What Stands in a Storm (17 page)

5:07 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA

The sky above Tuscaloosa turned the color of a yellowing bruise. The birdsong stopped, and through the pregnant silence came the intermittent moaning of wind. The air held a charge. Now visible from the outskirts of town, the tornado emerged from the west. Even those who could not see it could feel its presence slouching across the horizon.

The dark column twisted down to the earth as the earth rose up to meet it. It plowed the verdant landscape, ripping up trees and chicken houses, grinding them up and spitting them out like shrapnel. Mesmerizing in its terrible beauty, it moved indiscriminately across the land, grinding at sixty miles per hour toward the city.

Across Alabama, people followed the black mass growing on their screen. In solid brick houses and double-wide trailers, in college dorm rooms and government projects, in church basements, corporate offices, and living rooms, people watched it unfolding, live. Through the unblinking eye of the rooftop camera, the people of Tuscaloosa saw death come into town.

They had been given sixty-four minutes of warning.

The rescuers of Tuscaloosa Fire Station No. 7 had been on edge all day. Their dispatch radio was oddly quiet. They had James Spann turned up in the background as they readied their medical kits, checking and
rechecking their equipment. When they heard the pitch of his voice begin to rise, all heads swiveled toward the TV.

“Look at that thing—it's huge!” Spann said. “This is a very rare day. Reminiscent of the outbreaks of the seventies, the Super Outbreak of seventy-four.”

The five men ran out the metal side door and into the engine bay, where two trucks stood by and pairs of yellow bunkers waited, puddled on the concrete. The men watched the blackness approach the southern edge of town, an industrial district filled with metal warehouses and boxy government buildings. The funnel was less than two miles away.

As the trees across Skyland Boulevard began to lean and sway, the firemen rolled down the metal door of the engine bay, protecting the trucks. Framed by the narrow windows, they watched grimly as flakes of drywall fell like snow on black asphalt.

“Everybody near Skyland Boulevard, be in a safe place!” Spann said on the station TV. “This is as violent a situation as you'll ever see.”

The men ran for the bathroom. Drivers swerved off the road and banged on the station door. The firemen ran to let them in.

“Nobody should be driving!” Spann's voice boomed from the dashboard. “Everybody down there listening to me on the radio in Tuscaloosa, stop now. At the next exit, the next convenience store. Go into a business—they will let you in.”

Two young men racing across Tuscaloosa ignored the voice on the radio and kept driving directly toward the darkness gathering in the sky. The twenty-five-year-old student behind the wheel, Ryne Chandler, had always wanted to see a tornado, ever since the movie
Twister
. He had no storm-chasing training and very little knowledge of meteorology. But he had lived in Tuscaloosa all his life, and he knew its streets as well as anyone. Well enough, he hoped, that he could find a quick escape route if this thing came their way.

Nate Hughett, his twenty-two-year-old friend riding shotgun, filmed the drive down Veteran's Memorial Parkway, pointing his camera west through the windshield. The rain had stopped, but the windshield wipers ticked back and forth like a metronome. Beyond them, the blackness rose from the treetops like a plume of smoke, indistinct but looming.

“This is a large wedge tornado,” Spann's baritone boomed across the car radio. “This is making a beeline for downtown Tuscaloosa.”

“That's exactly where we're going.”

They were headed west on Veteran's, which turned into Fifteenth Street, a main thoroughfare through town. A few cars were still on the road, but most of them were headed rapidly in the opposite direction. A bolt of lightning lit the clouds as the amateur chasers passed University Mall. While they actually waited for the light to change at the corner of Fifteenth Street and McFarland Boulevard, Hughett's phone began ringing. Across the street, the Chevron station sign was still backlit, $3.69 Regular. In the passenger seat, Hughett set his camera on his lap, still rolling, to take the call.

“Hey. I'm good. Yeah, it's pretty big. Uh, I see something that looks like a tornado . . . Yeah. Okay, I gotta go.”

They passed the neighborhood of Forest Lake and its ancient Druid oaks, Flowers Baking Co., and Fifteenth Street Diner. They could see the tornado hovering in the distance above the empty parking lot of TES, which Danielle Downs had left less than two hours ago. On the radio, Spann kept saying the tornado was headed straight for downtown, so they headed instead toward the interstate, where they could beat a hasty retreat.

