For Tea Storm Chasers, reporting breaking news is ‘out of the love of our hearts’

Skylar Coleman doesn’t get much sleep over a typical weekend.

Instead, you’re more likely to find him in a 2013 Ford Taurus somewhere between the east side and downtown Sioux Falls, listening to law enforcement scanner traffic.

“I’m not driving constantly. I sit. There are spots I sit,” he said. “People know I sit there and will come say hi. If it’s absolutely dead and the bar rush doesn’t bring anything, come 3 a.m. I may just go home. But the past few weekends there’s been enough to keep you up all night.”

Coleman is one of a dozen volunteers who make up Tea Storm Chasers, a group that began as the name indicates with storm chasing but has evolved into a nearly real-time online report of crimes, traffic issues and other breaking-news events.

“This is in our spare time out of the love of our hearts,” he said. “We each have our own reasons and have very different reasons for wanting to inform the public and do photography and get footage, but none of us are paid. We’re not motivated by the money, and that’s what makes it so amazing. We’re passionate about the content we provide the public.”

Aj Towne, 36, is the founder of Tea Storm Chasers. Originally from Indiana, he discovered Sioux Falls 15 years ago through his now-wife, a Nebraska native and USD grad whom he met online and married in 2010. Her career in social work brought them to Sioux Falls, where he helped create the hot dog-based restaurant Senor Wiener.

He then earned a degree in law enforcement science from Southeast Tech but didn’t pursue a career in it because he said he would have been required to relocate. In 2010, he was scoping out a storm when he ran into a friend who’s a storm chaser.

“We got to talking and found out he was in Sioux Falls, and I lived in Tea,” Towne said. “I was just doing it as a hobbyist for fun, and he got my gears turning as making it into a group.”

They started sharing their storm chasing on Twitter and then added Facebook, “and that’s where things really took off,” Towne said.

Today, Tea Storm Chasers has more than 70,000 followers on Facebook and nearly 26,000 followers on Twitter.

“I never dreamed of being where I am today with it,” Towne said. “I never had the vision of being where I am today with it. Today, it feels like a full-time job, where before it was like, I heard this or something happened and I’m going to post it.”

It essentially is close to a full-time occupation for Towne, who also works security at the Denny Sanford Premier Center.

Tea Storm Chasers became a nonprofit in 2015.

There was funding needed for things like fuel, computers, equipment and cameras, Towne explained.

“Everything we do goes back to the community,” he said. “All our funds go to equipment or back into the community.”

But storm season in Sioux Falls and the 150-mile radius around the city can be unpredictable and isn’t year-round. Towne didn’t set out to cover the country, so to fill in the downtime he decided to put his own twist on the Argus Leader’s Argus 911 brand, which covers mostly crime-related breaking news.

“I was like, I have a police scanner, I can do the same thing,” Towne said.

The 2018 downtown building collapse gained Tea Storm Chasers a new batch of followers as “we were literally across the street in the parking garage and had a good view the whole time,” he continued.

“We tell our reporters, and even myself, you have to come at this with an open mind. You can’t put your own personal twist on it. And that’s why a lot of people are looking at us. We’re not politically controlled. We’ll tell you this is what’s happening.”

Building a team

There are five volunteer reporters who regularly cover breaking news for Tea Storm Chasers, including Towne and Coleman.

While there isn’t a set schedule, someone typically is listening to scanner traffic 24 hours a day, especially on weekends when it’s busier.

They use a real-time scanner instead of one that can stream over a phone, which allows broader access, and they tend to divide the city geographically when heading out to cover incidents.

A group chat allows them to tell one another when someone is covering a call.

“We’re all first responder-certified,” Towne said. “We go through CPR and first-aid classes, and we carry an AED and are all AED-certified. We do all in-house training, and we cover everything from reading radar to looking at the sky to first-aid response to disaster relief to driving because you use our vehicles.”

The goal in covering law enforcement is simple “five W’s” journalism, Towne said: Who, what, when, where and why.

Tea Storm Chasers reporters don’t write news stories but relay what’s happening on scene generally in real time or after law enforcement sends follow-up information.

