Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

As many of you are aware, I was able to write a story about the tornado for my little hometown paper. It's a small weekly paper published in a town where everyone knows everyone so I knew they'd be interested. I also knew it would give me a little more liberty with my writing than a larger paper, so I was able to write in first-person and avoid the typical cut and dry news story. My paper is so small, they have no website, so here is the article minus the pictures which were published with it (it would make this post too long). But I'm sure many of you are oh-so-familiar with the damage already.

*I should tell you here that the statistics quoted in this story have changed since it was published. The death toll is still around 40, but the number of missing has dropped well below 100. As of today, I don't know the exact count.

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Cheyenne (Kearl) Martin grew up in Milford, graduating in 1998. She moved to Tuscaloosa, Ala., shortly after to pursue a degree in journalism at the University of Alabama. She now lives in close-by Northport with her husband and two children. She and her family witnessed the destructive tornado on April 27, and though they were able to watch from a safe distance, she has many friends who were directly affected.

On April 27, my husband woke me up in the middle of a monstrous thunder storm (which produced, I would later learn, a small tornado) to tell me we had no power. I groaned and went back to sleep.

In our 20-year-old, 900-home subdivision in Northport, Ala., just across the river from Tuscaloosa, power outages are a frequent occurrence during ferocious Alabama spring and summer storms. So, I wasn’t alarmed—even with the day-long tornado watch—and even thought the public school systems almost overly cautious for canceling school that day. I carried on like normal and took my three-year-old daughter to her dance class.

But after seeing the darkening sky after class, I joined the public school system in using caution and canceled my two piano lessons for that afternoon. I didn’t want them to be caught in the rain. Of course, I didn’t know at that point they would have been caught in something much worse.

Just south across the river, near the University of Alabama, my friends Cody and Lindsay Blowers were much more in tune with the weather than I was. Being apartment dwellers, they decided early in the afternoon to head to Cody’s parents house in Brookwood, a town about 20 miles northeast of Tuscaloosa. His parents have an underground storm shelter, so they decided it was the safest place to be.

“[Cody] came home early and we grabbed a change of clothes from the apartment and a few other things and headed out to Brookwood,” Lindsay said. “We had seen the tornado in Cullman (Alabama) on television earlier that morning. We knew if one hit here it would be bad. Better safe than sorry.”

As the gray afternoon wore on, I realized how serious things were becoming. I called my husband to see if he would be able to come home from work early. He drove up seconds later. We put shoes on the kids and got our safe place ready. (A closet on the lower level of our multi-level home; we don’t have a basement.) We retreated to our lower-level family room and turned on the news.

Just after 5 p.m., we watched live on television as a mile-wide tornado started in the south of town and completely demolished everything in its path for the next six miles.

Lindsay said she listened to the reports of the tornado on the radio as she sat in the storm shelter with her husband and in-laws.

“I didn’t realize the magnitude,” she said. “And then of course afterwards we heard reports about Krispy Kreme and Full Moon [Barbecue] being gone. I couldn’t imagine that it would be as big as it was or stay on the ground for so long.”

Lindsay’s in-laws escaped the storm and managed to keep their power. We still had power also and, three miles from the tornado, our house was intact. But cell phone use was out of the question.

Again, we watched on television as local reporters took us for a guided tour of a popular and busy intersection. Trees: gone. Neighborhoods: gone. The place I cried over my husband-then-boyfriend while eating great gobs of chocolate custard: gone.  The hospital, just two streets away, was still standing, as was my beloved University of Alabama, which begins its sprawl less than a mile west from the hospital.

I know in Nebraska it’s a common thing to be able to see for several miles. In Alabama, it’s nearly impossible to tell how big a town is for all the trees that divide homes, neighborhoods and businesses. We don’t even see our neighbor directly behind us. Today, I can stand at that once busy intersection and see everything. Only now that everything is nothing.

Afterwards, Lindsay immediately turned to Facebook and her cell phone to check up on friends and managed to find out the fate of one of our mutual friends.

Rachael James Mulder and her husband Dan were home in their apartment when the tornado hit. They made it through; their apartment did not. Cody and his father made their way to where the apartment once stood to pick them up.  Lindsay would return the following day to help our friend salvage what she could.

It would be a few more days before I heard Rachael’s story. CNN actually interviewed her and the Associated Press snapped a picture of Rachael and her husband outside their demolished apartment.

