What Stands in a Storm (3 page)

The conditions intimated an outbreak of epic proportions, an event of a scale that many scientists had never witnessed in their lifetimes. But it was impossible to forecast exactly when and where the storms would form. Tornadogenesis is still a mystery not yet decoded by science. Meteorologists have deciphered the conditions that give rise to tornadoes—moisture, instability, wind shear, troughs of low pressure and ridges of high pressure that ripple through the upper air like ocean waves—but not the proportions. Much as bread dough with too much water or too little yeast will fail to rise, the ingredients for tornadoes must be present in very precise amounts. “We know
the ingredients,” some meteorologists liked to say, “but not the specific recipe.”

This week these ingredients were present in generous quantities, making the atmosphere ripe for the kind of tornadoes that could stay on the ground for hours. But the best that science could do was map out the probability in any given area. That picture grew clearer with each passing day, as the weekend ended and the workweek began. The map looked like a target, with concentric circles of decreasing risk radiating from the bull's-eye.

That bull's-eye was beginning a slow drift toward Alabama.

This April had already seen two outbreaks, and one was the worst in years. Just days ago, on April 14–16, 178 tornadoes had raked across sixteen states from Oregon to Virginia, killing thirty-eight people. Towns in Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky were still picking up the pieces.

Three days later, on April 19, the second outbreak barged through the Midwest and southern Great Plains, unleashing hail-spitting thunderstorms and seventy tornadoes in Oklahoma, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana. One of the biggest struck the St. Louis area a little before eight in the evening on Good Friday, carving a twenty-two-mile path through the suburbs, barely missing downtown. Nearly half a mile wide, it damaged 2,700 buildings and pounded the airport, blowing out terminal windows and buffeting three commercial airplanes full of passengers waiting on the tarmac. Damage to the airport, which would close for four days, was nearly $30 million.

Astonishingly, no one died. Broadcast meteorologists had warned St. Louis with thirty-four minutes of lead time.

April was usually the peak of spring tornado season, but this April was exceptionally fierce. Around two hundred tornadoes had struck North America so far this month. The tally would rise to 757, making April 2011 the most active tornado month in recorded history. But most people would not remember these first two outbreaks, because
a third was brewing with such malevolence that it would come to eclipse them both.

James Spann, the lead meteorologist for Birmingham's channel ABC 33/40, had been monitoring conditions intently. In nearly three decades of forecasting Alabama weather, he had watched the atmosphere turn deadly many times. As a teenager he had witnessed the worst outbreak ever previously recorded, the Super Outbreak of April 3, 1974. That was the first time he had ever seen death up close, and now, as a broadcast meteorologist, he felt a personal responsibility for every fatality on his watch. He could recite the victims' names and life stories; he attended their funerals and grieved with their families, some of whom became his friends.

Karen Spann had been with her husband for his entire career. Married for nearly thirty years—they joked that she was a “weather widow”—she could read the forecast in the shadows of his face and in the fog of preoccupation that clouded his eyes whenever a storm approached. She was accustomed to the silent withdrawal that occurred whenever he was in the zone. But something about this storm struck her as particularly ominous.

“This has a huge potential for disaster,” Spann told his wife quietly at the kitchen table one morning as they sipped their coffee. Breakfast was the one slow moment of his day, after calling in forecasts to twenty-seven radio shows, filming his daily online Weather Xtreme video, and getting their thirteen-year-old son off to school. Today as they talked, he was troubled, his forehead etched with concern. “Somebody could die in a setup like this.”

The computer models were not always right. But atmospheric conditions looked alarmingly similar to those of past outbreaks, and models were all pointing to a day when the sky would convulse with long-lived supercells bearing families of tornadoes. He expected to see funnels of unfathomable size and power that could stay on the ground
for a hundred miles—maybe more. Spann felt certain this was going to be a red-letter day. He had come to this conclusion more than a week before the storm.

“Wednesday the twenty-seventh—that could be a pretty active period for strong or severe storms,” he had warned viewers the past Tuesday, eight days out, on his Weather Xtreme podcast. “Hey, this is April in Alabama, when things like that can happen—and often will.”

SUNDAY, APRIL 24, 2011—TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA

Danielle Downs awoke on Easter Sunday to the unusual quiet of an empty house. Both her roommates were with their families, and in their absence the house lacked the comfortable chaos of three students with colliding schedules. Danielle wished she could be home today, too, with her parents and younger sister. But she had the weekend shift again at the Wingate, an interstate hotel where she worked the front desk. In the slanting light of spring, this rare and velvety silence tempted her to sleep in. But she decided to get up for Easter Mass, even if she had to go alone.

A mile north of campus, her house stood in the lowest point of Beverly Heights, a sleepy street of middle-class homes and college rentals shaded by trees in new leaf. The neighborhood lacked the couches-on-porches ambience of the Strip, that thumping stretch of University Boulevard where Lynyrd Skynyrd blasted at any hour from the belly of a sticky-floored bar. At twenty-four, Danielle was over that. She liked this house, with its wraparound deck seasoned with late-night laughter and spilled drinks, where the white wooden railing was still wrapped in Christmas lights. It was quiet, but not too quiet. Through her second-floor window she could hear invisible trains rumble by, hidden by curtains of tall pines.

A senior in social work, Danielle was one of thirty-four thousand
students attending the University of Alabama, the biggest school in the state and an academic juggernaut that dwarfed the historically black Stillman College (one thousand students) and two-year Shelton State (around five thousand) in their semesterly occupation of Tuscaloosa. Graduation was less than two weeks away, and all three schools were pulsating with the fugue of procrastination and panic that whirled through finals week.

