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I live in Alabama in an area that was in the path of the April 2011 tornadoes but an area that was luckily spared of serious damage. This is the experience of one Tuscaloosa student, a story he shared openly on Facebook. Some names and information have been edited to protect identity.
[SIZE=1]This is my experience during the tornado that swept through Alberta and Tuscaloosa in as much detail as I can muster with the medication I am on. I need to put this down for therapeutic reasons and for others to read because I can't keep re-telling this story. If you are to take anything away from this story it is two things: 1)God saved so many people that day including me and 2)disasters bring out the absolute best in some people...and the absolute worst in others. I am going to write down the events exactly as I remember them while I still can. I will add details that I have gathered from accounts by my neighbor and judging from materials stuck inside my body. I would also like to point out that any person I don't reference by name (such as neighbor) I had not really met before. Here goes:[/SIZE]
[SIZE=1]At roughly 4pm on April 27, 2011, I was sitting in [cut] class listening to presentation on industries and the severe weather alarms went off and the University cancelled classes for the rest of the day. I considered staying on campus, but I saw everyone else leaving and decided I would be fine going to my apartment (face palm). This is probably my biggest regret of my life purely for the fact that I let the actions of others sway my opinion and nearly kill me. I walked to my truck that was parked roughly a mile away near the Coliseum. I knew we were in for a storm when the wind knocked my backpack off my shoulder halfway there. I made it to my truck and drove to my apartment that was located at the intersection of [cut] in Alberta City , AL . During my drive, I received several texts from both my older and younger sisters warning me that some severe storms were heading to my area. Naturally, I discounted them as hysteria and paranoia and continued on my merry way. I got to my apartment at roughly 4:30pm and popped a frozen pizza in the oven for dinner. I turned on my computer and pulled up my assignments for the night. As I began working through my homework, I got some more texts from friends warning me of the weather. I assured them all that I would be perfectly safe in my sturdy apartment. The timer for the pizza went off so I got it out of the oven and took two slices to my room. I hadn't eaten much for lunch so I was ravenous. I ate nearly the entire pizza. This small detail probably saved my life. More on that later.[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=1]The power in my apartment went out at roughly 5pm and so I opened the shades on my window to read and look outside. I noticed the trees behind my apartment swaying at a steep angle. Then I decided I should probably close all windows and doors. I did so. Just then my buddy Sean texted me that I should find cover. I was coming up with a clever retort about how paranoid he is being when my ears popped really hard and I heard what sounded like a train outside my window. I had watched enough news to know this meant a tornado. I jumped into my closet and slammed the door shut. I felt the whole building shaking so I grabbed the door knob and held it shut with all my strength. Then I heard tearing and ripping noises which had to be my back wall tearing away. At this point, I wanna point out that if any of these events had occurred slightly differently or in a different order, I would have been buried. Anyway, the back wall tore away from the building and the door to my closet began shaking open and I kept pulling it back closed. After a couple seconds of this struggle, the door and I were sucked out of the closet and through the back wall. I never rose more than a couple feet off the ground but, judging from memories of where things were, I flew about 40 feet total. The winds flung me from the back wall into the chain link fence 10-15 feet behind my apartment with enough force to leave bruises of the chain links in my side. It then flung me back into some piles of rubble where I was then rolled around on the ground for about 15 seconds before it subsided slightly. I looked up from my prone position and I was lying on tile floor and I could see my neighbor lying on top of her baby trying to shield her. I also heard myself screaming and realized I had been screaming the entire time but hadn't noticed.[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=1] The winds were beginning to pick up again so I ran over to my neighbor and threw myself on top of them to try and shield them. Somewhere along the way I stepped on a piece of wood with enough force to shove a 3-inch piece through the bottom of my foot. Please take note, this was not an act of heroism, but desparation. As far as my concussed mind could think, I truly believed during that split second that we three were the only beings left in a world that had dissolved around us. I acted to try and preserve the only other people left in this Hell so I wouldn't be alone if I survived. I laid on top of her and immediately the winds picked up again. I was bombarded with (judging from wounds and what is still imbedded in my back at the time of this writing) glass, roofing shingles, pieces of wood, and a Bic pen. LOL. I know this for sure because I pulled it out of my side when I stood up. The storm finally dissipated after roughly 10-20 seconds and slowly stood up. Due to adrenaline and shock, I did not notice any of the injuries I suffered. However, I did notice that I could barely hear anything and my ears were bleeding from the pressure of the storm (the earlier popping that alerted me of the tornado). Everyone's ears were. The poor baby's ears were pouring blood. At this point, I surveyed my body. My jeans, watch, glasses, and shirt had been ripped from my body.Somehow, I was still holding my iPhone in my right hand. Just then a call came through. It was my older sister, Christine. I could only stare at it in disbelief before answering. I don't remember our conversation, but she later relayed it to me. Here it is as she remembers it:
