What Stands in a Storm (25 page)

Now, at 7:00 p.m., ten miles after the Tuscaloosa tornado dissipated, its mother supercell regained its strength and spawned a deadly twin. A second tornado grew even more rapidly than the first into an EF4 with 190-mile-per-hour winds and a funnel that lurched toward Georgia, trampling the chain of small Alabama communities that lay in its path—Argo, Shoal Creek, Ohatchee, Forney. In Shoal Creek, it killed a man who left behind ten children and a wife. In one house, a couple hid with their sixteen-year-old
daughter as the roof popped off and bricks came swirling around and around.

Families who have lived through tornado season for generations have passed down many folk beliefs about twisters. Some of them are even true.

A lot of the dangerously inaccurate wives' tales concern beliefs about geography. Many people believe that tornadoes will never cross a mountain, that “they bounce around in the valley like a pinball.” Others say they will not cross certain rivers, or hit big cities. Some swear they follow the interstate.

If only tornadoes were so discerning. The strong and violent ones tower tens of thousands of feet in the air. Topography may influence the likelihood of tornadoes forming in certain locations, but once one has formed and grown into a thirty-thousand-foot giant, minor topographical variations could not possibly change its path. Tornadoes have climbed mountains, danced across lakes as waterspouts, and pummeled great cities.

People believe that tornadoes always follow the same routes, year after year, and decade after decade, as if following a highway or a valley, or both. And sometimes they do, but not for the reasons people believe. Tornadoes do appear to follow certain mountains, such as the Appalachians, and certain interstates, including I-20/59 between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. But as with the old Statistics 101 example of ice cream sales and drownings increasing every summer, it would be incorrect to assume a causal relationship. Tornadoes typically travel northeast—the direction of most weather—and that is the same direction these mountains and that interstate also happen to run.

People claim that tornadoes “skip,” when in fact they merely weaken and strengthen (no one knows why). They believe they move erratically, but tornadoes generally move steadily northeast,
which is why most maps of tornado tracks look like parallel scratch marks. They rarely veer south or west. One notable exception is the El Reno, Oklahoma, EF5 tornado that killed the scientific storm chaser Tim Samaras and his son on May 31, 2013. Samaras, a researcher attempting to place probes in its path to measure the inner workings of tornadoes, fled south to escape the path of the oncoming tornado, a 2.6-mile-wide monster, the widest ever recorded. It made an unusual U-shape dip southeast that put Samaras and his son right in harm's way.

Many say you should open the windows in a house to equalize the pressure, let the wind flow through. Not true—most homes have enough air leaks to do that, and the force of the wind is what destroys a house, not unequalized pressure. “Don't worry about equalizing the pressure,” instructs a NOAA treatise on tornado myths. “The roof ripping off and the pickup truck smashing through the front wall will equalize the pressure for you.”

They also say you should hide in the southwest corner of your basement, because the house will fall northeast. But houses collapse—from falling trees, cars, or debris—and do not necessarily collapse in any given direction. The best place is under a stairwell, in a tiny, innermost room such as a closet, or under a sturdy table or workbench in the basement.

A great number of highly educated people believe that tornadoes do not occur where they live. Unless they live in Antarctica, they are all wrong. “This comforting myth can kill you,” wrote the meteorologist Chuck Doswell. “Tornadoes have been observed on every continent and in every American state at every hour of the day and in every month of the year.”

Across Alabama, people reacted—or did not—based on what they believed. For some, it made the difference between life and death. For others, it was a matter of luck.

7:50 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE, BIRMINGHAM OFFICE

The Birmingham office of the National Weather Service found themselves in the path of a storm. The small government office had been running wide open, on all cylinders, since 3:00 a.m. NWS Meteorologist in Charge Jim Stefkovich had never seen his staff working with such focused intensity as he had today. They had issued nearly fifty warnings so far, and the next one would place the polygon—the projected path of the supercell—directly over their office.

In a rare step away from the radar, the staff of the National Weather Service left their stations and filed into the office safe room. A concrete-reinforced box designed to withstand violent weather, it was also the break room, with a fridge, coffeemakers, and a small plastic lunch table. The heavy metal storm door swung shut with an ominous boom, and someone latched it. On the other side of the door, the forecast room sat silent and empty, radars flickering unwatched. Their colleagues in the Atlanta office had taken over the reins.

