What Stands in a Storm (14 page)

The clatter on the roof grew louder. Hail. It sounded so big that Peters worried that his windshield might shatter. Hail occurs near the core of a supercell, which meant the funnel could be near. They wondered whether it would emerge at any moment from the grayness that enveloped them.

“Do we want to get under the overpass?” Peters said, spotting shelter.

“We're directly in the path of the tornado now. I see the rain-free base. I see a lowering. We've just got too many trees and hills in the way.”

They pressed on through rain and fear. They had passed the point of turning back. Coleman looked up from the radar and out the window with mounting anxiety.

“You haven't turned southeast yet,” Coleman said, voice rising several octaves in panic. “It's coming at us!”

“I know it. I know it.”

“You gotta keep goin'.”

“We don't want to get off here?”

“No!”

Coleman knew this landscape well. He had a cabin on nearby Bankhead Lake, where he loved to fish for bass and bream. He had driven these back roads many times. He knew where they went, and where they did not. With a lack of escape routes, he knew they were in danger. Coleman believed they were punching the core of the storm. Peters disagreed that they were core punching but sensed the danger, too.

“We're gonna have a view right up here,” Peters said. “Let's see what we can see.”

“Okay. But keep your engine running.”

As they climbed the slight hill, Coleman looked behind them.

“There it is, Brian!”

In the sky behind them was a gathering gray, rotating slowly on the ground, like a giant top. Coleman rolled down the passenger window and pointed his video camera toward the back of the truck as Peters pulled onto the grassy shoulder. Semi trucks roared by, seemingly oblivious, kicking up spray from the asphalt. The trees and fields lost their hopeful spring green as the land darkened under a yellowing sky. The tornado was four or five miles away, and it was either growing bigger or getting closer. Maybe both. The air smelled of cut grass and wet asphalt.

“I'm stopping on the interstate to give James a play-by-play of what we can see from our vantage point,” Peters said.

Their video camera captured Peters's voice, excited and unafraid. Coleman's carried the edge of primal fear.

“We can't stay here long,” Coleman said.

“Tim, that's it!”

“There's the tornado!”

It swayed like an elephant's trunk. Around it, the entire sky was rotating slowly, looming ominously and winking with lightning. Peters stared at it in awe and said a silent prayer of gratitude.

Thank you, God. It's in the woods. I get to see one where nobody's going to get hurt.

They guessed it was four or five miles away as it crossed the interstate. From this distance, it almost looked like it was moving in slow motion. But it was actually charging at sixty miles per hour, snapping hardwoods, tossing cars, splintering chicken houses. Ropelike at first, the funnel leaned like a plow tilling the ground, the supercell dragging it across the land. It fattened and darkened with bits of trees and dirt and asphalt. Then a second vortex formed beside the first. Were they looking at twins? Peters was standing on the side of the highway juggling his digital still camera and his phone as he dialed the number of the ABC 33/40 studio. The managers patched him through to Spann on the air.

“We're looking at what appears to be two tornadoes. One has lifted, and the second one is definitely on the ground. We're not going to be able to stay here very long. This thing is actually coming at us.”

“Brian, you get out of there,” Spann said. “Don't worry about me. If you've got to hang up, you go. But do you notice any debris falling out of the sky?”

“No sir, but it is definitely on the ground. We can see the visible funnel.”

In the background, a woman on the side of the interstate screamed, “
It's right there!
”

Outside Tuscaloosa, waiting for the southern storm, Oldshue and Greer stood outside the bingo parlor, cameras rolling on a pregnant sky. A
handful of cars remained in the parking lot like sleeping dogs awaiting their owners. The meteorologist and the cameraman stood on either side of the dark blue Highlander, which had both doors splayed open, giving the vehicle a birdlike quality, as if it stood poised to take flight.

Oldshue set up his camera to stream live footage to the studio. His laptop sat on the hood of the car, attached with a cord to his video camera, which he had detached from the dashboard so he could hold it. Using a private chat, Oldshue pinged Jason Simpson to make sure his live video stream was working. He had muted the volume for the test run; one less source of noise for Simpson.

Oldshue tore his eyes from the laptop and turned them toward the sky. Above the ridgeline, the wet cotton was beginning to flicker with static electricity. The cloud-to-ground lightning was another sign that a tornado was forming inside the gray mass. A bolt crackled to the earth. Then another. And another. Strangely, the wind was not gusting. The air around them felt restless and humid. Oldshue felt it, the storm breathing down his neck, like a predator ready to pounce.

Oldshue knew Colonel Sanders meant Brian Peters. What he didn't know was that Peters was on the air, describing a tornado about to deal Cordova the second blow of its day. Oldshue's mind was racing too fast to comprehend this because of what he saw in front of him.