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[SIZE=1]Christy: Randy??? Randy???[/SIZE]
[SIZE=1]Me: Kiki! My apartment; it's gone. The baby is bleeding. I lost my glasses. My foot is bleeding bad. There are people stuck. I have to go.[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=1]I then hung up the phone because people were screaming from within piles of rubble. I limped over to the nearest pile where one of my neighbor's head was sticking out from beneath a section of roof. I pulled off a couple small pieces of wood before collapsing. I think I blacked out for a couple seconds. Next thing I remember, he is digging himself out. He comes to check on me and almost slips in the puddle of blood and water at my feet. He tears off his shirt and ties it around my foot (I had no shoes or socks on before it hit). He helps me stand and we look around at the damage. I see my childhood friend Adam and his girlfriend Mary and their dog that live six doors down from me. They are standing in their bathroom. I yell to them and then begin trying to crawl out. At some point I believe a neighbor (maybe Mary) throws me a woman's loafer which I put on my left foot to protect it. It was a left shoe that was about 2 sizes too small but I barely noticed. I can't walk because of my foot so i throw some sections of my couch across the short wall of sharp debri between me and what's left of the parking lot and begin crawling on my hands and knees across. Due to the composition and layout of the debris, I am forced to crawl on my belly under my truck to get out (it was then parked in my living room and totalled).[/SIZE]
[SIZE=1]I finally reach the parking lot covered in blood, dirt, oil, and sheetrock dust. I lend a neighbor my phone and then I spot my friend and neighbor, Brandon and hobble to him to check him out. Amazingly, he is unhurt. We both hear someone yelling that another storm is about to touch down in the area so we immediately take off to find shelter. I lose track of everyone else. Adam and Mary help dig out some neighbors. Brandon lends me his shoulder and we begin walking (me hopping) to the Piggly Wiggly down the street. We hear that they are not letting people in so we detour to the local Save-A-Lot and ask the manager if he is letting people in. He lets us in. I sit on the nearest checkout station while Brandon runs to find first aid supplies. He finds peroxide, paper towels, and scotch tape. I use what little Spanish I know to try to cheer up a small hispanic child that was crying near me. I begin to feel very faint from blood loss so I start chugging as much Gatorade as possible to keep blood sugar up so I don't pass out. The pizza I ate earlier also probably kept me awake and alive. Brandon begins cleaning and wrapping my foot. We then see that there is still wood sticking out. We wrap paper towels and tape over it to try to stop the blood loss.[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=1]I then begin to feel a slight itchy, burning sensation on my back so I asked him to take a look. He says that I have a few cuts on my back. I'm glad he didn't tell me the extent to which it was messed up. We stay in the store and wait for the next tornado to touch down. I sit on a rolling cart so that Brandon could quickly wheel me to the back if it came. We were all getting ready to run to the back and lock ourselves inside the freezer. I tell Brandon to gather some food and water in case we are trapped inside the store. I feel prepared, so I try to slow breathing and heart rate to slow blood flow. Some time later (I began losing track of time and events) we see people run into the bank to steal money and cops arrest them. This pissess us all off for obvious reasons. Brandon and I walk (and hop) up to the Texaco because we hear they have set up a triage center there. We get there and they turn us away so we go back to the store. I am exhausted from blood loss and hopping everywhere. I should point out that I am hopping down the street wearing only my silver cross necklace and boxers and the homemade bandages on my foot. It's funny now, not so much then.[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=1] We stay in the store for a while. A woman who was in the store earlier comes running back and leads a cop to where I'm lying. I owe her and Brandon both my life. I would have bled out within a couple hours if that cop hadn't found me. He calls in a truck and I jump in the back and they drive me to the hospital. I ask for pen in the bed of the truck so I can write my name and medical info and mom's phone number on my body in case I pass out again and can't talk to nurses. We get to the hospital and I am assigned a radomized name for legal reasons ([cut]). I ask over and over again for them to call my mom to check on Jennifer because she is home alone in Homewood and I heard a storm passed by there.
