasnt of the magnitude of this one. And then Osama Bin Laden was killed and that took over the news. I started with childrens meteorologist books. Then i got into the textbooks and face the meteorologist with a vocab. Cloudy with a chance of meat balls. Your book was a nice review because here in virginia we dont deal with a lot of tornado outbreaks. The biggest outbreaks in terms of number of tornados we had was in september of 2004. There were 40 or 43 tornados depending upon who confirmed them. Ge most of them were of 1. I think it was 153. There were no deaths. It was a very different scenario in virginia. The mountains dont make tornados impossible but we dont get the same conditions with the gulf air blowing in across the land landscape that has nothing more than a barb wire fence to stop it. 1929 was the deadliest tornado in america when a tornado hit a school house and killed 13 people. So it is nothing of the magnitude of this storm that you are talking about. I think it is hard for virginians to understand the absolute terror of touch a situation. And that is one of the things you really brought to mind. And you look at the historically larger outbreaks. The april 3rd 1974 tornado outbreak. And many fatalities and financial damage. And other out breaks like the wheat land tornado outbreak may 31 31 31 and the moore tornado one. The things she is talking about will be talked about for a long time and you highlighted on this but the event wasnt just one tornado and one long line of towns going from point a to point b. This who system affected much of the central and eastern u. S. From mississippi and working southeast through the course of 26, 27 28 with the 27th being the most impactful. This was a long lived thing. And one of the triumps was he had so much lead time and colleagues and gene span, another person mentioned in the book is jason simpson. I know him and josh johnson. Very good friends with him. And hearing not only the preparation and just the mentality in the days going ahead and following on social media what happened during and also what happened afterward and the personal perspective was amazing and you tie all of that together corresponding with what i had and didnt have. Putting something that significant on paper in the grand scheme of weather was great. It is hard to wrap your head around it. In the three day outbreak there were tornados in 21 states from texas to canada. 1100 miles of tornado tracks. 252 people died just in alabama. 62 tornados in my state alone. And it is almost unfathomable. There were times when there were six or seven on the ground at once. Tornados are rare and occur in a small percentage of storms and big ones are really rare. Usually one or two a year. It is a lot like soup. It is one of the cases where too much salt can spoil the soup. Everything has to be in the right amount to form. You can have weak and strong ones. If you get a big outbreak as april 27th is very rare. In that context, i want to say that is just the stage for this. You learn the mechanisms as the tornado form and you see the event. The event is almost a character in itself. The tornados become characters. But what you are doing is living this through the people who it was in its path and the people trying to keep it safe. The meteorologist are the ones who allow you i thought about my zoophiles myself as a director. You know when you lose yourself in a story on the couch and look up and the record scratches the thing and you are back in your room . I wanted it to be like that. So i wrote in such a way that you only know what character in that seen knows at that moment in time. It is almost like the camera is on a character and you see them and hear what they are thinking and saying but you dont know the big picture. Then the camera flash do is a meteorologist who allows us to pan out and see the big picture of where this person is in this huge monster day. As you are reading you will follow the characters and it will go from character to character but you are there in the room with them. If i could ask you talk about how you chose the characters you did for the story. You focused on several College Students a few families talk about how they came to light and a part of the story. Sure. I think first i had to focus on which tornados of the 62 to focus on. I chose tusculusa and cordova because the first one affected the crimson tide and affect ad lot of people. The small cordova one got overlooked. They have a Volunteer Fire Department and are tiny and cant afford more than a few trucks. They represent the vast responders in the country; most firefighters are volunteers. I thought it was important to show. And i realize it is impossible to tell the story of one tornado without the other. James band was showing the people getting live video of the tusculusa tornado. The reason they were chasing wasnt for glory or to be like this is cool. It was because showing viewers or pictures of a tornado makes them act. You can stand in front of a radar screen and say vortex or velocity all day and people will sit there. But if you show them a picture of the tornado they will run for the bathroom. I remember watching the video james span put up and watching online. The one going through downtown. Your jaw is on the floor. It is amazing. It is almost like watching a movie but you are not. They got it on film twice. There is a cam on buildings downtown. By the time you see it though it was into rural area and folks had a lot of warning to get cover. The cordova was 150 miles. So it had a long track. And cordova was hit twice. There were three rounds of tornados in alabama. There was an Early Morning predawn that came through and knocked out the power and messed up the