“The story makes itself,” Coleman said. “We do strictly what is told to us from police and first responders, and if there’s an accident or fire, the victims or people on scene will tell us.”

On the storm-chasing side, last year they were out about a half-dozen times. The year before, it was closer to a dozen. The group includes men and women in the Sioux Falls area from approximately age 20 to 65.

Tea Storm Chasers turned an old ambulance into a mobile weather center and has a secondary one as a disaster relief vehicle, filled with food, water, blankets, first-aid supplies, teddy bears and chainsaws.

“We livestream as much as possible,” Towne said. “Our thing is we want everybody to be safe. We don’t want ‘John Smith’ coming out his door watching the storm roll through the town. We want him downstairs in a basement, safe, watching us on his phone.”

Tea Storm Chasers occasionally will post when it’s looking for new members, or people will contact wanting to join.

“Once people figure out what we do behind the scenes, they’re more involved,” Towne said. “There’s so much more to us than a Facebook page.”

Members go to schools to talk about public safety and educate around severe weather, he said. In 2019, they took a truck of supplies to victims of flooding in Dell Rapids.

“Our crew is ready to help when a town does get hit,” Towne said. “If a town gets hit, we stop our chase and start rendering aid. If a house gets hit, we send our disaster relief vehicle, and we can provide immediate first aid. And then we’ll continue to chase.”

For Coleman, who moved to Sioux Falls from Virginia, Tea Storm Chasers became a way to meet people and use his photography skills.

His day job is offloading semis at a warehouse, and he does some security and photography work on the side.

He worked in fire rescue in Virginia for four years, which he said prepared him for the all-nighters he pulls on weekends tracking law enforcement calls.

“I’m pretty much 5 p.m. to midnight weekdays and 24 hours during the weekend,” he said.

“I would definitely say certain crimes are going up, and the weather is changing too. And there’s way more protests in the last 12 months than in a long, long time.”

Coleman is a certified EMT and has lent a hand to many as he has volunteered with Tea Storm Chasers. He has changed tires, helped with traffic control and even crawled through a cat door to help a woman in a wheelchair whose blanket had caught fire.

He’d like to eventually pursue a career in law enforcement, he said.

“I see police and first responders as heroes with an unimaginable job ahead of them, something a lot of humans can’t cope with and can’t do,” he said. “I want people to see our first responders in action and get footage no one else has.”

Both Towne and Coleman praise the Sioux Falls Police Department and other area law enforcement.

“We have a great relationship,” Towne said. “I love our Sioux Falls police. I love our county deputies. I love our highway patrol. They’re always willing to talk. They’re willing to take two seconds out of their day.”

There are times Coleman said he will be the only one reporting on scene.

“My relationship with law enforcement is amazing,” he said. “They realize what I’m here for and what I stand for and that I’m not going to be problematic, and they let me stay.”

For his part, Sioux Falls Police Department spokesman Sam Clemens opted not to comment on a media outlet but did say the department considers Tea Storm Chasers like other media outlets in that it “provides information to the public like traditional media sources,” he said. “And we try to treat every media entity the same without favoring one over the other.”

To fundraise, Tea Storm Chasers does pancake feeds, rummage sales, asks for corporate sponsorships and donations, and sells Krispy Kreme doughnuts on Saturdays.

There’s a growing amount of overhead to maintain, including two storage units in Tea that are filled with donations to be used in future disaster relief. The cars continue to need gas and maintenance, and the hope is to eventually pay reporters and have a building to work out of, Towne said.

And what about the name? While “Tea Storm Chasers” made sense years ago, it has grown far beyond Tea and storm chasing. Is it time for a rebrand?

“We get asked this quite a bit,” Towne said. “But I feel like we’ve made such a name for Tea Storm Chasers, people would be like, ‘Who are these new guys?’”

Meanwhile, the thrill that started it all – storm chasing – still exists for him.

“Each one to me is memorable,” he said. “You learn different things, learn how to read things differently. You look up, and there’s funnels above you. There’s rotation. We’re right where the action is.”