What Stands in a Storm (15 page)

Spann's voice cut through the hallway with a chilling report.

“We are calling a tornado emergency for Tuscaloosa and Northport. At the same time, we are calling a tornado emergency for Walker County, specifically around Cordova.”

The tornado had passed out of sight of the chase team. Spann cut to the SkyCam bolted to the roof of the Tuscaloosa County Courthouse, on the other side of town from 31 Beverly Heights. Above the dark seam of the horizon, the sky was a light box, flat and white.

Like a shadow, it slunk into view. At first it just looked like a thunderstorm, a mass of cloud sitting on the ground. The funnel, wrapped in rain, was invisible from this angle. But the telltale signs were present:
a bright, cloud-free base to the right, which signaled an updraft so powerful that it swept falling raindrops back into the sky. It had grown into a monstrosity that looked big enough to swallow the whole world.

“Anybody in the city of Tuscaloosa, you need to be in a safe place right now!” Jason Simpson said on TV. “This is not a game. This is for real.”

All across town, police scanners crackled to life. Firefighters, policemen, and EMTs froze and listened. The message seemed a time bomb.

Fire dispatch to all units. There is a large tornado that is on track to impact the city of Tuscaloosa in less than thirty minutes. Correction: less than fifteen minutes.

It was one of seven long-track tornadoes on the ground in Alabama.

4:56 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—CORDOVA, ALABAMA

In a tiny town fifty miles north of Tuscaloosa, a woman stood under an awning, taking thoughtful drags from a cigarette. She noticed pink wisps that looked like cotton candy floating incongruously through the air. The sun was shining and the backlit raindrops quickly morphed into pea-size hail that peppered the ground. Wet-cotton clouds snuffed out the sun, and the sky turned green and jaundiced. The woman looked up with a thought she had never had.

If fear had a color
,
this is it
.

The power was still out in Cordova. The two-block downtown had been gutted by the EF3 tornado that roared out of the pre-dawn. The fire station had been heavily damaged, and the trucks were stuck inside. No outside help had arrived, because most of the surrounding towns were dealing with their own storm cleanup. If more storms were coming, they did not know. They had no power. News came through the windows of passing cars.

The woman was taking a break from directing traffic when she noticed the shift in the wind. The lazy curl of smoke snaking from her cigarette vanished in a stiff breeze. More cotton candy rode in on the wind. She recognized this harbinger of danger: insulation.

Raindrops turned to leaves. Leaves gave way to objects.

“Mom! There's debris falling!” said a teenage boy.

“Stop playing!” said his mother.

The boy pointed at a tree branch drifting down from the sky, featherlike. What looked like a twig grew into a limb. In a blink, it became a full-size tree hurtling down upon them. As it hit the ground nearby, green lightning spidered out of the clouds and seized it like a hand.

The boy ran with another young man to the railroad tracks, the highest point downtown. They pointed their camera phones at the crest of a hill, knowing on some primal level that something was about to come over it. The trees on the hilltop began to bend and lean. And then some great, invisible force lifted the double-wide mobile home on the hill and flung it into the medical clinic across the street.

“Look right there!” a voice boomed above a chorus of yelling. “Look right there! Looklooklooklooklook!”

“That's it!” a woman yelled.

“Come on!” screamed another.
“Now! RUN!”

Mothers shrieked in panic at their sons, who sprinted toward them. Firemen burst out of a camper—their temporary HQ now that the station was gone—and clambered into city hall. Next to the fire department's camper, in the old one-room train depot, the police dispatcher would not leave her post. Aware of the storm, she was sheltering in the bathroom with the dispatch radio, using the closed toilet lid as a desk to write notes in her log.

In the middle of the block, the twenty-one-year-old lieutenant waved everyone into the half-submerged basement of city hall, his voice cutting through the roar.

“Get in here! Get in! They comin'!
Get in!
”

He pulled the door closed just as the second tornado of his day charged through his broken town. This one was much bigger than the first. He pressed his phone's camera to a hole in the door. Outside, boards and branches hurled violently from right to left. Inside, the high-pitched whine sounded like a Shop-Vac sucking up gravel.

It plowed through town like a bush hog, bending steel I-beams like paper clips. The bank exploded. It decimated the Piggly Wiggly, scattering canned vegetables and bricks. It crushed half the church
and spun the mansion on the hill off its foundation. It ripped apart a house and slung three boys and a mother two blocks.

Within seconds, the wind weakened, and flying objects slowed and drifted to the ground. Some of the rescuers felt the impulse to get outside and start digging for people. Others held them back.

“It's gone now. That's it. It's over.”

“No, it's not.”

“Nah. No no no no
no
!”

“It's calm! It's calm!”

“Did y'all wait for the center to go by?”

“That's right—I forgot.”

The wind picked up again, flinging objects with equal force in the opposite direction. The core of the storm had passed over them, calm like the eye of a hurricane, and now the rear wall of the vortex was hitting.

Then they remembered the dispatcher who had refused to leave. They watched their camper sail away like a kite and crash into the building where she kept her post. A young fireman opened the door to go find her. His colleagues clawed at him, trying to stop him.