mainstream and that was a blessing because the afternoon would have been full of people. People would have been in the bank and the piggly wiggly. There were responders there and it was claire cleared out. In the afternoon an ef4 hit and james span had another chase team on that storm and they were able to call in with live audio. And in the heat of the chase they parked their car on the highway and the camera was mounted on the dashboard and pointed the car the wrong way. They later were like oh no. But james span had this moment where he is like okay. Just a second. I have brian in cordova with audio and you with video. And he puts them on the screen at the same time and everyone is like what is happening. That shows how complicated the day was. He felt like we he was playing whack a mole. It was an intense day for him and he did an amazing job and saved so many lives. To go back to your question, i narrowed down the towns and in cordova i wanted to focus on the responders. But more died in the other city. Six students died. There are three colleges and this particular gosh, i dont want to give the ending of the book away because in the book you dont know who makes it and who doesnt and that keeps you turning the pages. But there is a house where each of the three colleges there is one and their families really responded when i reached out to them. I didnt know if i would get one family of the three to talk to me and you really needed all three. And there was another house that had four people in it and three survived. I was looking at that house but things fell into place at this house and i followed the open doors. A lot had to do with the families and how they responded. It ended up being the perfect situation. Another point to tell you how much i appreciate the terms you used. I had several verifications of that. When i was reading your book and discussing it with my wife and telling her how much i liked it. I said i read the part that refer today weather wings and that is a term i have not heard anyone but weather people use. We love literation. I read that and thought i resemble that remark and then i read my wife to the weather widows comment and she said i resent that remark. And it did mention both. She said to leave him alone he was in the zone. My life learned that the hard way. And verifying a couple other things. I just found out yesterday a graduate student in our department was from one of the towns that was hit and remembered it clearly. She talked about how her family was relatively unscathed but they took in other families for a couple months until they got their houses restored. So it is just like what is referred to in the book in many cases. And the other thing she did mention james span. And how he was a hero and an icon in that area. And she said boy when he takes off his jacket you better look out. And read the book if you have not read it. Kim just deadon. She hit the mark on all of the information. I had it fact checked and was obsessed with getting the information right. I want to talk about reporting the book and the sources available that were not available to other authors who did books about storms. Social media and time stamps today allowed me to get accurate with the time line and with quotes and with descriptions of scenes. So i started to wrap my head around the day james span coverage he does wall to wall coverage. Meaning the second it is on the ground until the last warning it expired he is on the air. No commercials or shows. And all of it was on youtube in 15 minute increments and i sat and recorded for days the time stamps along the way. So i was able to get a linear timeline of here is what he knew here is how it unfolded and what meteorologist new at any given time. And on top of that i had tweets Facebook Post and facebook was amazing. People friended me from loved ones accounts and i was able to get to know the kids and see what they like and didnt like and their sense of humor and when they were sarcastic how their voices sounded. There were occasions where they talked to each other on the morning of the storm even though they were in the same house. Someone said i just woke up and the time stamp, so i know when it happened and i thought there was a strobe light in my room but it was just storms. And someone said is it safe to use a microwave during a storm because i want oatmeal and she said yes just stand back and it showed her character and how she cared about people. So it allows you to get in their minds at pivotal moments with their voices. I used Facebook Messages and Text Messages with the time stamp and left them raw so you can see the spellings and you get a sense of the stress at the time. And it showed them making decisions the day of the storm and you could hear that in their writing. Those were precious and captured the characters. And youtube videos i think this must have been one of the most filmed storms ever. People from all over instead of get to a safe place what do they do . And what is great about that is since i knew tusculusa well i could identify where they were filming from. It looked different in a couple places. And a couple students were amateur Storm Chasers and they had a camera rolling in the whole time and drove right in the path of the storm and you could hear james span on the radio and from that i was able to know there is the intersection and he said this thing and they are at the intersection at 4 11 and that was pretty cool. So a lot of what you see in here is very accurate with dialogue that has been transcribed by a recording. And there was dialogue in some cases of someone there, firstperson source, and then i try to ask other people about sources there. But what ends up is you have a pretty