As they changed direction, they saw the funnel emerge above the treetops, growing thinner and taller, spinning faster. Billions of flecks danced around it in the air.

“There it is! There it is!” the passenger said, the camera zooming in his shaky hand. “You can see debris in the air. That thing is massive!”

They headed on I-359, trying to get behind it. Now they could see it, clear and full, towering above the industrial rooftops, growing by the second. They were now directly in its path.

“We need to go faster. It's coming right at us!”

“Jesus!”

The engine roared.

“Never in my life will I see this again.”

“Oh, my God . . .”

They pulled to a stop on the side of the interstate and watched it through the rear windshield.

The sky was black, the enormous mesocyclone rotating above like a giant malevolent planet. From this freakishly powerful storm, a dark funnel spiraled to the ground, now less than a mile away. Suddenly, it seemed as if some great dimmer switch had bled the light and color out of the sky, leaving every surface looking dark and slick, as if the world were sweating oil. The funnel grew before them, drawing them closer, luring them in.

The driver turned the car around.

“Chandler, do not go back that way!”

“Nate, film it.”

“I am!”

“There's two of them.”

“We need to go
that
way. Goddammit, go
back!
”

“We're fine. We're fine.”

“Chandler, go the fuck back! I'm not kidding. We don't know if this thing can change directions. We're not experts!”

The driver jammed the car in reverse. They sped backward down the interstate.

“It's crossing the interstate right where we were.”

Barely out of its path, the young chasers watched the EF4 tornado invade the city.

The tornado was a half mile wide when it entered Tuscaloosa. It barreled into the Tamko Roofing plant, inhaling nails and shingles and spitting them out. It slammed the Curry building, which housed the Tuscaloosa Emergency Management Agency (EMA), crushing steel-and-concrete walls built in the 1970s to withstand a nuclear fallout. Sheltering in an inner room, Battalion Chief Chris Williamson and Deputy EMA Director Billy Green saw the ceiling tiles begin to dance, and heard, through eighteen inches of concrete, what sounded like a jet engine. The Emergency Operations Center, which held much of the city's emergency rescue equipment, began to crumble.

Crossing I-359, the funnel toppled cars and semis, catapulting an elderly passenger—seventy-three-year-old Minnie Acklin—from her car at the Thirty-Fifth Street exit to the very spot where the amateur storm chasers had been driving just minutes before. The tornado's first victim, she left behind four children, eight grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.

The winds bent the steel beams of a warehouse and toppled the walls of a church. At the Salvation Army, thirty-five people sought refuge in the dining hall as the wind blasted open the doors and stripped away the roof. A steel building that crumpled like a wad of foil was hurled into the seventy-bed shelter, which collapsed upon the impact. An electrical substation twisted like a telephone cord, and the lights went dark across town.

Without power, the hallway of 31 Beverly Heights was enveloped by silence. In the sudden absence of Spann's voice, in the void left by the whirring, buzzing things that fill the spaces between thoughts, the stillness felt thick and heavy, like being deep underwater. This kind of stillness is rare in our modern world, except when the power goes out.

Danielle, Loryn, and Will lay side by side in the silent hallway. All of the light had drained out of the sky, and their faces glowed blue in the light of their phones, the last lifeline. The world outside was a car
wash, sluicing and swirling and gathering in a seething cauldron of shadow and light, water and wind.

Loryn dialed her mother.

“Mama, it's so black!” she said. “I've never seen anything like this!”

On the other end of the line, Ashley Mims could feel her daughter's fear. The sky above Wetumpka was still sunny and blue, but she could feel the storm roiling deep in her gut. She stood before the TV in the living room, phone to her ear, relaying everything she saw and heard. Before her, the funnel seemed to double in size. She knew without having to look at a map that her child was in its path.

On TV, Spann sounded defeated.

“This is something you pray you never, ever,
ever
see,” he said.

Every cell in Ashley's body cried out in prayer. Choking on waves of panic and hope, she paced back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, praying to God and consoling her child. Her small children trailed her like lost puppies.

“Where's Sissy?” they cried. “Is Sissy okay?”