One last paper stood between Danielle and her diploma. Working seventy-hour weeks between her full-time hotel job and her field placement for the School of Social Work, she had been rushing to finish papers and tie up loose ends in the scraps of time between double shifts. When she learned that she had qualified to graduate, the swell of relief yielded a smile so big that her almond eyes disappeared. Her family called this look her “Chinese eyes.” It meant she was really happy.

She loved walking to class across the grassy Quad, the focal point of campus, beneath cherry trees that rained pink blossoms in the spring and rust-colored leaves in the fall. On one side of the Quad sat the musty-smelling fortress of Gorgas Library; on the other towered Denny Chimes, the redbrick obelisk that announced the hour with a melody. Ancient oaks knit their branches into a canopy above University Boulevard, shading the white double staircase of the President's Mansion, one of seven antebellum buildings that survived the burning of campus five days before the end of the Civil War, when this was a military college. Beside the mansion was Danielle's School of Social Work, headquartered in Little Hall, a former gymnasium named after an 1892 transfer student who introduced a game he had learned up north: football. The university now claimed a football dynasty that could easily double the population of Tuscaloosa on game days, when students must move their cars off campus to make room for convoys of motor homes filled with fans of the Crimson Tide.

Soon there would be no more tailgating on the Quad, admiring the chocolate fountains and flat-screen TVs clustered under vast alumni tents. No more all-nighters over textbooks or beer pong. No more struggling for a passing grade in classes that tested theories but not those unteachable realities that underlay her calling to social work—compassion, integrity, tenacity, patience. Well, maybe not patience. She was itching to move on.

Her little sister's wedding was a week from Friday, and Danielle was the maid of honor. Michelle was marrying her high school sweetheart, a meteorology student, just a few days after their graduation from Mississippi State. The day after the wedding, Danielle would walk across her own stage in Tuscaloosa. After pulling on one more bridesmaid's dress for a good friend's wedding in May, she could get on with her own postcollege plans to move to the snow-white beaches of Florida's Gulf Coast. She hoped to find a job at Eglin Air Force Base, counseling families through deployments.

Danielle had not been to church in a while, and as she entered the sanctuary of Holy Spirit, a large marble fountain of holy water bubbled as if to welcome her back. An Irish priest delivered a touching Mass, the altar behind him lit by the late-morning sun streaming through the stained-glass window, which depicted a white dove in flight among golden rays. Around Danielle's neck swung a medal depicting her patron saint, Joan of Arc, an inexpensive piece of jewelry that she almost never took off.

After church, she treated herself to the jazz brunch at Five Bar, a gastropub in old downtown known for its Bloody Mary bar, beignets, and fried chicken 'n' waffles. Customers filled the bistro tables on the sidewalk patio as temperatures rose comfortably into the mid-eighties—a good bit warmer than normal for April. A gentle breeze drifted in from the south while a local jazz trio played in the background. It was not a bad way to spend Easter, even if she could not be with her family. She paused to muse on Facebook:

At 3:01 p.m. she clocked in and took her place behind the wood-and-marble front desk at the Wingate. As comfortably familiar as any chain, the five-story stucco-and-stone hotel joined a Cracker Barrel and a Howard Johnson among the gas stations off Interstate 20/59 on the outskirts of Tuscaloosa. It offered clean, predictable rooms and a free continental breakfast to visiting UA parents, interstate travelers, and a few French and German employees attending meetings at the nearby Mercedes-Benz plant.

Danielle was still upset with her boss, who had cut her hours as punishment for her recent confrontation with a customer, a man who had been complaining aggressively. She took pride in her ability to smile and let customers vent. But she was no pushover, and this man had been condescending. She had tried to offer a calm reply, but he had cut her off and talked down to her. She had raised her voice, not to the point of yelling, but enough to ensure she was heard.

Her boss was furious. Coworkers and nearby customers had defended Danielle, calling the customer out on his behavior. But it had not made any difference. She was dropped from the schedule Mondays and Wednesdays. And with two weddings coming up, and her own move in May, she desperately needed the money.

Her Sunday shift passed uneventfully, and after clocking out at 11:12 p.m. she went home to a house that was no longer quiet. Her roommates, Kelli Rumanek and Loryn Brown, were back and getting ready for Dead Week, the window of all-night voracious cramming that preceded final exams. It was good to have them back.

The girls were aware that a dangerous storm was expected midweek. The TV meteorologists were working themselves into a lather. Danielle was not afraid of storms, but she constantly reminded everyone
she knew to stay prepared and take shelter. Loryn, on the other hand, was terrified of storms and had just bought a weather radio, which would wake them up with a loud alarm if a tornado warning was issued in the middle of the night.

As Dead Week commenced, the bars on the Strip got at least as busy as the library, and students sauntered in small groups across campus dressed in the unofficial coed uniform of T-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops. It was starting to feel like early summer.

MONDAY, APRIL 25, 2011—ACROSS THE SOUTH

As Monday slid into afternoon, the sky to the west began stirring. Tornado-producing thunderstorms were forming on the leading edge of a cold front nosing its way across Arkansas, chasing a surface low. Hail drummed the ground, growing as big as hen eggs, golf balls, baseballs, and softballs, pocking cars and cracking windshields. Ending months of abnormally dry weather, the skies spilled themselves upon Arkansas in what would become, in many parts of the state, the wettest April in years. Rivers swelled and escaped their banks, engulfing roads and sweeping cars away in the swiftly moving water. Six people died in those cars. A house was flushed from its foundation. In Missouri, the Black River seeped over the crest of its levee in more than three dozen spots, oozing toward the thousands of people who lived in its floodplain.