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[SIZE=1]I will never forget the nurse who helped me, Nurse Jackie. She checked up on me throughout my X-Rays and CT scans and stitches over the next 6-8 hours. I felt like I was her only patient although she likely had scores of them at this time. I plan on thanking her personally as soon as I can travel.
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[SIZE=1]This is where the story ends. I am just one person among hundreds, possibly thousands of people hurt in a city where neighbors and strangers alike risked their own lives to save each other. I tried to help who I could any way I could and I owe my life to many others. Thank you, Nurse Jackie for consoling me while I was alone for those many hours. Thank you, Brandon for lending me a friendly shoulder and thinking only of others. Thank you, Lady from Save-A-Lot for finding me a ride to the hospital. Thank you, Mom for forcing Delta airlines to let you off of a plane preparing to take off. Thank you, Jimmy and Jennifer for looking throughout hospital (and morgue) for me for hours before finding me. Thank you to the men and women of the National Guard, fire departments, and police departments around the state. Many of us wouldn't have made it without yall. And, of course, thank you, GOD. Even as the clothes and material possessions were ripped from my body, your symbol stayed fimly around my neck and in my heart.[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=1]It is long, but I can already feel a massive weight lifted from my chest. This note has done its job. If you are reading this, you are my friend and share the honor of calling me "pal". [/SIZE]
I live ten miles from the path of where that same storm came rampaging through north of Birmingham. I remember walking out into my yard the next morning picking up pieces of insulation. I know people who found credit card statements, street signs, and other debris that had been blown dozens of miles away.
I live in Cincinnati and I have lived through two tornadoes one in 1969 and the other the severe out break of 1974. My house received $38,000.00 in damage in 1969 and about $10,000.00 damage in 1974. The 69 storm occured on August 9 at 6:01PM I remember we had about 30 seconds notice before the storm hit (no sirens). I ran through my kitchen and looked outside towards the west and I saw absolute total blackness and the well known roar of the aproaching storm. My dad and I dove down the basement steps (10) both of us praying that we would make it. The noise was something you can't explain. At 6:05 it was dead silent (nothing). My dad then screamed for my mom who was upstairs taking a bath--thank God she was ok, the only reason she did not get hurt was the door remained closed during the storm and the glass/metal/wood shreads embeaded themselves in the door. We walked out of the house and as far as you could see it was total devastation. In 69, our house suffered major roof damage, there was only one window left intact in the entire house-however the house survived both storms. It took until June 1970 to finally clean up the entire mess. In the 69 storm there were many injuries and three fatallies. The fatallies (two kids and their mom) occured only 4 doors down from our house in the same block.
I live ten miles from the path of where that same storm came rampaging through north of Birmingham. I remember walking out into my yard the next morning picking up pieces of insulation. I know people who found credit card statements, street signs, and other debris that had been blown dozens of miles away.
You know, it's kind of funny, I was far more affected by the straight line winds that blew through the night before the tornadoes. If you went through the Cahaba Heights area around then you could see how every tree on the road leading up to the Summit was ripped from the roots and almost every house had seriously crumpled roofing. The next night, with the tornadoes, it barely even rained there.
I was about 45 miles away, but the most violent tornado outbreak to ever strike North Carolina - now referred to as "The Carolinas Outbreak" tore through on March 28, 1984.
I was in middle school, Charlotte, and can recall the afternoon very vividly - getting home from school, and hearing that there was a tornado watch. I did not consider this to be much of a big deal, and put some music on while I got started on homework.
At some point shortly thereafter I noticed it starting to get very, very dark outside, and I can remember thinking "this is going to be a really mean thunderstorm." 4 PM, and it was dark enough that the streetlights came on. This was 20 minutes or so before the thunderstorm actually hit. (I learned many years later that those thunderstorms were moving at a foreward speed of ~60 mph, so to cast that dark of a shadow ahead of the storm while moving at that speed would lead one to estimate that the height of those supercells was at least 50,000 feet.)
The storm was like nothing I've ever seen before in North Carolina - it went on like the apocalypse, but no tornado, not in Charlotte as it turned out. I didn't know what was going on, as the power, phones, radio, cable had all been knocked out by lightning, which was so continual it was almost psychedelic.
The power came back on just in time for the national - not local news - as Dan rather was literally reading bulletins that were being handed to him describing a series of towns in South Carolina that had been hit by a series of tornadoes that were, at times, more than 2 miles wide. I grabbed a road atlas off a bookshelf and then figured out that those tornadoes - 45 miles to the south - were the opposite side of the same storm that had blasted through Charlotte 3 hours earlier.
