re: Tenth Anniversary of the 2011 Super Tornado Outbreak

That's exactly what I was thinking when the, I'm assuming, police chief was being interviewed.

Spann is doing his weekly podcast tonight live other now and there are a ton of big names from the weather enterprise that we’re involved in 4/27/11 on tonight. Here is a link:

LINK

I recently saw a YouTube of the Tuscaloosa tornado event, and couldn't believe what I was seeing. A high-end EF-4 a mile or more wide, on the ground for 81 miles through a highly populated area!

It's truly miraculous this event didn't result in about 10x the high number of casualties that occurred. That tornado was a monster

And how silly some of us thought that the first round did enough to calm the skies.

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Evan Fisher
@EFisherWX
The lives lost 10 years ago during the April 2011 Super Outbreak will never be forgotten. This is a map of every fatal tornado from April 25th to 28th, scaled by the number of lives it took. Today, we remember the victims and the loved ones they left behind

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And how silly some of us thought that the first round did enough to calm the skies.

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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.

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The NW quadrant of Alabama was also the worst-hit area in the US during the Super Outbreak on April 3-4 1974. 87 people in the state were killed by tornados during that event.

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Indeed, the western and northern portions of Alabama are very tornado prone. Especially along and north of the I-20/59 corridor. The town of Guin, AL was virtually wiped out by an F-5 during the 1974 Super Outbreak. That is considered one of the strongest tornadoes ever. It was so strong that the creator of the Fujita tornado scale, Dr. Ted Fujita, went to Guin to survey the damage himself.

Solid thread RTR.

My neighborhood was hit by the early morning storms in the Altadena area. I live on the Jefferson/Shelby county line. Lots of trees down but no serious home damage in my hood, very fortunate. Power was out for around 7 days, I think.

Went to friends house in Highland Park B'ham and watched the rest of the day unfold. It took hours to get there bc of all the damage and traffic from my house til Cahaba Heights.

The eeriest thing I saw that day was debris, especially insulation, falling from the sky presumably from the Tuscaloosa/ West Jefferson County tornado. Crazy stuff.

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Legend, I think you’d really enjoy this episode of Spann’s podcast that linked above. It’s some deep stuff. Some of the NWS guys on there really were messed up by 4/27/11 and the things they saw during those surveys.

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I've got all the anniversary stuff saved right now. I'm going to give it a little while before I dive in. Been bit overwhelmed just looking at the old/original stuff. I spoke with my old co-worker yesterday. He leaves every year and goes on a trip by himself. He's had it rough this year.