“No, get in! That's just the calm!” a female colleague screamed.

“I don't care! The camper's into the motherfucking building!”

He charged outside.

The woman screamed.

“No!”

5:02 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA

Druid City Hospital was under Code Gray. Patients resting on hospital beds had been rolled into the inner hallways. Those who could walk were ushered into the auditorium. Televisions in the lobby, emergency room, and inpatient rooms were buzzing with the news and weather. People on both sides of the white coat watched together as James Spann called out names of roads and landmarks in the path of the storm. The landmarks drew closer and closer.

The hospital disaster coordinator, Andrew Lee, had called Code Gray when he first saw the tornado on John Oldshue's LiveStream. His hospital was the only one in Tuscaloosa. The nearest facility of its size was an hour's drive away—on clear roads with no traffic—in Birmingham. Lee, a flight nurse and a meteorology enthusiast who closely studied the weather, had done everything in his knowledge to prepare for a catastrophic hit. When James Spann had begun warning of the coming storm last week, Lee had briefed his staff on Code Gray, the disaster plan for severe weather. The plan included four hundred and fifty premade medical charts with fake names, which would speed the admissions process and allow them to intake patients quickly, treating first and leaving the paperwork for later.

That was the count of his worst-case scenario, the most catastrophic
event his imagination could grasp: a flood of four hundred and fifty patients, all needing urgent help at once.

He hoped it would not come to that.

Two blocks from the hospital, in the hallway of 31 Beverly Heights, Danielle, Loryn, and Will could do nothing more to protect themselves than they already had done. They had dragged the TV as far as the cord would stretch, so they could see it from their linen fortress. With pillows ready to cover their heads, they watched the blackness swallow their horizon.

“That is something significantly wicked on the horizon of Tuscaloosa and just about to move into the city,” Jason Simpson said on the air. “It's large. It's violent.”

Danielle feverishly texted her sister.

Michelle looked at the extra spaces, the misspelling of Loryn's name, and knew her sister was distracted and afraid. At least Will and Loryn were there beside her, so she was not alone. Michelle sat on her bed in her off-campus apartment, trying to study. But she could not shake off the feeling that crept into her stomach. This did not feel right. Michelle had never seen her sister afraid.

“This will be a day that goes down in state history,” Spann said. “All we can do is pray for these people.”

At 5:07 p.m., Spann experienced a rare few seconds of dead air, struck speechless by the second superstorm of his life, aimed at the heart of his hometown.

5:09 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—CORDOVA, ALABAMA

The tailwinds were still sweeping through when the volunteers poured out of city hall. Wearing navy blue Cordova Fire & Rescue shirts over ripped jeans and fireproof bunkers, they fanned out to search for survivors. Brett Dawkins, a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant on the squad, held his phone as he ran, still filming, capturing the moment in a perspective befitting pandemonium.

“Holy shit!” Dawkins yelled. “Our camper's exploded! There's nothing fucking left!”

The camper they had gathered in moments before—their tactical command center—was gone. Through the crack in the city hall basement door, they had watched as it tumbled down the street like a paper sack.

The responders scattered in all directions, looking for it. They ran quickly, taking in the scene as they went, peering in the busted-out windows of cars and trucks, listening for cries for help.

Cordova had lost to the morning storms much of the equipment it needed to respond to the crisis. The fire station had been demolished by the EF3 that hit town before dawn. The medical clinic near downtown Commerce Street was now gone. Unlike Tuscaloosa, Cordova had ambulance service and no hospital. The nearest hospital was around twenty minutes away in Jasper, the same town and the same
hospital where eighteen-year-old James Spann had been sent with his amateur radio in the 1974 Super Outbreak.

“Jeff an' them was still in the Rebel Queen, wasn't they?”

Dawkins ran up the hill toward the only restaurant in town, across the railroad tracks, owned by family. It looked as if it had been struck by a wrecking ball. Inside it, his aunt and uncle had survived, holding on to an industrial grill that had stopped the imploding building from crushing them as it fell.

Nearby, at the United Methodist Church, the roof was sheared off. This church was the closest thing Cordova had to a community tornado shelter, its basement a refuge to the people of the small town. Inside it, dozens had survived.

People were spilling out of buildings and into the street, hollering, screaming, cussing. In the dizzying swirl of this new reality, Brett caught out of the corner of his eye a man running toward him, waving him down.

“Jackson and Bev are trapped,” yelled the man. “The whole damn house is on 'em!”

The man was his uncle, Mike Van Horn, who had been crouched in a half-finished basement with his wife and grown kids when the house collapsed on them. Mike's daughter, Taylor, had made it out with her boyfriend, but his wife and son were still under the house.

Brett Dawkins ran to a truck with no windows but saw the roads were blocked with debris. Nearby, he found a tractor with the keys still in the ignition, and he drove it all the way to the fire station, clearing a little path through the rubble. At the station, he gathered equipment from the undrivable fire engines—extrication tools, airbags, and medical supplies thrust by the armful into paint buckets—and dropped them at the downtown pharmacy, which would become their triage spot.

Then he ran to dig his family out.