As the eye of Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas late Friday, social media users were briefly aghast after a storm chaser posted video that abruptly cut off leaving viewers wondering if he was killed by a collapsing building.
Jeff Piotrowski, a storm chaser, live streamed himself on Periscope as he and his partners sat through 130 mile-per-hour wind gusts in Rockport, Texas.
Rockport is a coastal town just northeast of Corpus Christi. The surrounding region is in the path of a hurricane that is considered more powerful than any storm system seen in Texas for decades, according to meteorologists.
As Harvey’s eye reached the Texas coast, Piotrowski remained in the area and filmed the effects of the hurricane.
At one point, Piotrowski said that a ‘car wash’-like structure collapsed and that the roof of the building in which his car was parked was also in danger of collapsing.
As the eye of Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas late Friday, social media users were briefly aghast after a storm chaser posted video that abruptly cut off leaving viewers wondering if he was killed by a collapsing building
Jeff Piotrowski, a storm chaser, live streamed himself on Periscope as he and his partners sat through 130 mile-per-hour wind gusts in Rockport, Texas
‘There’s total destruction here outside my window,’ Piotrowski said, his voice rising as he dramatically describes the effects of the devastation around him.
‘There’s zero visibility,’ he said in one Periscope video. ‘I see walls and debris now flying through the air.’
Piotrowski described ‘roofs being ripped off’ and ‘high beams splitting.’
His live stream was conducted from his car, where he has storm tracking satellite and communications equipment.
He said that wind gusts in his immediate surroundings reached as high as 150 miles per hour.
Just before the Category 4 storm reached landfall, Piotrowski tracked the storm as moving to the northwest.
At one point, Piotrowski said that a ‘car wash’-like structure collapsed and that the roof of the building in which his car was parked was also in danger of collapsing
He said that Harvey would pack winds with gusts over 100 miles per hour ‘for the next four or five hours.’
Harvey posted a series of clips from his position in Rockport on Friday.
The poor visibility caused by the hurricane coupled with the coming of night time made it impossible to see what was happening outside.
The most dramatic moment in the live stream came at the 1:43 mark of a Periscope video in which Piotrowski is heard yelling as the roof of the structure in which he was parked was blown off.
‘The roof just fell,’ he is heard screaming. ‘The whole building just collapsed around me.’
In the video, debris is seen being blown all around his car, with the windshield wipers being activated to full speed.
A few hours later, Piotrowski tweeted a picture of him and his two storm chasing partners
At the 1:44 mark, he is heard saying: ‘Everything is giving way.’
His voice begins to fade as the sound of flood waters engulfs him.
It then appears that he got out of his car and was looking for shelter as debris was being whipped around.
Piotrowski said that a ‘building collapsed right next to me.’
‘We have catastrophic damage occurring now,’ he said as winds whip at speeds that destroy nearly everything in the area.
The video abruptly cuts out at the end, leaving viewers to wonder if Piotrowski survived.
But he subsequently posted two more videos, which was a relief to Twitter users who knew he was alive.
The dramatic Periscope clip garnered in excess of 980,000 views.
A few hours later, Piotrowski tweeted a picture of him and his two storm chasing partners.
‘We are alive in the eye now calm winds,’ he tweeted. ‘I moved to a new location NW wall going to be very bad.’