Rachael, a nurse at Northport Medical Center, had just pulled an all-night shift Tuesday, the day before the tornado hit. She was home sleeping and wasn’t aware of anything out of the ordinary.

“I had heard a few things but I didn’t think much about it,” she said. “We always have severe weather warnings and nothing ever really happens.”

While she slept, Dan, a biology student at the University of Alabama, studied in their second story apartment. Rachael says the next thing she remembers is Dan running to her saying, “Rachael, get in the tub now!”

“He just seemed so scared and he was yelling,” she said. “He just had this fear and intensity.”

Dan shut the door and covered her in the tub with his body and within seconds the tornado hit.

“I was terrified,” she said. “It was so loud and there was so much wind. It just felt so close. In a storm you can hear everything, but you are still away from it and it doesn’t feel very close. This was like it was right there. It was terrifying.”

Thinking that was the worst of it, she and Dan were completely unprepared for what they found when they opened their bathroom door.

“Dan went out first and I think he said something like ‘Oh, my goodness,’” she said. “We walked out and we could see the sky. Our living room was destroyed. We had no roof and our walls were gone. There were big pieces of wood everywhere, rubble, other peoples’ stuff and that pink, fluffy insulation.”

In complete shock, the couple walked around a now unrecognizable apartment until Dan and a boy went to look for survivors.

“Dan was gone for a couple of minutes,” she said. “Then I heard him yell, ‘Rachael, hurry! Come down here! Someone’s dying! Someone’s dying!’”

Rachael retrieved her first aid kit from the closet and carefully picked her way through the only exit to their apartment: the kitchen window. She made her way down the concrete stairs and around the corner to find Dan with a 21-year-old woman who was severely injured.

Overwhelmed, in shock and frustrated by the lack of appropriate tools, Rachael did her best to help the woman.

“She was in horrible condition,” Rachael said. “She had a wound on her side, her organs were coming out, she was bleeding, she had cuts on her head. She was unresponsive but she was still breathing.”

Rachael tried to open the woman’s airway and she wrapped an ace bandage around the bleeding.

“She started choking on her fluids so I turned her on her side … she took her last breath and she died.”

Sadly, Rachael’s story is not unique in the aftermath of this storm.

 The neighborhood of Alberta City, just to the east of Tuscaloosa, is devastated. Neighborhoods are gone, as if they never even existed. I know a couple who rent a house in Alberta City. She and her one-year-old granddaughter clung to each other on the floor of a closet while she listened to her house being dismantled. They survived. Seven people on her street did not.

According to local news reports at this time, the Tuscaloosa mayor’s office has confirmed that the tornado covered a total of 5.9 miles, cutting a swath anywhere from one to 1.5 miles wide. It damaged well over 5,000 structures, killed 40 people, left 2,580 people without power and left behind $75 to $100 million in destruction. More than 400 people are estimated to be missing, though it is hard to get an accurate count. In total, the mayor’s office estimates that it affected the lives of 20,000 people, whether directly or indirectly.

And like rubbing salt on a wound, the tornado even took the city’s Department of Environmental Services (they have since pieced together seven garbage trucks) and the county’s emergency management agency.

The National Weather Service categorized the tornado as an EF4, with winds being measured at 190 miles per hour; just 10 miles less than the required 200 miles per hour of an EF5. It has, without doubt, caused more death and destruction than any tornado in Alabama’s history. 

And yet, in the midst of this devastation and destruction, there is a pervasive feeling of hope rather than despair. Shelters have popped up all over the city. A volunteer headquarters was immediately set up at a local church. In the spirit of true Southern hospitality, the residents of this city didn’t miss a beat in offering aid, services and comfort. Not one beat.

“So much has already been done,” Lindsay said. “I can’t even count the number of places that are now drop-off centers and donation centers. Things started happening immediately…I’m just trying to do what I can.”

Rachael, too, has a feeling of peace and quiet hope in spite of everything she has experienced.

 “We truly feel so humbled and grateful,” she said. “We know that our Heavenly Father is there in our lives and we are unbelievably humbled by how incredibly kind, loving and giving everyone has been to us.”

There is a line in the Alabama fight song which any Southerner worth his salt will remember: “Fight on, fight on, fight on men!”

And after the events of last Wednesday, there is nothing left to do. But after seeing the unity, love and determination of the place I call my second hometown, I know we will know nothing but victory.