A Chaotic Flurry of Twisters That Spread Devastation Fast and Wide
By ROBBIE BROWN and KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: April 28, 2011
PLEASANT GROVE, Ala. — William Cannon, 46, a maintenance worker in this Birmingham suburb, said everyone knew on Wednesday that a big storm was coming. “The news had been telling us about it for two days,” he said.
Dusty Compton/Tuscaloosa News
Devastation along 15th Street, in the Cedar Crest and Forest Lake neighborhoods of Tuscaloosa, Ala., one of the places hardest hit by the powerful tornadoes that swept through the state. More Photos »
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About 5:15 p.m., his sister called from Mobile, telling him that it looked like a tornado was headed his way. “I’m looking at the TV and the radar said the tornado’s hitting Pleasant Grove right now,” she told him.
Then the phone went dead. His windows started to shatter. Part of the roof flew off. His daughter prayed while he grabbed his wife’s godmother, who is 75, and tried to carry her downstairs.
But the wind was too strong. It picked him up, blew him down the stairs and nearly carried him out of his house. Meanwhile, his daughter clung to a stair rail and grabbed his wife’s godmother with one hand.
He doesn’t know how long the tornado lasted. Some said it was only a minute, but he thought it felt much longer. When he went outside, the sun was shining.
The scene of devastation was repeated throughout Alabama, which took the brunt of violent storms that carved a path of destruction through the South on Wednesday. Usually, when tornadoes strike, they will devastate a single town or small area of a state. What was unusual in Alabama was that a mass of twisters ravaged the entire northern half of the state.
No single storm took a linear path. Rather, an untold number of tornadoes hit an untold number of homes and buildings in a chaotic flurry, touching down and picking up power at different places at different times. By the time they were gone Wednesday night, the wreckage was extensive, in terms of lives lost, neighborhoods crushed.
Officials and residents were still struggling on Thursday night to comprehend the magnitude of the damage. The death toll had reached at least 194, a number expected to rise.
“This is just total devastation,” said Vicki Wood, 52, as she picked through the rubble that had been her daughter’s house here.
“I’ve seen Katrina,” she said, saying that she had done several months of relief work in New Orleans. “I’ve seen anF-5 tornado. But this is different. This is the worst.”
A first round of tornadoes crossed from Mississippi into Alabama about noon on Wednesday, and a second, more deadly series of them hit the northern half of the state in the later afternoon and early evening. Nearly 200 people were killed in a short span of time, after a warm sun had lit up the sky on what seemed a pleasant, ordinary afternoon.
“We knew this stuff was coming later, but until about 3 or 4 in the afternoon, it was a beautiful day,” said Mark Kelly, a spokesman for the Jefferson County Emergency Management Agency, which covers Birmingham.
“It was windy, but by and large it was a sunny day,” he said. “Then the clouds started to gather.”
The helter-skelter nature of the touchdowns is reflected in the National Weather Service’s log of reports from residents.
Three fatalities were reported a little after 3 in the afternoon in Baileyton, a small town northeast of Birmingham. At 3:43 p.m., 13 fatalities and 40 injuries were reported in Union Grove, a bit to the northeast of Baileyton. At 3:52, a report of “numerous houses gone” came from Hatton, to the west.
“This happens so rarely, we don’t really have a context for it,” said Susan Cobb, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “This many tornadoes on such a wide scale is overwhelming.”
Some of the worst damage appeared to be in Tuscaloosa, to the southwest of Birmingham, where at least 36 people were killed, and in DeKalb County, in the northeast corner of the state, where at least 36 were also killed.
Rarely has a single natural disaster struck such a vast area so swiftly. There wasHurricane Katrina, of course, in 2005, when at least 1,836 people lost their lives in the subsequent floods — 1,464 of them in New Orleans alone. But Alabama may have more experience than most.
On March 21, 1932, seven tornadoes ripped through the state, killing 268 people and injuring 1,834.
Some residents were already predicting that the final toll from Wednesday’s storm would be larger.
Ms. Wood, whose daughter’s house looked like a landfill on Thursday, watched as injured children were being carried by on ripped-off doors and planks of wood.
“You have visions of this monster coming through, picking people up and just dumping them somewhere,” she said. “There’s nobody who won’t be affected.”
John Walkingshaw, 64, a retired police officer, was standing by his shattered house, which he had lived in for 36 years.
“It’s going to end up being the worst tornado this state has seen,” he said. Large chunks of the walls of the house were sitting in his yard. His red Lincoln sedan was half-buried under mud and debris.
“We’re lucky — we’re alive,” he said, referring to himself and his wife.
Sharon Blue, 57, a real estate appraiser, had saved herself by huddling in her laundry room. “I thought the whole house was just going to take off,” she said. “It was like Dorothy in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ I just held my little dogs and prayed.”
Lee Smith, 57, who works for a public utility, said people were caught off guard. Tornadoes are not uncommon, he said, but usually they do not do this much damage.
“There’s been so many storms that end up just being high wind and rain,” he said. “We figured this would be the same.”
In fact, no state in recent decades has lost as much life to the destructive path of tornadoes as Alabama. Between 1980 and 2009, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, tornadoes killed 165 people in the state — more than any other state, even though other states, like Texas, had more tornadoes. In Alabama the twisters are deadlier.
Alabama is not part of what is traditionally considered Tornado Alley, which covers the Plains States. But it is part of Dixie Alley, which runs through the South. Tornadoes in Dixie Alley can be worse because they are more violent, the Southern states are more densely populated, and the tornado season is less predictable, so residents are not always prepared. Studies have also said that housing in the South was made of less sturdy material than that in other parts of the country, making homes more susceptible to storm damage.
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