The newspaper (Charlotte Observer) the next day: one supercell thunderstorm formed east of Anniston, Alabama. That storm caused wind damage, produced large hail, many reports of wall clouds and funnel clouds in the Atlanta metro, and became tornadic between Atlanta and Athens, GA. Once in South Carolina, it then produced a nearly continual series of F3 and F4 tornadoes along an intermittent path nearly 400 miles long. As one tornado would dissipate, another would form, and most of the tornadoes had damage paths 20-50 miles in length. Two of them, with damage paths both at around 2.5 miles in width, struck opposite ends of the town of Bennettsville, SC 15 minutes apart, and completely levelled half the town - not roof damage or trees snapped, but things like an entire strip mall wiped off its' foundation kinds of damage. The quantity of fallout between the paths of those two storms (2.5 miles wide each, and the moved parallel at a distance of about 6 miles apart until the first one dissipated) itself was equivalent to F0-F1 damage. In SC and NC that one supercell (there were others) spawned 14 tornadoes in total, all but two of which were F3 or F4. In the areas between tornado paths, there was severe downburst damage that often linked the paths. That specific supercell tracked from extreme eastern Alabama to Virginia Beach in something like 12 hours, and produced some form of recorded damage (tornadoes, large hail, microbursts, or flash flooding intense enough to cause disruption) in every county it passed through, form beginning until it went out to sea.
Even without tornado strikes, Greenville-Spartanburg had millions in hail damage. Softball sized hail fell just south of Charlotte, in Columbia SC, and in Fayetteville NC, where one supercell produced a million dollar hailstorm, before supercell #2 - which had produced the Bennettsville tornado - moved through, about 45 minutes later. Microbursts in the Raleigh area destroyed one house; that supercell (the 3rd or 4th of the outbreak) began to produce large tornadoes about 50 miles east of Raleigh and continued to produce tornadoes to very close to the Virginia state line. Yet more severe microburst damage cleared a path through the Great Dismal Swamp and from there into Chesapeake and Virginia Beach, where the microburst damage came up to 6 digits in $.
The stuff we were seeing on TV the next few days was unbelievable - in South Carolina, Newberry (between Columbia and Greenville), Winnsboro (between Columbia and Charlotte), and Bennettsville (90 miles NE of Columbia) looked like an air raid had come through. Ditto in North Carolina for Maxton, Red Springs (SW of Fayetteville), La Grange (between Goldsboro and Kinston), and Greenville, where a mile-wide path was carved through the southern and southeastern suburbs. In Red Springs, half the town was leveled (the 2nd Bennettsville tornado, which had struck that town about 20 minutes earlier), and in the half that wasn't, every remaining building had F1-F3 damage inflicted upon it.
According to the Charlotte Observer some time later, the meteorologist Thomas Fujita had considered that the damage in the Bennettsville area may have reached F5 levels of intensity, but due to the fact that the damage was caused by two very large multi-vortex tornadoes, moving in tandem and throwing back a huge amount of debris into the area between the two paths, the went with an F4, as there were several places where it was impossible to know which storm had primarily caused the most damage at certain locations.
There have been a number of tornado outbreaks to hit the Carolinas since then, including a very prolific (but not nearly as violent) one last spring. The 1984 outbreak is something I will never forget. Even in a city that didn't experience a tornado, the violence of the thunderstorm itself was unlike anything I've ever seen. Nothing close.
You know, it's kind of funny, I was far more affected by the straight line winds that blew through the night before the tornadoes. If you went through the Cahaba Heights area around then you could see how every tree on the road leading up to the Summit was ripped from the roots and almost every house had seriously crumpled roofing. The next night, with the tornadoes, it barely even rained there.
Since you and I are in the same zip code, I live about a quarter-mile in from the fire station on Overton Road down in a hollow, so we weren't affected by the straight line winds. But we were up watching James Spann in the basement when the sky turn green and got very quiet.
As it turns out, the tornado's path was less than a mile from us and while the winds didn't blow much where we were, just up the street they were intense enough to snap some power poles in half, making me think that a mini tornado had skipped through. It took until Sunday night for the power to be restored. But, given how much other people suffered, I wasn't complaining.
That storm was only an F2, but it was amazing how much damage it caused through that neighborhood.
That afternoon, when the F4 was barreling up I-59, I got the last room at the Hilton by the Colonnade and took the family there. There was no way I was going to ride it out with no power and a dead weather radio.
Our saying? "If it's hitting the fan, watch James Spann."
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