The fiftieth tornado of the day, an EF5, was moving through the northeastern part of the state, destroying two hundred homes and claiming thirty-two more lives in and around the small town of Rainsville. Its path, thirty-four miles long, was one of the shorter of the long-track paths, but it left an astounding wake that revealed the mysteriously acute selectivity of tornadoes. Foundations wiped clean of all debris were found within eighty feet of trees that had kept their leaves. A school bus was thrown and shucked from its chassis. At one home, an eight-hundred-pound safe, bolted to the foundation, was ripped free and thrown two hundred yards, its locked door blown open by the magnificent winds.

Meanwhile, tornado number 51, the twin of the Tuscaloosa storm, was billowing through the blue twilight above Ohatchee, coming over black hills like smoke rising. More than a mile wide, it stayed on the ground for seventy-one miles, killing twenty-two and injuring at least eighty-one.

It approached Piedmont, Alabama, a part of the state that has a long history of being unlucky. In its path lay a church that had seen far more than its fair share of sorrow.

“Anybody near the Goshen United Methodist Church, be in a safe place,” Spann said. “Anybody affected by that 1994 Palm Sunday tornado, be in a safe place—
now!
”

The Palm Sunday tornado was one of the most tragically memorable storms ever to strike Alabama. Twenty-nine tornadoes had torn through five states on March 27, 1994, but it was the one most people remember because it struck a church during Palm Sunday services.

Goshen United Methodist Church sat on a rural road in Piedmont County, a redbrick sanctuary with around a dozen wooden pews and a tall, white steeple pointing skyward like a compass needle. There was no sermon that day, because it was the day of the children's play, a Palm Sunday drama about the Passion of Christ. The children walked around the pews waving palm branches in a gesture of welcome. The church was packed for the special performance.

“Have any of you seen this many children in church on a Sunday morning?” Pastor Kelly Clem asked the congregation. Two of them were hers.

There were 142 people at Goshen that day, as many as the church would hold. It was rainy, and someone was meeting people in the parking lot with umbrellas and walking them in.

The man playing Jesus was about to come out with the cross. His crown was made of real thorns and the pastor warned him to be careful, they could cut. The power went out and the lights went dark, and the children sang louder through the thunder and rain. The drama onstage was so captivating that it kept the darkness in the window at bay.

Then a window broke and the peace was shattered. People ducked, screamed, and ran as the winds tore into their church. The pastor ran
toward her four-year-old daughter, Hannah, and saw her running toward her, hand in hand with a friend. In an instant, everyone flew in different directions. A boy looked up and saw a black cloud with cars and pieces of houses hurtling inside it. The white steeple was sucked off the roof. The wooden pews were ripped up and thrown. It knocked children out of their Easter shoes.

Something struck the pastor in the head and she fell, hitting her shoulder and breaking her arm. She was the first to stand up and behold her church transformed into a battlefield. Her altar was buried under a mountain of bricks, her people covered in dust. She could not tell the living from the dead, and as she looked up at where the roof should be, there was nothing left but sky. She prayed the deepest prayer she had ever prayed in her life:

Help!

She found her four-year-old daughter unconscious under a pew.

“Mama's right here,” she said, patting her tenderly.

A rescue worker came and took Hannah away. The pastor did not know whether her child was alive or dead. And not knowing gave her the presence of mind to continue being a pastor. She looked down and saw her dirty robe and remembered it was her duty to shepherd her flock through this valley of death.

Twenty people died in the church that day. Six of the dead were children. One of them was Hannah.

It was hard to see this and not question God.

“This might shake people's faith for a long time,” the minister said as she mourned her daughter's death. “But having your faith shaken is not the same as losing it.”

The believers of Goshen United Methodist picked up the pieces of their broken church, leaned on one another when they felt their faith slip, and rebuilt their sanctuary with the help of donations from all around the world. When they opened the doors of their brand-new church, they invited James Spann to the pulpit as their first guest speaker.

“If you're looking for a theological explanation as to why this happened, I'm not your guy,” Spann told them. “I'm just here to love on you and encourage you.”

The burning question in everyone's heart was
Why?

“You've got the wrong question,” he said. “It's not
‘Why?'
because you will never get an answer at this time and place. It's
‘What?'
What can we learn from this? How should we respond? What can we do to take this and turn it into something positive? It's biblical, when something good comes out of bad things.”