accurate rolling time line of this thing unfolding in real time as you read and i think that adds to the book. When you ask what do you do when you hear a Tornado Warning and i say i run to the top of my driveway. Well i am a professional. When this storm happened i have to admit like so many people i was complacent and rolled my eyes and said honey, the sirens scream all of the time. That always happens and nothing happens. But i realized that was not very smart now. I think this would be a good time to address the false alarm rate which was 80 nationwide. This is a huge problem. I even got and travis can talk to this more about being a broadcast meteorologist but i got a call or had a visit from one of the forcasters in the area who said that forecasters he was getting a lot of grief for having interrupting program when there was a Tornado Warning. Not a watch but a warning. Because people were upset that i dont know reruns of Andy Griffith were not on or Something Like that. He actually did a video piece where i was explaining how important it was. The only real Warning System we have is the radar and the Doppler Radar can give us indication of signal that there is a strong, rotating wind in the atmosphere but it doesnt tell you if it is a tornado, or a real funnel cloud reaching down to the surface or hitting the surface. That is the only warning you get. So the problem is do you act on that or just sit there . Because there is no reason to half protect yourself. You either give up and dont do anything or you take it seriously. And the wise thing to do is take it seriously. And you may have to crawl into the closet under the stairwell more times than you like but it is still the only warning you get. This is a real problem. The only way to confirm a tornado is for a human to lay eyes on it. Anyone read john mcphee . He is a writer who made something as esoteric as geography come to life. I love his visuals. I wanted to do it with weather but it is hard because there are four demissions and it is largely invisable. One thing i learned about the radar is if this is the ground this the radar, it is spinning around like this makes a rotation goes up and then it makes a rotation. And at one point it is still like this where there is a tornado here and you cannot see this part of it. There might be signs of rotation but you cannot say it. There is storm spotters and Storm Chasers. Spotters stay where they are and attended classes to get training so they can spot the signs of tornados as opposed to tornadic looking clouds that are not tornados. And they can phone that in or email it or go in a chat room and give that information to meteorologist social media has made our jobs exponentially easier. If i had a dollar for every time i interrupted someones Sports Program or something and i got a nasty gram i would have a vacation home. Until someone sees it and gets the word bark back to us what you are seeing on radar is actually a tornado hopefully it is not too big to jail how prosecutors compromise with corporations too late. I was working this afternoon and i read in the paper the false alarm rate and the National Service was 49 for birmingham. But the lead time average, the heads up between the time the warning was issued and the time it happened averaged 22 minutes. So that is the big take away in this. Yes, we might be interrupting programs and not know if a tornado is on the ground. But if you have 22 minutes to protect as much of yourself and lives to prepare that is a great achievement. And that was the whole thing i took away was what if we have issuing left and right and the overwhelming number and the average of them happening up to even 45 minutes on some tornados. It is remarkable. I have the personal belief we will never be a hundred percent accurate. We will try to do the best we can because there are so many parameters with weather that make it happen. What happens on the ground happens hundreds of thousands of miles behind. That is one big takeaway. It could have been more than 25 people that died. Not only do you have the radar elevated but you have the curvature of the earth so depending on how far awayia way you are it is shooting higher and higher. Here in charlottesville we are equally spaced from the three nearest radar. We are at about the extreme range that the Weather Service likes to have for any point in the country. So we are actually seeing that affect about as much as anybody does. So we have the curvature of the earth problem. And we have the rugged terrain problem. The radar station in blacksberg to get to us the beam has to be to get to where we are on the surface it has to shoot the beam over the mountain. If they lower it reer it too much to picks up brown air we call it. So charlottesville is a good place to have a disconnect between what the radar sees higher up than what is going on on the ground. So that is probably going to con tribitute to the false alarm rate in terms of what is on the ground. You have to take these things seriously because you have nothing else and there is a giant radar shadow in Madison County i know from experience. That is why i had you on twitter to tell me. But with the way the radar being situated it hits mountains and terrain around here people say why dont you put something in charlottesville and it is you are level with the decrease and flat so you cannot put a radar tower on flat lands because you will hit the mountains but you cannot put it on the mountain because you will overshoot everything. So getting something to supplement from our perspective is difficult. If you ask me about social media, especially with winter storms i cannot tell you how wonderful social media has been to gather information. If i see