(wind howling)
(glass shattering,
house shaking)
♪ ♪
WOMAN:
Sounded like a train,
but I knew it wasn't.
And it just hit.
WOMAN 2:
We were right
underneath the front of it.
I've, I've never seen anything
like it,
and I don't want to again.
WOMAN 3:
Then I just said, "Lord,
if it's time for me to go,
well, I, I have to say
that it's my time to go."
NARRATOR:
On April 3, 1974,
scores of tornadoes
tore across 13 states
in the center of the country,
leaving a massive path
of destruction.
First responders in cities
and rural areas
were overwhelmed.
MAN:
We've got about 40 or 50 people
injured this side of town.
GREGORY S. FORBES:
There was tornado
after tornado after tornado.
As the day unfolded,
it became clear
that this was going to be
an historic day.
NARRATOR:
Hundreds died
and thousands lay injured
from the Great Lakes Region
to the Deep South.
The shock
of the unprecedented outbreak
left Americans struggling
to comprehend
what Mother Nature had wrought.
One scientist took on
the challenge of understanding
what he would later call
the "Super Outbreak."
Tetsuya Theodore Fujita,
a professor of meteorology
at the University of Chicago,
was determined
to make sense of the chaos.
NANCY MATHIS:
He was a detective
looking for clues,
and no detail should go
unturned.
The Super Outbreak
was one huge crime scene.
FUJITA:
We do research on tornadoes.
And in case of future tornadoes,
you know, what people should do,
that's the kind of thing
we want to find out.
Right after the storm...
NARRATOR:
The scene in America's heartland
was all too familiar to Fujita.
Three decades earlier,
he had sought out answers
amidst devastation
in Nagasaki and Hiroshima,
sifting through the rubble
created
by the world's
first atomic bombs.
MARK LEVINE:
After the Second World War,
he came to the U.S.
and he began
a relentless pursuit
of studying the aftereffects
of severely destructive forces.
NARRATOR:
His unique forensic approach
to meteorology was unorthodox,
and would transform
the understanding
of one of nature's
most powerful phenomena.
ROBERT F. ABBEY, JR.:
Fujita was able to utilize
his insights, his ingenuity,
and give us knowledge
about phenomenon
which we thought was unknowable.
♪ ♪
(waves crashing)
(air raid siren blaring)
NARRATOR:
In the late morning
of August 9, 1945,
in northern Kyushu, Japan,
a 24-year-old Tetsuya Fujita
quickly led his students
toward an underground
air raid bunker.
The young professor glanced
at the sky,
but a thick layer of clouds
obscured the aircraft,
a B-29 Superfortress laden
with a single atomic bomb.
MATHIS:
The primary target
was three miles
from where Fujita was.
The bomber actually made
three attempts to drop its load.
It could not get a visual
because of the clouds,
so they ended up going
to their secondary target,
which was Nagasaki.
The cloud cover over his city
really spared his life.
(explosion echoes)
NARRATOR:
At 11:02 a.m.,
the B-29 dropped an atomic bomb
on Nagasaki.
♪ ♪
Thousands of buildings and homes
were instantly destroyed.
The flash radiation of heat
from the blast
scorched hillsides
as far as 8,000 feet away
from Ground Zero.
♪ ♪
(footsteps approaching)
FORBES:
About a month later, Fujita
was asked, as part of a team,
to go out and look
at the damage pattern
around Nagasaki
and Hiroshima
to see if they could determine
exact location
of where the bomb detonated
and the altitude
of the detonation.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR:
After closely examining
the debris,
Fujita and his colleagues
calculated
that the bomb had exploded
520 meters above the ground.
But what intrigued Fujita more
was the curious pattern
left by the blast.
The blackened trees
directly below the explosion
stood upright,
while those radiating out
from Ground Zero
fell away horizontally
in a starburst pattern.
As he studied the damage,
Fujita imagined the airflow
from the blast
descending rapidly
and fanning outward
upon contact with the ground,
toppling the trees.
ROGER WAKIMOTO:
This was his first
really comprehensive
damage survey.
It wasn't meteorological,
but some of his
early understanding
of how to do a damage survey,
those seeds were planted
during these surveys
of these two atomic bombs.
NARRATOR:
In the ashes of Nagasaki
and Hiroshima,
Fujita realized that the rubble
told a story
beyond the tragedy
of death and destruction.
♪ ♪
Tetsuya Fujita had always
explored the natural world
with a fearless curiosity.
As a young boy in Japan,
he had studied astronomy
to master tidal patterns
and avoid being stranded at sea
while hunting for clams.
His father, a schoolteacher,
encouraged
his inquisitive nature
despite his reckless behavior.
"I thought I could measure
wind," Fujita recalled.
"When a typhoon came,
my father found I was standing
on top of the roof."
LEVINE:
Even as a child,
and even in a society
as collectivist
as pre-war Japan,
he emphasizes
his independent strain of mind.
Someone who wasn't willing
to do things
the way the teachers
expected him to do them,
but who might have known better.
NARRATOR:
In 1939, at the age of 18,
Fujita departed
from his boyhood home
for the Meiji College
of Technology
to study engineering.
There, he continued
to pursue his passion
for amateur
meteorological experiments,
hopeful for a life filled
with scientific research
in his beloved homeland.
But after the atomic bombs
dropped on Japan,
everything changed for Fujita.
♪ ♪
MATHIS:
After World War II ended,
Japan's economy
was absolutely devastated.
He was an assistant professor,
but there was
no research going on.
Just surviving was a struggle.
One of the things he did
to get extra money was,
he applied
and received a grant
to do science maps,
weather maps,
for local schoolteachers.
NARRATOR:
Working with atmospheric data
provided
by local weather stations,
Fujita created detailed maps
that revealed something
other scientists overlooked.
His maps provided
far more information
about localized conditions
than the larger pressure fronts
illustrated as smooth curves
in textbooks.
"In the 1940s and '50s,
people would smooth out
those bumps and wiggles,"
a former student recalled.
"Fujita said, 'Those bumps
and wiggles mean something.'"
