What Stands in a Storm
Read What Stands in a Storm Online
Authors: Kim Cross
Praise for
What Stands in a Storm
“The writerly brillianceâthe terse dark poetryâof this debut book explodes from every page. Yet Kim Cross is too much of a writer to let mere masterful writing suffice. She has enlisted her sentences in the service of her tremendous reportorial mission: to recover and make sense of the thousands of fragmentary incidents, images, voices, and glimpses of human character ennobled by loss and imminent deathâthe sum and substance of the most catastrophic mass-tornado attack in recorded American history. This young writer has done the impossible: she has out-written apocalypse. A new star has appeared in our literary sky.”
âRon Powers, Pulitzer Prizeâwinning journalist and coauthor of
Flags of Our Fathers
“Amid so much terror and pain and death, there is an overflowing of life here in
What Stands in a Storm
, gathered together in a blessing of uncommon decency and indelible beauty. If you want to know what shape your heart's in, read this book and learn, through Kim Cross's extraordinary reportage and artistry, that stories are as much a gift as life itself. Stories, in fact, are our afterlife.”
âBob Shacochis, author of
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul
“Whether you live in tornado country or not, everyone should read this book. Heartbreaking and heroic.”
âFannie Flagg, author of
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe
“Turn off your cell phone. Call in sick. Tell your family whatever you need to tell them, because you're going to have to have eight hours of uninterrupted time once you begin Kim Cross's book. Her verbs pulsate, her narrative web sucks you in. Mostly, Cross makes you care
about the people in
What Stands in a Storm
, their quirks and aspirations. You won't look at a coiling sky the same way after reading this powerhouse debut.”
âBeth Macy,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Factory Man
“
What Stands in a Storm
is a dramatic and carefully reconstructed account of nature's unexpected and explosive power and the strength of humans to bond together in its destructive wake.”
âPeter Stark, author of
Astoria
and
The Last Empty Places
“With exhaustive, on-the-ground reporting, spellbinding prose and voices of the living and the dead recounting every haunting moment of the storm's three-day reign of terror, Kim Cross has produced a spine-chilling narrative.
What Stands in a Storm
will tear apart, forever, our complacent sense of security when we look at a dark sky overhead.”
âGeorge Getschow, writer-in-residence, The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference
“A powerful book, unforgettable in its recreation of a horror that swallowed entire communities. Kim Cross brings to life the soul-searing experience of people standing prostrate as a monstrous storm tears their lives to shreds. But there is joy in this horror. She shows us how ordinary people in the worst-hit areas discovered what they and their communities were made of as the sky fell around them.”
âWinston Groom, author of
Forrest Gump
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17.
 Slouching Toward Tuscaloosa
Tuscaloosa, Alabama Storm Fatalities
For those who lost their lives to this, and for everyone who loved them
April 27, 2011, became the deadliest day of the biggest tornado outbreak in the history of recorded weather. It was the climax of a superstorm that unleashed terror upon twenty-one statesâfrom Texas to New Yorkâin three days, seven hours, and eighteen minutes. Entire communities were flattened, whole neighborhoods erased, in seconds, by the wind.
This was an epic storm in an epic month: April 2011 saw three separate outbreaks and a record 757 tornadoesânearly half of which (349) occurred during the April 24â27 outbreak that inspired this book. This anomalously stormy month blew away the previous April record of 267 tornadoes in April 1974 (and the record for any month, topping the May 2004 count of 542).
The storm left in its wake long scars across the landscape, $11 billion in damage, and at least 324 people dead. Most of them died in Alabama, which now leads the nation in tornado deaths. On April 27, a total of 62 tornadoes raked the state; in some moments, there were six or more on the ground at once.
This book tells the story of this storm through the characters who lived it. All the characters and events in this book are real, based on more than a year of research and one-hundred-plus hours of interviews with responders, meteorologists, survivors, and the families of those who died.
Any dialogue in quotation marks was taken directly from an audio or video recording, or from transcribed interviews in which those conversations were recounted directly to me. Time-stamped posts were recorded directly from Facebook, Twitter, and chat rooms.
Text conversations were retrieved from victims' salvaged phones and shared with me by their families. These conversations have been left raw and intact, with no editing for grammar, spelling, or punctuation. Emergency radio transmissions were transcribed from time-stamped recordings. A person's thoughts set in italics were based on social media posts by that person, or were remembered by primary sources present when the character said what they were thinking.
I have attempted to check and double-check my scientific facts with the help of many experts, including respected research and forecast meteorologists and a fact-checker trained in science writing. That said, any errors are mine.
Almost nothing stood.
Where the awful winds bore down, massive oaks, one hundred years old, were shoved over like stems of grass, and great pines, as big around as fifty-five-gallon drums, snapped like sticks. Church sanctuaries, built on the rock of ages, tumbled into random piles of brick. Houses, echoing with the footfalls of generations, came apart, and blew away like paper. Whole communities, carefully planned, splintered into chaos. Restaurants and supermarkets, gas stations and corner stores, all disintegrated; glass storefronts scattered like diamonds on black asphalt. It was as if the very curve of the earth was altered, horizons erased altogether, the landscape so ruined and unfamiliar that those who ran from this thing, some of them, could not find their way home.
We are accustomed to storms, here where the cool air drifts south to collide with the warm, rising damp from the Gulf, where black clouds roil and spin and unleash hell on earth. But this was different. A gothic monster off the scale of our experience and even our imagination, a thing of freakish size and power that tore through state after state and heart after Southern heart, killing hundreds, hurting thousands, even affecting, perhaps forever, how we look at the sky.
But that same geography that left us in the path of this destruction also created, across generations, a way of life that would not come to pieces inside that storm, nailed together from old-fashioned things like human kindness, courage, utter selflessness, and, yes, defiance, even standing inside a roofless house.
As Southerners, we know a man with a chain saw is worth ten with a clipboard, that there is no hurt in this world, even in the storm of the
century, that cannot be comforted with a casserole, and that faith, in the hereafter or in neighbors who help you through the here and now, cannot be knocked down.
âSouthern Living,
August 2011
I wrote, after the winds had died, that we would never look at the sky the same way again. But it changed us in more ways than that.
Before April 27, 2011, the wail of the warning sirens might have caused some concern, some pause. After, after the winds bore down and into this place, the sirens struck us with dread, and sent us moving for basements and strong buildings not in panic, maybe, but awareâcertainâof the destructive power that swirled somewhere nearby.
Before, we looked at the weatherman with the remote control in our hands and heard his warnings, certainly, but it seemed distant, that danger, something we could just flip away from at any time if we wanted, and hide inside an old movie, or the cooking channel, or ESPN. After, we searched for him, quickly, because he had been the only warning a lot of people had.
Before, we looked at things like concrete blocks and red bricks, like lumber and nails and poured cement, as solid things, substantial things, something stronger than the elements. After, we saw steel twisted into ribbons and bricks scattered like bread crumbs, saw cars crumpled like wadded-up newspaper and trees snapped like Popsicle sticks and whole streets swept raggedly free of houses; in some cases of whole neighborhoods.
Before, we took the darkening skies as a kind of inconvenience, thought to ourselves how inconvenient it might be when the lights winked out. After, the funerals lasted for days.
Most of us could only imagine the horror of April 27, 2011. Some of us were very lucky, and only came home to the great sadness of the destruction of splintered houses and lives. We drove back into our
neighborhoods to see only material things smashed and hurled about, and knew nothing of the deeper misery, in places like Rosedale, the Downs, Forest Lake, Holt, Alberta City, and other places.