something or dont see something it is covered. And flashing back to this storm i have never seen that much information coming from an area during an outbreak. It was phenomenal. An amazing amount of material. I think if you know of the service that lets you search twitter. I know about topsy. I am convinced that would be a great resource for journalist. Google earth is another resource i wanted to mention. I cannot believe this thing is free. It was amazing. I was able to look at satellite shots of the before and after. It is amazing. You can zoom in close, too. I always appreciated the street view. You can actually drive down streets that dont exist anymore. If you want to do that sometimes if the google car has redriven that you only see the new but i found a way to go to google maps and get street view with the history tool. There were some houses i didnt have pictures of and i wanted to see the house or drive down the cordova main street. And that was amazing. And always download the national Weather Service data on the storms. You can download and put them on your personal data. Kmz, yeah you could go and click on storm report that was taken. A storm survey by an expert and sometimes they would have a photo and that is how tornados get rated it is amazing what google earth has done. This place got x amount of snow and tracks the damage honingalong the way. Within the last five years with google earth it is amazing how much information gathering has come. It is almost overwhelming but in a field where we need information this is our dream come true it did lead me into a turnip field one day. Something wasnt updated. I have a question for you, jerry. National geographic had an article about an interesting trend surprising the number of days in which a tornado touchdowns in the u. S. Declined but when one does touchdown it is likely to be part of an outbreak. I dont want to quote something that is wrong but i think it indicated in the past ten years where before ten years outbreak of 30 or more tornados were very rare and now they are more common. So when there are tornados now there are likely to be more of them. I have not read that and i focus mostly on virginia. I have not seen that trend specifically in virginia. I do know if you look at the number of tornados over time there is a distinct upward trend in the number of tornados. But the problem with that and you talk about ground truth. Nowadays, whenever there is a signature of a tornado or an idea a tornado touchdown, the Weather Service sends people out to check to see if that is a tornado. So we are responding to the weak weaker tornados than before. So people are looking at are we trending toward more tornados but the answer is no one can figure it out because there is no consistent way to take the old data. There were times where it was hardly accounted for. We had a rural country for the most part and if a tornado tore up trees in the back 40 it wasnt necessarily someone was going to call the Weather Service about. We didnt have gps and Doppler Radar so you can look at the radar, draw the dot on it and know exactly where to go on the ground and look to see if there is a sign of tornadic damage. When you plot the number of tornados the stronger ones and even if you go f2 and higher you dont see that trend. So there is no obvious trend on the ab of tornados. I have not seen the work on whether or not they tend to be more in outbreaks. Just from knowing the virginia data i dont see that but i wonder if there is a bias toward smaller tornados. I think it should be pointed out it was long agree in the last ten years they totally redid the puget scale. That is important to note. They were higher and now are being brought down. They are ef0 and 1 with the winds being lower and that was done because construction thresh thresholds are lower reer than they used to be and there is no magic code you can use to compare one to the other. So most analysis simply just take fs and efs and lump them together. So another difficulty in drawing conclusions like that. It is important to say the event that stood out with weather storm was the blizzard of 93. It hit us hard. The storm of the century. I am not sure what century they are referring to. It is important to note it was around the late 80s early 90s when the Weather Channel came into life and brought the science of weather to the mainstream and as a result people have been paying mor attention to it over the last number of years. It is has been here but now we are really going to Pay Attention to it because the weather affects us. You have 24hour tv weather, you have the social media weather, and the Weather Channel is far bigger than anyone imagined when it first started. So people are more attune to weather than they were in the past. Question time. I appreciate kim putting the history in the book. She pointed out the first tornado forecast was by a friend of mine. I was in the air force also. I knew him when he was older. Years before that we could not put out tornado forecast if you are in the military or weather view because they were afraid you would panic the public. The government didnt want you to say tornado because they thought the panic would be worse than the tornado. Putting the history in there makes you think maybe there are more torped tornados because they were not reported yet. How many have read the book yet . Bits and pieces . I enjoyed reading the book. I wanted to ask a question because i had read the article in the Daily Progress and there is a problem with terminology and i hear it being discussed here. The government doesnt want you to say it is a warning until someone sees it with their eyes . The thresh old for warning is it is deteth detected bay radar