woop, there it is

August 27, 2011 tornado, or a completely unnecessary second reminder of my own mortality

I don't have a video to upload, and if I did it wouldn't be as good as the ones made by reckless young men from moving cars or doorways. On the plus side, the soundtrack to this blog post has more than three words in it. And let me go on to say, before I try to remember the important bits of what happened to us, that we were very lucky. Not in the sense of "Lucky is not being hit by a tornado at all," but lucky because we are alive and on the injured and the vast majority of our important possessions were not even damaged. Many people were a lot less fortunate.

There might be one or two people who don't remember or didn't know that I survived an almost fatal car accident in 2003. That's why reminders of mortality are not necessary. I am well aware. I'm sure I said something about all of that back years ago in this blog.

So, Wednesday, a series of linear clusters of thunderstorms moved through Alabama from the West. This is not unusual. One thing that was unusual was the high frequency with which individual storms appeared, rapidly grew and intensified, in some cases spawned tornadoes, and then passed through at 50 to 60 mph. More typically, storms persist for a long time. In other words, you can see them coming on your local television station's weather website. Most of Wednesday the area immediately west and southwest of Tuscaloosa was clear of storms, but shortly after 3 p.m. We were told that a particularly vicious looking storm was headed our way and would arrive in about 30 minutes. Go now or wait in a concrete reinforced hallway for who knew how long. So we all left. School had been canceled for the day, so when we arrived home my wife was already there. The menacing storm passed by us to the north and, I believe, did spawn one small tornado somewhere else. Maybe it spawned more than one tornado; there were so many that day I couldn't possibly keep them all straight.

At five o'clock there was one more in an almost continuous series of tornado warnings for the county, my daytime caregiver left to take her chances on the road, and my nighttime caregiver arrived. "Get in here," we said, and all crowded into our safe room.

Imagine you have just followed a link. I shall digress, sans link, to explain that our safe room is more like the inside of a short fat straw. I can no longer get to the crawl space under our house, and we didn't have an interior windowless room that could easily be remodeled. Instead, steel reinforced beams protect the western end of our long straight hallway. I trust my contractor when he says this is safe. We might have tested that theory on April 27, but we didn't. No rapidly rotating winds sucked the doors off of the ends of the hallway and tried to drag me in a 400 pound wheelchair to Oz, not to mention two other people and a dog, collectively weighing less than me plus my wheelchair. So we still don't know, and this is the end of the digression.

What did happen is that I expressed a desire to move out, and my caregiver walked into the kitchen. He said "I see it, it's coming this way, and the transformers are blowing." He rejoined us, and at some point the power went out. I don't remember exactly where that falls in the timeline of events.

I heard a noise. It did not sound like an oncoming express train. I know what that sounds like. We live a block from the railroad tracks. There used to be a sound buffer in the form of trees and a row of houses. Anyway, I used to put pennies on the tracks just like most of you did. It sounded more like an electric mixer. Because I knew what it was, I thought it seemed like something that knew we didn't need a lot of noise to be scared. I could see one of the windows. Little bits of this and that went flying through the air, the house shook, and there was a very loud thud. The wind started to die down and we heard an arrhythmic banging, like a loose shutter. Less than a minute had passed since it all began. We waited a few minutes and then started to explore.

The banging was a window that had come loose and was hinged on one side. One of its four panes of glass was broken. The light was dim in the dining room. That's because the uppermost branches of two black walnut trees were all up in the window's face. They were too broken window panes in the library. One of them was the size and shape of a billiard ball. We never found anything that might have caused it. Oh, and there was an oak tree embedded in the attic, pushing hundred-year-old pine timbers through the ceiling in the hall. Luckily, it was the little oak (a red oak, if you want to know). The largest of the pieces that was later sawn up and lifted out of the attic by a 45 ton crane weighed 3500 pounds. Altogether the whole tree probably didn't weigh 10 tons. The big oak tree, a hundred years old and perhaps 8 feet in diameter, fell into the street and a neighbor's yard. I think if it had come the other way and tested the strength of our safe room the steel reinforcement would have been found wanting.

Most of the front porch roof was on the front porch, so we couldn't push the screen door open. The back door worked, but a third black walnut tree was lying across my outdoor lift, so I couldn't leave the house in either direction. Not without being carried and then set down... where?

My wife and caregiver went outside and looked around. They could see several houses that were damaged and more than a dozen trees that were down. I think it was the next day before we realized it wasn't just our neighborhood. We didn't have power and so many cell phone towers had been blown over we didn't have cell phone service either. All the roads around us were blocked by fallen trees and any that were freed up were either clogged by slow-moving traffic jams or blocked off by the police. So we had no access to news at first. Cell phone service started to come back on Saturday the 30th. We didn't get power back until Friday the sixth. My wheelchair van is still in the body shop and I have not been more than three quarters of a mile from my house in 15 days. The tornado cut a 6 mile long and 1 mile wide swath through the city and adjacent county, and we were so lucky. Many houses were reduced to sticks. And you knew that before I did.

It's not all bad. The volunteer response has been simply tremendous, and we got a much-needed help from dozens of strangers. In addition to self mobilized volunteers who drove or walk through the neighborhood giving away food and water, as well as other things that were needed, I should mention a few groups and organizations that really stood out. Many of our friends went to great lengths (literally: walking up to a mile in some cases to get into neighborhoods that were closed to through traffic) to help us with everything we needed. Tuscaloosa fire rescue sawed most of the branches off the little oak tree in the roof. Later, a team from the local steel plant (owned by Nucor) sawed up the tree and removed it from the roof. Tuscaloosa police and members of the National Guard set up a checkpoint at our intersection to restrict unauthorized traffic. We felt extremely safe, even when they broke discipline to pet our dog. Maybe they are allowed to do that anyway. The Midsouth district of the UUA, or maybe it was the Emerald Coast congregation acting on their own, brought a full 17 foot trailer up here just a few days after the storm. The supplies were more than our group needed and the leftover stuff was passed on to local charities active in the recovery effort.

It was weird being the victim of a natural disaster. I really had nothing to do but sit and watch the traffic go by, while a procession of other victims trudged by and volunteers came up to the porch and asked if they could help. My wife had plenty to do. I could not do much to help her besides accept graciously whatever was offered to us that we could use.

We know our neighbors a lot better than we used to. People spend a lot of time outside when they don't have working cell phones, televisions, or computers. They spend a lot of time outside when so much is going on out there and nothing is going on in the stifling dark house.I don't want to say a tornado was worth a half dozen new friends, but it does reduce the sting.

I'm sure I have forgotten some things that are important. I may revise this later.