The charcoal monolith emerged over the southeast ridgeline, hulking and formidable. Set against the stark white sky, its edges were clearly defined, though its ropelike bottom was truncated by the ridgeline. Now there was no question.

Click.

The tornado was live on the air.

As he steadied his hand on the camera, Oldshue blocked out the cacophony that surrounded him. The car door was dinging, the Emergency Broadcast System was squawking, and a phone was going unanswered. Spann's voice was booming from the dashboard.

On the other end of the line streamed a silent picture. Oldshue had muted it for testing, and now knew better than to change his setup and risk breaking the tenuous connection between eyewitness scene and viewer: camera, computer, cell tower, Internet, computer, broadcast microwave. The silence made it feel as if time had warped into slow motion.

In the studio, Spann faced an unprecedented situation: Two tornadoes. Two towns. One moment in time. Cordova's storm was slightly more imminent. Tuscaloosa's endangered more people. He had video from one, audio from the other.

Which one should be put on the air?

Both. Peters's voice overlapped Oldshue's video in a surreal moment that captured a thumbnail of the chaos breaking loose above Alabama. The sky was exploding with supercells, with no fewer than five violent, long-track tornadoes raging through the state at this moment. Still more were lined up behind them in Mississippi.

The atmosphere was boiling. As in a pot of water on a heated stove, great bubbles of air continued rising into the colder upper air. The wind shear was extreme: blowing twenty miles per hour on the surface and seventy miles per hour at three thousand feet up, which spun those rising air-blobs like tops. Higher still, at thirty-four thousand feet, the wind speeds screamed at a hundred miles per hour, feeding the momentum of the mesocyclone, the rotating mother storm. Wind shear was a key ingredient missing in summer storms, when towering anvil-shaped thunderstorms grow straight and tall. Hot blobs of air still rise, but the rain falls straight down into the updraft, cooling and curbing its ascent. In effect, they rain themselves out.

But now, spring winds were careening through the upper air, shoving the tops of those towering thunderstorms until they leaned like the Tower of Pisa. Curtains of rain and cool air descended on the leeward side, too far over to cancel the updrafts. With nothing to stop their ascent, the updrafts coursed unchecked like great fountains of air, sucking in the fuel of humidity and growing even more powerful.

These rotating supercells had evolved into something like living organisms, with inputs and outputs that flowed in a vicious circuit unbroken for many hours and miles. They consumed the warm and humid air, sucking it up like food. They discharged cold air in fierce downdrafts. Without anything to break the circuit, the biggest of these
monsters stalked the earth that day for more than eight hours and one hundred miles, some bearing multiple tornadoes.

Upstate, two EF5 tornadoes were coming out of Mississippi, and an EF4 was crossing over into Georgia. But those were now the concern of the Huntsville TV station. Spann was focused on the two EF4 killers in his market, aimed point-blank at Cordova and Tuscaloosa, approaching simultaneously.

“We've got a large tornado crossing into Cordova,” Spann said. “I've got John's video of a separate tornado. We are calling a tornado emergency for Tuscaloosa and Northport . . . based on that live stream, be in a safe place. This includes the campus of the University of Alabama.”

4:38 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA

The girls were getting scared.

Camped out in the hallway, a mile from campus, they could hear the sirens howling. On TV, two terrifying spirals crossed the radar behind James Spann. The bottom one was headed toward Tuscaloosa.

“Get a bicycle helmet on your kids,” Spann said. “In many cases the treating physicians in the ER have told us that if the kids had had a bicycle helmet on, they would have survived.”

The girls had no helmets. They had no basement. All they had was this hallway at the bottom of the stairs, filled with soft things to protect them. It was everything Spann said a safe place should be: a small room, in the center of the house, on the lowest floor, away from windows. Still, Danielle did not like it, and she said so on Facebook:

Beside her, Loryn was on the verge of tears, and Will was trying to comfort her. The hallway dimmed and the TV flickered shades of blue across three solemn, frightened faces.

In Wetumpka, 130 miles southeast, Loryn's mother opened her front door and stepped out onto the porch. The sun was shining down
on her farmhouse, its warmth breaking through the gently rolling clouds. Intermittent shadows chased the little kids running in the yard. Back inside, Ashley flipped through the channels, trying to find news about the weather in Tuscaloosa. In this TV market, she was struggling to find out what was happening on the other side of the state.

From the hallway, Loryn chatted with friends on Facebook. Some of them teased her about her fear.

Next to her, Danielle was texting friends and family. Many people out there still had no power and might not be able to see what she was seeing on the news. She was particularly worried about her little sister in Mississippi, where so many tornadoes were forming.