or someone sees it. If if is seen on Doppler Radar the Weather Service people can make the call to issue a warning based on that alone. That is one of the reason there is so much false alarm rate because you cannot count on people on the ground seeing them. Especially some of these occur at night. And unless the lightning lights it up there is no good way for someone to tell. And that is why warnings are now being issued based on the Doppler Radar signature. Your pens help me a lot with the circling. The second thing i want to ask the writer is the fingernail the boys had and were those two young people buried together . The mother when she went to identify her daughter saw the fingernails were missing. And when they opened up the boys hand he had the fingernails in his hand. He had marks in his hands. He had indentations. They were not identified together. They were found together but when the families found them they got together later and figured that out. A couple questions. And so we put in after. But it after. But it helps me get my head around how complex a wise and how it looked in the direction it went. In a snapshot i thought that can be better than with thousands of words can say and make it come alive in your mind. Second question is how did you choose whether or not to choose other accounts of natural disasters and help people response to them. You mean other books . I read them over and over and over. Recollected dialogue versus dialogue history from them. A little bit of a tangent. If if something was i said to him directly but was recollected. In my book i wanted you to have an immersive experience in my editor commits me your nitpicking. The reader just make it easy for them to get into it. So was the other part of the question . Does it . Okay. Somebody over here. I love the all of questions. The title focuses a lot of the humanity. I i was curious, a couple of questions has it been an increase in the number of tornadoes and it is it over and above the range . What im getting at is nothing has been mentioned about Climate Change and global warming, and i want to no whether or not that factors in. As i mentioned, there is nobody that has been able to put together a good analysis of whether or not there has been an increase in tonight activity. Nationwide certainly its very difficult to determine that in virginia again because so many of the smaller generators are being identified. We look atlarger tornadoes, the more powerful tornadoes can we dont necessarily see a trend. A trend. People have tried going back to the records and relating the amount of damage to determine some of the strengths of the tornadoes the risk by the tornado, tornado command that is extremely difficult, too. We have more urbanization, more People Living more places, and there are just too many confounding issues to join the conclusions from that. I think a gentleman up theyre. Any change in jets coming off the gulf of mexico. Zero, no. I am not sure anyone knows precisely what might be expected. We will see some circulation changes may see an intensification of that, but we that, but we are not i dont think it has played out. And atmospheric is a very complex machine, if you want to call it that. What habits your ground level is determined by what happens and the atmosphere. Also by what happens halfway around the world also affects what happened in parts of the country. Country. So to get a real understanding of how the atmosphere works is an ongoing process because it is almost like a domino effect in many ways and because of the complexities where always going to have the desire to research and see how things correlate and come together. I just dont think were at a. Right now definitively where we can say that things are what they are because of these changes per se. And the other thing is im sorry the recipe of tornadoes being so finicky you have to know how each one of these things would play into it which is a level of complexity far smaller scale than what we can even postulate. What about the dual polarization radar for getting debris fall signatures. Doppler radar is certainly advanced over the last several years. You may have heard that term dual pole come out which gives us a much better skin of things happening in the hemisphere whereas you get to like about the horizontal and vertically. Tool vertically. Tool paul allows you to get certain correlation coefficients and analyze what is happening inside a what kind of precipitation better indication of what is happening in the atmosphere. With recent instances in West Virginia a couple of weeks ago there was the derailment of an oil train and get actually pick up the smoke from the radar at the various coefficients they can determine the amount of smoke from the fire itself. It is one of those things that gives us the opportunity to understand what is happening better in terms of the precipitation was happening its a little tougher because the parameters a very scientific i dont want to use the phrase, its not for general use per se. Its one of those things where it is certainly helping and will help and there is definitely room for improvement as we continue to advance upon things. Of a worldwide models from particular to a certain area of the world their ones they go out several days in advance. Certainly when theres something coming the models are saying this, the models are saying that well well, the truth about models is, we College Computer model guidance for a reason because the guidance is key. So many times that were has been left out. It is not the endall say all that something should happen. If one computer model predicts we get 9 inches of snow lovingly latching upon for several months and does not mean it is a