Think that was just people rationalizing what was about to happen.

By 5pm all the people I have who live in that state had either been hit by or had been in the cone of at least 1 F4 or better storm.

Had people in N AL who were tornado warned at least 4 times from around dawn until around dusk.

By the time the Hackleburg storm was rolling in they didn’t have power, the cell service was out and their weather radio was useless because the broadcast tower had been hit earlier. They were about to check damage in the area because the clouds had cleared when I was able to get texts through to them about the F5 just west of them and they went back to their shelter. Of course when they came out I had to tell them about what was going on down in Tuscaloosa.

So they got to end the day driving all the way to Tuscaloosa as the storm that had wiped it out cleared Birmingham. They had to dodge police barricades in the dark to pick their daughter up near campus because she’d her car was trapped by debris and her apartment complex was uninhabitable.

Her bf was from N Birmingham and had just heard from his parents that their house had been taken down to the foundation, so he was down two places in a single storm. Lot of people ended up doing multi week rentals down on the coast as hotels were full and it would be weeks or months before places were fixed.

They said even in the fading light on the drive down they could make out at least 4 or 5 clear tornado tracks where storms had crossed I65 and I20/59.

Over on the 359 bypass close to Stillman College the storm had thrown cars into the side of an overpass and they were tangled into a mess that only makes sense if you’ve seen a marina after a bad hurricane take a bunch of boats and smash them together in one corner where they couldn’t go any further.

Went down that week to help with cleanup and drove through the Harvest/Decatur/Sparkman area and it was bad. You had expensive, well built brick homes torn in half or scoured to the foundation. Power lines cut in half and of course the trees were stripped and broken in the base for a half mile or more. That W Madison area to I65/Athens has been built up so much since then I hate to think what it would do if it went through now.

Only thing I can equate it to is a direct hit from a cat5 type hurricane because of the scale and width of the damage. Really bad day for E MS and much of central and N AL.