Gone With the Wind

April is now over and Alabama can breathe a sigh of relief.  April 2011 was a most violent month as spring storms brought disaster to many communities in this state.  Spring in the South is perhaps its most beautiful season with all kinds of blooms and blossoms festooning their colors throughout the landscape.  This spring was no different and now—a few weeks earlier than normal—the stately magnolia trees are opening their flowers and wafting delightful fragrances in the air.

Last year was the same flower-wise.  The weather, however, was another story.  Severe thunderstorms moved across Alabama and many of them spawned the South’s greatest weather scourge: tornadoes.  These storms unleash winds and cause death and destruction that have to be seen to be believed.  Wednesday, 27 April saw them let loose a fury that had not been seen here in nearly forty years.

On that day 62 tornadoes touched down in various places.  Twenty-nine of them rampaged through central Alabama alone.  Birmingham’s suburbs and the college town of Tuscaloosa were very hard hit.  Entire neighborhoods were destroyed as winds in excess of 200 mph/320 kph tore through them.  More than 250 people died as the twisters did their deadly dances across their communities, including the one my brother John lives in with his family.  They had a narrow escape.

“We heard it coming, Raymond,” John told me later.  “It roared like a freight train.  Fortunately for us, it didn’t touch down in the neighborhood.  Instead, it stayed up in the air and passed over the house.  It dropped all kinds of debris on my property and the neighbors’ land as well.  But it didn’t stay in the air.  The funnel finally touched down 2½ miles (4 km) away in Pleasant Grove where it killed ten people.  Had that happened here, I don’t know if we would have survived even though we took shelter in the basement.”

A year has passed since that dreadful day and Alabama is still picking up the pieces.  April and May are the months that see the most tornadoes but here in the South the storms can strike in any month of the year.  They are part of a larger weather pattern.  No other country on Earth has as many tornadoes as the United States where more than a thousand occur each year.  The plains states east of the Rockies are frequent targets, particularly Kansas (remember the twister that opens the movie The Wizard of Oz?) and Oklahoma.  But the South feels their force as well.

When cold, dry air born in the Rockies meets warm, moist air that flows out of the Gulf of Mexico, you have a recipe for big trouble.  The results frequently are thunderstorms, severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.  When conditions are favorable for violent weather, the National Weather Service will put an area under a severe thunderstorm or tornado watch.  If the storms actually appear the watch is upgraded to a warning.  That gives residents time to take cover.  A watch can last for several hours and is broadcast on radio and television so that residents can prepare for the worst.  But even with improved forecasting and warning tools, people still die in these horrific storms.

Last week, my sister-in-law drove me through one of the areas that was ravaged by last year’s tornadoes.  We went to Pratt City.  Now I hadn’t been there for many years and really had few memories of what the area had looked like before.  Nevertheless, I was still amazed by what I saw.

Like much of Alabama, this community is heavily wooded with forest and thick groves of trees.  We saw the place where the twister had touched down and not a single tree had been left standing.  All of them had been uprooted and destroyed.  We passed a church that had not yet been rebuilt.  It looked like a bomb had hit it.  Some buildings had been replaced but much of the damage remained.  If it looked this bad last week, I could only imagine what it looked like last year in the days immediately following the catastrophe.

When I moved back to Alabama, I wondered about the weather.  I had forgotten what it was like to live in a place with abundant rainfall.  My former home in Boulder, Colorado sees 18 inches/460 mm of precipitation a year.  By contrast, Birmingham gets some 54 inches/1,380 mm a year.  I have already witnessed severe thunderstorm activity since I returned.  You know the storm is going to be very bad when the cloud cover gets so thick that the street lamps turn on in midafternoon.  The rain comes down in buckets, not a “Presbyterian gulley washer, but a real Baptist downpour” as we say in the South.  Such a storm can last for hours.  The one I saw dissipated in less than thirty minutes.

I was bracing for tornadoes, but this April gave everyone a very welcome and pleasant surprise.  For the first time since 2004, April was tornado-free in Alabama, hence the aforementioned sigh of relief.  After last year’s devastations, nobody complained.  Of course, we still have May to get through.  Tornadoes are common then as well so we’ll have to wait and see how this month shapes up.  It has started off on a warm note but that isn’t remarkable.

There’s also hurricane season which will begin on 1 June.  You can be sure that every tropical depression that forms off the African coast and then heads for the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico will be given a close and anxious look.  Birmingham is too far inland to take a direct hit, but that doesn’t mean a Gulf coast storm can’t give us fierce weather and its associated headaches.  Hurricanes are also tornado spawners and can send high winds and heavy rains to places many miles from their landfalls.  I saw that back in September 1979 when Hurricane Frederick struck the port city of Mobile and sent very bad weather to us some 250 miles/400 km away; and I might see something like it again when the season gets underway this year.

Despite all this I’ve chosen not to worry about severe weather because there’s really nothing I can do about it anyway.  It is a fact of life here and so it isn’t something to consciously dwell on all the time.  When watches and warnings are issued, I’ll take the appropriate measures.  I’ll either go down into the basement or seek cover in a closet or interior room of the house.  As horrible and terrifying as tornadoes are, they don’t stay in any one area long.  They are constantly on the move so a few minutes is the length of time of the greatest danger.

Spring in Dixie means azalea, dogwood and magnolia blossoms, the world famous Kentucky Derby horse race, the start of baseball season, different festivals and other outdoor activities and…wild weather.  Yet Southerners think that White Easters and blizzards in April and May—common enough in the Rockies—are weather aberrations to be avoided at all costs.  Compared to those, violent weather in this part of the country is considered normal.  Having experienced extreme weather in both the Rockies and the South, I suppose my experiences have prepared me to face anything.  This year’s weather may well test that perspective.