guarantee that it we will happen. Models of what has happened in the past and serious mathematical equations they can happen, they might not happen, but we use them to guide us with the science and how the whether works. To determine what we will happen in the future. In my perspective being a forecasters not just saying here is one model. Here is what it says. Trying to use that to get a bit of Bigger Picture of how the atmosphere is working will lead you to determine exactly what we will happen. Forecasting is still in some sense a dark art. One of the things, as travis was saying, you will have different models. Someone will interpret things one way some of the way, and each one may have its strengths and weaknesses and biases. And also sometimes we we will find in a given winner my gosh, the european law is working really well. This allows the european model, over 12. The ones are doing very well Something Like that. In any event, it still remains sort of a dark art. That keeps forecasters. Evening just having the mountains to our media west wreaks havoc. I am sure you have seen this many times thunderstorms and shenandoah valley, but here, valley but here come up with, they are gone. I plow through richmond. I mentioned earlier and will say it again, we are again, were working to the. Where we can be 100 percent accurate as meteorologists. We have a ways to go but are trying. We need to head on to the last three or four questions here. The science question. We give nonsense answers. Could you talk just a a little bit about what people did for the fellowship piece of helping with resilience . Because i think whatever the disaster is we often want to help and dont know how. If you identified anything out of the ordinary that you can share. Absolutely. One of my favorite ways that i tell people, just do small things for each other, the tornado sucked of things from mississippi and dump them on alabama command element of rain down on tennessee and people take these little pieces out of there yards and a lot of them posted them on a Facebook Group a Facebook Group called documents and photos were tornado. This to people would see them and see the persons name is one posted on the Facebook Group. The camera crew when they reunited. It was such a beautiful moment. The woman who found it wanted to bring it home and see the place where it had been sucked into the sky. Kerry had put it in her moms house, and your moms house was gone. Just a slab. She tried she tried to clean it. The mud were not come out. Part of the story. Small children. I look at this and realize how much my kids look like me. As people would never have met. They still keep in touch. Little things like that were quite beautiful. If you get only only take one thing from this book i would like it to be a understanding beautiful things come from a broken us. So many beautiful things emerge from the tragedy that might have happened before you know, one of those things is a school in alberta city alberta elementary in tuscaloosa was devastated. Luckily, no one died as far as i no. But in its place is a performing arts school part of the Public School system that did not have an art school for. It has great facilities and curriculum and the original students will go to it. As far as how to help people, i think one of the best things that we can do is just listened. One thing i wanted everyone to take from this is a sense of how to talk to someone who has lost a child. That was the hardest part for me talking to the families and really, you know, feeling of pain and their loss. A lot of times in Something Like this happens you can lose your house and feel grateful and move on and a lot of people felt that way, it is grateful to be alive. It is just off but the people who lost someone, especially the parents who lost a child they will never get over it, it, never move on, keep looking because they have no choice. But. But i think that it is really important for us to come you know, continue to ask about the kids are not given the sad smile. I just want to talk about my daughter the way that parents with living children talk about theirs. This one time when she did this and it made me laugh and that she is the sad smile or that, honey, were thinking about you. She does not want that. She just wants to be able to remember. So many times we asked immediately after and then dont know what to say or are afraid to say the wrong thing. And they end up feeling isolated like no one cares. I think that it is just important for them to feel like there loved one is remembered, they will never get that 1st one back with the fact that people remember them as important which is why a lot of the start of a scholarship fund. It is a reminder that this person existed. One little thing one of my characters lauren brown, characters, lauren brown, my mother, it was her birthday the day before yesterday. Her mom for her birthday celebrates by doing a random act of kindness for every year she had been alive. Im a bit teared up now. So one of the things she did what she bought me a ticket to go with her and her kids her surviving kids to them are in the lambert concert. If you we will read the book you we will understand why Brenda Lambert is significant. And so we went and it was just crying with her. He it was just part of, i dont know something. The truth is we dont. Instead of saying i no how he feels just saying how do you feel. And just listening instead of trying to talk through awkward silences. Silences. That is one thing that anyone can do for anyone. In general what kills people . How do people die . Is it that the buildings they are in collapse, sucked away, blown away by the storm . What typically closes the fatalities . Do you want to