What Stands in a Storm (12 page)

The pastor of Smithville Baptist Church was sitting on the red brick steps that had led to 520 Sunday sermons, watching the funnel part the horizon. It was off in the distance, maybe a mile or two—he could see where it was, but not where it was going—and two heartbeats later he could feel it breathing down upon him. He turned to his youth minister and said, “It's here,” and the two of them began running. They sprinted across the parking lot to the two-story Sunday school wing, the oldest and strongest part of the church, and ducked into a low-ceilinged room where eleven others—children, parents, a small dog—were huddled together, terrified.

For fifteen long seconds, the world hung suspended. The winds punched through the windows and pelted the people with pieces of trees and homes and dreams. It peeled tiles off the ceiling and tugged at them like a great, invisible hand trying to turn the church inside out. They held fast to the walls, to a bookshelf, to anything still there. With a thunderous clap, two large sheets of metal from the fellowship hall slammed down over the two nearest windows, shielding Pastor Wes and his people from the blender of debris. One room over, the storm speared a two-by-four through the wall. So loud was the roar that they did not hear the church fall.

Two blocks away, Johnny Parker cowered in his hallway with his sister and father. He had always dreamed of seeing a tornado but never
imagined he would find himself caught in the teeth of an EF5. His ears popped, muffling the roar that sounded like a 747 jet screaming inches from their heads. Even through the deafening noise, Johnny's father heard a voice. It was a man's voice, deep and loud.

MOVE!

Randy reacted reflexively, not pausing to question.

“Get in the bathroom!”

Chloe clawed her way through the dark on her hands and knees, dizzy and disoriented. It felt like the room was spinning. She felt Johnny in the tub and clambered on top of him, holding his head as he screamed. In the sliver of light through the bathroom door, she saw the south end of the house implode, sending a doorframe and a crystalline shower of glass hurtling down the hall where they had just been.

But where was her father? She could not see him, and she knew, in the deepest part of her gut, that if he was not in the bathroom, he was dead. In those eternal seconds of thrashing, pounding horror, she felt certain that her mother was dead, that she and her brother were orphans. The thought made her preternaturally calm, because she knew she would have to be the one to find their parents' bodies, to take care of Johnny. They could move in with their grandparents, if they both survived.

The windowless bathroom became a Tilt-A-Whirl, and she felt the floor dropping out from under her. But the floor was not dropping. Chloe was levitating, sucked from the grips of gravity and into the terrible mouth of the storm.

The supercell towered three miles above the earth as its funnel-child tore mercilessly through the heart of Smithville in a tantrum of annihilation. It plucked a red Ford Explorer up like a Matchbox car and hurled it into the town water tower half a mile away. The SUV flew another quarter mile and cratered a field. The storm lifted the cab of a tractor-trailer, flung it more than a quarter mile into a field, where it landed and crumpled like foil. It blew the town hall apart,
wrapped cars around trees, and smashed apart buildings, flinging cinder blocks like Legos. It plucked trees from the ground and scoured the bark off the few that stood. The tornado sucked homes right off their foundations, leaving nothing behind but lonely slabs with the anchor bolts that once held down the walls. It sucked people into a hateful sky and pelted them to death with shards of the places they trusted to protect them.

Patti Parker ran up, breathless, to find the front of her house shorn off, the scraps of her walls heaped on the porch. She began screaming for her husband.

“Randy!”

The past and the future dangled in the moment, her universe suspended in the purgatory of uncertainty. Somewhere under the house lay three pieces of her heart. They were alive. Or they were dead.

A movement on the side of the house caught her eye, and within seconds the world had shifted again. It was Johnny, walking around from the back. She could hear Randy's voice, and it sounded strong. Then Chloe emerged through a gap in the wall and sobbed when she saw her mother. They all ran to one another and embraced, sinking gratefully to the ground in a knot of elbows and tears.

Blocks away at Smithville Baptist, Pastor Wes and his people picked their way out of the fallen church. No one in the church was killed, but their sanctuary was buried under a mountain of bricks and glass. And yet: A single window somehow survived with only one small crack. It was the stained-glass window of Jesus, with outstretched arms, which Johnny's grandparents had donated.

4:00 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—NEAR CORDOVA, ALABAMA

The storm chaser squinted at the rectangle of sky framed by his windshield, glanced at the radar, and stepped on the gas. Duct taped to the dashboard of his Chevy Avalanche, a video camera was trained on the road and plugged into a laptop strapped to the center console with a threadbare bungee cord. It wasn't fancy, but the rig was ready to stream live footage to ABC 33/40. On the laptop, the radar showed a spray of moving targets—storm cells that were stuttering out of Mississippi and gathering intensity as they stalked northeast. The biggest one was headed toward Hackleburg, and he was trying to catch it.

A retired meteorologist, Brian Peters was not out for a glory chase. Though he could not deny the exhilaration of chasing, his mission was to intercept a tornado in time to save the people in its path. He worked closely with James Spann, who affectionately introduced him to storm-spotter classes as “the man who looks like Santa Claus.” Other colleagues called him Colonel Sanders. With a bemused smile and a quick laugh, he talked about the weather with the unbridled glee that other men reserve for football. He had spent years working for the National Weather Service as a Warning Coordination Meteorologist, in charge of tornado warnings. After each storm, he would walk the damage path, looking for the telltale signs of wind speed—an empty foundation, debarked trees—that were used to determine the
EF rating. Yet in his forty-five years as a meteorologist, he had not seen a single tornado.

