I have been chasing since I was a little kid with my dad. Storm Chasing is in my blood.
My Grandpa was the Emergency Manager of the City of Lansing, MI for 25 years, from the Late-60s through the beginning of the 90s. He had the tornado siren system installed in the 60s to cover the City of Lansing, and was responsible for setting them off during tornadoes.
My father was around this his entire life, and became very interested in severe weather and tornadoes. My father started taking me on chases at a very young age. He was also instrumental in having the Doppler Radar for WLNS TV-6 in Lansing installed during his tenure as Chief Engineer at that station.
I used to listen to spotter nets all the time and always wanted to get involved. The derecho event of May 31, 1998 was an event that I studied a lot and have always kept in the back of my head. I also remember May 3, 1999 very well, and listened to as much as I could that night online.
As an adult I finally became involved by taking SKYWARN training and getting my Amateur Radio license. My callsign is WX8BEN, and you can view my amateur radio site at http://www.wx8ben.com.
Since getting my Amateur Radio license, I have become AEC (Assistant Emergency Coordinator) in charge of Skywarn for Ingham County, MI which includes most of the City of Lansing. In my first year as Skywarn AEC (2007) we had 2 strong tornadoes touch down in the county - on August 24th we had a EF-3 Tornado touch down in Potterville, MI and continue into the City of Lansing causing EF-1 damage across the southern end of the city. I was running Skywarn net control at the time and was not far from the path of destruction. On October 18, a high end EF-2 tornado struck the town of Williamston after a large Severe Weather outbreak across IL, IN, KY, TN and MI which I chased.
In our past Skywarn trainings, we have had the pleasure of presentations from Kaz Fujita, the son of Ted Fujita. He is truely an amazing individual, and has a lot of information to share about his father and his work on building the Fujita Scale which is still somewhat in use today (Although with the Enhanced Fujita scale, it has been slightly modified)
In my spare time, I have completely built, designed, developed, and maintain the Lansing ARPSC website for our radio group at http://www.lansingarpsc.com. I have also been a part of shaping the City of Lansing Tornado Siren policy, something my Grandpa would be very proud of if he was alive today.
I am best known as the "Web Guy" as I work for a fairly large-sized web hosting company here in Michigan as a Tech Support Supervisor and UNIX Systems Administrator. I am well versed in web servers, mail servers, streaming video servers, etc on both Windows and Linux/UNIX environments.
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