LI Storm Chaser ‘A Little Nervous’ Staying Ahead of Tornado

NORTH BELLPORT, NY — Stony Brook University Atmospheric Sciences program student Mark Doucet has made a hobby out of chasing down Mother Nature. He’s traveled the United States, observing weather conditions like tornados on the great plains, and even got up close during Tropical Storm Isiais when it struck his hometown of Long Island. That said, it was only natural for him to want to get out on the road during last week’s tornado warning on Saturday.

Doucet and his younger brothers had just played hockey with their friends and they were on their way back to Sayville, when they got the tornado warning, and he decided to start heading east on Sunrise Highway to stay ahead of it. Somewhere in between Route 112 in Patchogue and Brookhaven, likely the North Bellport area, there was a confirmed EF-0 Tornado.

The stretch of highway is part of a nearby hamlet just west of Shirley where there was a confirmed EF-1 Tornado, the three brothers had an encounter with a natural phenomenon they won’t soon forget.

“I knew this was going to happen,” said Doucet, a 22-year-old junior. “The storms were on their way you could obviously see the ominous looking clouds off to the west. It was definitely looking like something was going to happen, but obviously you never expect what happened to actually happen with how many tornadoes have already been confirmed.”

“So yeah, it was quite the scenario,” he added.

He wanted to see where it went and decided to follow it.

“They obviously know how passionate I am about weather and I jumped right on it,” he added.

He had continued east on Sunrise just to get out of the rain and get a better picture of what was going on with the storm in hopes of possibly seeing something.

As they got out of the pelting rain, they found themselves amid heavy wind that was whipping about leaves and other debris.

His brother started filming from his cellphone.

“And, that's when it hit us like we really had no time to react,” he said.

In a video Doucet posted to Twitter, leaves can be seen slamming into the windshield of his Honda Civic.

Doucet believes they were in the core of the storm because there was heavy rain and once they were ahead of it, and right when the actual winds crossed over, he said, “there was just tons of leaves and small pieces of twigs blowing all around as you can see in the video.”

He does not believe the video does it justice because the camera was not steady “and there was a lot going on.”

“Definitely you could feel the wind blowing against the car very strongly,” he said. “It was trying to push me over the side of the road and I was just worried at that point about keeping the car straight.”

Luckily, it was not strong enough to do that, but it did blow the windshield wipers up, allowing leaves to get under it. The leaves remain in every crevice of the car.

There was considerable rotation in the storm as Doucet was tracking the radar in an app on his phone and he could see velocities of the storm where the winds traveled in different directions, very tight and close together.

There was a circle that showed debris flowing around, so Doucet knew it was possible that there was debris and the storm was moving from southwest to northeast, as it did, in the video.

After the event, Doucet decided to pull off on a side street so that everyone could catch their breath.

He ended up getting off at Horseblock Road and pulled over on Williamsburg Way where there were fence posts down, a large fallen tree, and a large flagpole was torn out of the ground, he said.

Doucet has also since reviewed video from photographer Christine Heeren who was very close to or in the EF-1 in Shirley.

“You could see the winds blowing strong there,” he said. “The leaves were blowing and you can see in the distance how dark it is and what's going on, and it's a lot of chaos. So it definitely seems like a similar situation that she witnessed.”

He could not say whether he believed Heeren was in the tornado that touched down absent meteorologic equipment. At the very least, she was ‘in the circulation of it,” or very close to it by the video, Doucet said.

Sunday night the National Weather Service announced the tornado whipped through the area of Shirley, Mastic, and Manorville between 3:40 and 3:50 p.m. It ripped off part of the awning of a shopping center across the street from where Heeren was.

So was Doucet scared by his experience in North Bellport?

“Once we got into the thick of it, that's when I really changed my mind,” he said, adding that he changed his focus from his passion for weather to that of safety, “because obviously that's what you want to focus on most is keeping yourself safe.”

Similar storms are dangerous and can become deadly very quickly, Doucet admitted.

“So, yes, I would definitely say I was a little nervous and I was scared for not only my safety but my two brothers in the car with me as well,” he said. “That's definitely where I shifted my focus to at that point.”

That is why it can be seen in the video that, “I'm just so stunned and shocked at what's going on.”

All he could focus on was keeping the car straight and he thinks any storm chaser or any person who loves weather would be so.

“They're fascinated by the beauty of it and also how dangerous that can be,” he said.

To Doucet, there’s both a good and bad side to storm chasing.

“It's an incredible event,” he said.