In the passenger seat—he never chased alone—his partner, the meteorologist Dr. Tim Coleman, was watching the radar and navigating. Coleman had been just sixteen years old when he started working for Peters as an unpaid volunteer for the National Weather Service. Like Peters, he discovered a passion for the weather at the age of three or four. In high school he volunteered after school and on weekends at the NWS, where he read the warnings on the NOAA weather radio—a job that was later replaced by a computer-generated monotone. As soon as he could drive, he began chasing storms. After years of schooling, jobs at the NWS and at TV stations as a broadcast weatherman, Coleman completed a PhD and worked in research meteorology at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. He studied everything from tornadoes to atmospheric waves, and he loved, by his own admission, to “geek out about the weather.”

The two men had started a meteorological consulting business together and became steady chase partners during outbreaks. One would drive; the other would navigate. They trusted each other implicitly.

“Everything is north of us,” Peters said, stealing a glance at the radar.

“But where is that giant hook going?” said Coleman, pointing at a cell coming out of northeast Mississippi.

“Let's do a loop and see what happens.”

They played the radar scans, taken every few minutes, in a continuous loop, studying the cells' evolution. That was all the confirmation they needed: the cell ahead of them was rotating.

“So there's probably a tornado ahead of us.”

“I wouldn't be surprised.”

Coleman tracked the storm across the radar screen and searched the maps for a road that would place them in a safe position to capture it on film. They needed to be within camera range—a few miles
away—but somewhere well in the safety zone: south of the tornado's march northeast.

In Alabama, this was not easy. The country roads spaghettied all over the hills, and the trees blocked their view of the sky. It was much different from chasing tornadoes in Kansas and Oklahoma, where the roads are straight and gridded, and the cornfields so flat and bare you could stand on a tuna can and see all the way to forever. For this reason, most glory chasers favored the heartland and avoided Dixie Alley.

Today every road seemed like a tunnel of trees that curved in the wrong direction. The sliver of sky between the pines was white, in stark contrast to the wet asphalt, which mirrored occasional headlights. The big one was on the ground and tantalizingly close, but there wasn't a road that would put them in a place where they could safely stay out of its way. These roads provided no sure escape route, and Coleman didn't feel safe. They let the big fish go.

Just then, two new supercells caught their eyes, running northeast on parallel tracks, one trailing the other slightly. The northern one, which led the pair, was headed their way, on track to hit Cordova. Coleman bent over his laptop, tracing the tornado's vector on the screen with his finger, stopping at their target location. He compared this to their dot on the GPS. The tornado was still a county away. It looked like they had time to get into position to catch it roaring by.

But just barely.

Cutting a diagonal path across the state, the tornado would pass just south of their current position. This was the most perilous place for a chaser to be. If this tornado came wrapped in rain, they would not see the funnel. It would look like a wall of water, veiling the monster lurking behind it. And if it wandered off course, if it veered slightly north, they would be caught directly in its path.

In an act of faith and mental triangulation, Coleman calculated the window of time they had to get themselves south of the storm. It was closing rapidly. Like a car racing to cross the railroad tracks ahead of a speeding train, they would have to dash south, crossing its path, a few
minutes before it arrived in Jasper. On the radar, that path took them straight across the giant red eyebrow that preceded the debris ball.

“We are thirty-eight miles from Jasper,” Coleman said. “It says we'll get to Jasper at four forty-six. What time is the tornado gonna get there?”

“Four fifty-five,” Peters said.

Nine minutes.
That was their window.

The time was 4:08.

The Chevy Avalanche roared down I-22, its speedometer needle leaning precipitously . . . eighty . . . ninety . . . ninety-five miles per hour. Through the sheeting rain, only a few blurry taillights were visible. That was good—they could not risk an accident. It was fortunate, too, that Brian had put new tires on his car. Every advantage would matter today. With every minute that changed on the digital clock, their blood surged with another wave of adrenaline. It was dizzying to think that they were on their way to seeing their first tornado.

And then they lost radar.

Data lines, ripped by the morning storms, had limited their radar feeds to patchy or nonexistent. They had different phone carriers, which helped a little, but way out in the sticks coverage was not known to be good even in fair weather. They needed eyes on a live radar, or else they would have to abort. They knew better than to risk driving blind through the rain to meet an oncoming storm.

“I don't want to die, you know,” Coleman said.

“I don't want to die either.”

Through the rain they saw blue lights flashing ahead. Peters braked instinctively, but the state trooper was parked beneath a highway overpass, taking shelter. They stopped here, too, out of the clamor of rain, so Coleman could hear his wife on the phone.

“Listen, we're under the bridge near Jasper,” he said. “We have no Internet. We have nothing.”

Jennifer Coleman had been a weather wife long enough to confidently read the radar. At home in Birmingham, glued to the TV set
and attached to her computer, she became the chasers' lifeline. She relayed what she saw and heard to her husband, who repeated it to make sure he had it all right.

“It's southwest of Oakman? That's live? You're watching Spann?”

Coleman turned to Peters.

“Okay. It's moving east-northeast.”

In the shelter of the overpass they had no time for discussion. Every second they spent deciding put them a second closer to danger. Peters's gut made the call.

“We can do it.”

They sped off into the rain.