re: Tenth Anniversary of the 2011 Super Tornado Outbreak

I was a student at Alabama. I was an amateur storm chaser at the time and foolishly left my video camera in the dorm. My thought process was: it was my third time that month chasing storms and, despite the fact the values were off the charts that afternoon, I figured I would fail once again to catch any footage of a tornado. I started tracking the cell that would eventually spawn the Tuscaloosa-Birmingham Tornado about an hour before it reached the city limits. I decided that this was my best bet at seeing a tornado that day and so remained in the downtown area.

At a little after 5:00 the storm started to become visible off to the southwest. I was thoroughly impressed with the structure of it and was blown away by the almost continual sound of thunder emitting from it as it moved toward Tuscaloosa. My feeling at that time was that if there wasn't a tornado inside that thunderstorm then there was no such thing as tornadoes. I took shelter inside the Tuscaloosa Public Works parking deck and took photographs with my iPhone as the tornado passed about a mile and a half south of my location.

Two days later I found myself helping with the clean-up in the Forest Lake area of Tuscaloosa. It looked like a World War I battlefield. The next day I took my services to Alberta City and found the damage there to be much worse than what I saw in Forest Lakes.