Discovery Channel has announced it will honor former Storm Chasers cast members Tim Samaras, Carl Young and Paul Samaras with Mile Wide Tornado: Stormchasers Tribute, which will air Wednesday, June 5 at 10PM ET/PT.
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The new version will blend the previously-aired footage with new coverage of the recent May 31 tornado which swept through El Reno, OK, and killed Tim, Paul and Young in addition to ten other people.
Mile Wide Tornado: Stormchasers Tribute will include highlights and special scenes of all three men in their storm chasing careers and chronicle the EF5 tornado that traveled over 17 miles within its 45-minute life on Friday.
"Via in-depth interviews with scientists and the latest data, it looks at how this tornado formed, how it was different from a similar EF5 tornado that hit in the same area in 1999 and the role the warning system had in saving lives," according to the network.
"Discovery interviews meteorologists, storm chasers and emergency management who battled to save lives during that fateful day with exclusive footage of now condemned areas. This special provides one of the most comprehensive collections of user-generated footage of the Oklahoma tornado to date and conducts original interviews with those who recorded those first-hand accounts."
Tim founded the project TWISTEX, the Tactical Weather Instrumented Sampling in Tornadoes Experiment, which is a tornado research experiment designed to increase time for warnings and therefore hopefully save lives.
Young was Tim's colleague who encouraged him to collect meteorological data from inside tornadoes as the principle focus of his research, and together, they chased and tracked down over 125 tornadoes. Tim's son Paul shared the same passion for storms and had become TWISTEX's videographer.
The men were part of the last three of Storm Chasers' five seasons, which aired annually on Discovery from 2007 through 2011.
Mile Wide Tornado: Stormchasers Tribute is being produced by Pioneer Productions with Kirstie McLure, Robert Strange, French Horwitz, and Julie Meisner-Eagle serving as executive producers.
About The Author: Elizabeth Kwiatkowski
