Veteran meteorologists called it the storm of a lifetime. Just as well. No one that watched this thing would ever want to see its like again.
Over the course of the day tornadoes raked the state from border-to-border east-to-west, and hit or threatened towns stretching across more than half the state’s north-south axis. Cities like Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, towns like Cullman, suburbs like Pleasant Grove and small communities like Phil Campbell were hit hard.
(Update: A week later the death toll is still fluctuating a bit. There are still some persons unaccounted for. This is now considered the second-worst storm in U.S. history in terms of fatalities. The numbers are staggering, but how they aren’t higher given what we witnessed and what those people endured seems something of a tragic miracle.)
For me the sky turned from blue to gray to green to gray again. Finally, long after dark, the storms passed. The hard work of real heroes was underway. It will take some of those communities years to recover.
In the scope of all of that, this seems a bit silly. But I watched radar and news from across the state and curated it as well as I could through Twitter. For about two minutes late this afternoon my location was under a direct threat. Beyond that my extended family and I are extremely lucky.
Not surprisingly, given the destruction, a few of my colleagues at the University of Alabama lost their homes. All of those people, too, are safe.
