Wilson tornado
© UknownThis still is taken from a video filmed by Steve Hoag of a tornado in Wilson, N.C.

The video Steve Hoag shot of an April tornado bearing down on him in Wilson, N.C., is taking the Internet by storm.

More than 1 million viewers have watched the video and heard his calm narration as an EF2 twister blew up a transformer, exploded a building and then swirled debris around him on April 16.

Gutsy? Idiotic? Crazy?

Accident, Hoag said.

And it's not something amateurs should try, say storm experts - and Hoag himself.

"If I came upon a similar situation today, I'd see if I could turn around and drive the other way," Hoag said in an interview Thursday.

But it's also something that apparently is becoming more common in this digital age, when it seems that just about everyone has a camera as close as a cellphone.

That was apparent again last week when more than 300 tornadoes touched down in six Southern states and killed at least 318 people. Some amateur videos taken during that outbreak have added to concerns being voiced by National Weather Service officials.

People seem to be "just clueless" about what to do if a tornado threatens, Dick Elder, meteorologist in charge of the weather service branch in Wichita, Kan., told McClatchy Newspapers.

Jeff Johnson, warning coordination meteorologist for the weather service office in Des Moines, said the agency's storm spotters receive training before heading out.

"But these (amateurs) are people who don't know much about tornadoes," he said.

"Everyone has a camera on their cellphone, so they think 'Let's get a movie shot.' There are countless movies of tornadoes. One more isn't going to document anything we don't already know," Johnson said.

For the record, Hoag, 50, said he doesn't like driving in rain. Black clouds loomed ahead of the North Carolina Department of Roads employee, so he pulled off the road that day.

As he spoke with his sister on his cellphone, he grabbed his camera to film the storm. Within seconds a tornado appeared in front of him. And then Hoag made an assumption: that he was safe because the tornado wasn't moving toward him.

That's an assumption that worries experts, many of whom follow tornadoes themselves.

"The path of a tornado is not predictable, making it very dangerous," said Ken Dewey, applied climatologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

A tornado moving toward a person may not appear to be moving at all, he said. A twister can be stationary or travel up to 60 mph. It can travel in straight line, turn, reverse itself or even twist about in loops.

That's what happened in 1980, when Grand Island was ravaged, Dewey said.

Seven tornadoes struck in and around the city. Some corkscrewed their way across the city, while one remained stationary, drilling into a single spot.

Tornadoes can reverse direction, shrink and widen and grow exponentially in strength in an instant.

In Hoag's case, he said the tornado shifted.

"I realized it was more serious when 'Oh, wow! It's on top of me,' " he said.

That would sound familiar to Johnson of the weather service.

"People get fixated on tornadoes and they don't know how fast they're moving, or that it could change course," he said. "If you get fixated and all of a sudden it's on top of you, what are you going to do?"

People also often don't realize that it's not just the funnel they see that is dangerous.

"The parent circulation around it takes ... debris from the tornado and circulates it around the tornado with wind speeds of 100 mph or more," Dewey said.

A couple of years ago, Dewey said he saw a semitrailer truck on Interstate 80 get spun around and thrown into a ditch by the circulation outside the tornado.

The weather service's Johnson said there is no such thing as a safe tornado, even a minor twister.

"They're all dangerous. All it takes is one two-by-four that's flying through the air to hit you," he said.

Derek Loeske, spokesman for Heartland React, a volunteer organization of storm spotters in the Omaha metropolitan area, said people may be lulled into a false sense of safety because they think they can do the same thing as spotters who are out watching storms.

What the public doesn't realize, Loeske said, is that storm spotters have been trained on what to look for in a storm system and where to position themselves to watch.

Just as important, properly trained storm spotters work within immediate reach of shelter.

"We have safe houses," Loeske said. "We have an exit strategy."