Tornado Alley - Real Time Tornado: Tuscaloosa, Alabama

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looks like it's now touching down so we have an emergency situation this 22 is now on the ground and it looks like it says now sizeable tornado if you see anybody outside tell them to get inside we were watching this coming to a metropolitan area JFS out it was horrendous [Music] all I could think about was is this thing coming from you this thing is it was utterly terrifying facilities you could feel the power of his monster it was right on top of us that's the tornado right there it looked like it had a mind that it had personality this mysterious moment of my life we had severe weather that morning between 3:30 and 9 o'clock and during that time five people were killed and a quarter million people had no power National Weather Service notified me that Tuscaloosa had a forty percent plus chance of being hit by tornado it's important that we take heed of this and hopefully Tuscaloosa will come out unscathed but it doesn't hurt for us to be prepared and ready for what lies ahead in the next few hours at that point I decided to go ahead and activate the city's incident command system which is basically our emergency protocols I love working in the emergency department because you have the opportunity to take care of people it was a typical day in the emergency department typical patients that we get every day one of the paramedics mentioned that bad weather was coming in one of the nurses and I walked outside and it was a beautiful day the Sun was shining the problem we were facing was the fact that the Sun popped out and then you had a lot of people saying well everything's going to be okay this is the kind of stuff where we really really ask you to pay attention the fact that the Sun is out is the worst possible thing because that makes the air more buoyant and unstable the temperatures continue to warm and the instability increases and again a lot of the severe weather parameters are just off the charts today looking at the data we have a check list of about 64 parameters that you need for a tornado we had about 60 of the 64 they were just screaming almost an extreme range that any of these storms could erupt and go severe in a heartbeat and all of a sudden the atmosphere just started changing the wind picked up got dark we knew we had something big coming that particular day we weren't doing anything special we actually had a couple of days of thunderstorms and a very good friend of mine Josh had been shooting he was just playing around with a new video camera that I'd gotten not too long ago and was just trying to catch lightning we have seen some of the stuff on the news about you know potential tornados but that's kind of something that we get almost every single day during the summer so it wasn't really something that we really fretted too much about I went to go out to the front yard and I looked towards the front of my house where I saw my friend and he was like look right over there you can just see movement and velocity we knew that there was something going on around us that wasn't normal we want you to be in a safe place right now all of these storms are extremely dangerous today I think some of the real heroes were our people in the field if we just showed radar for a lot of people that looks like a bucket of spill paint but you show a live stream I will tell you people will do something at the live stream we've got John Brown and Mike Wilhelm two of our better sky watchers I work for the state of Alabama Department of Human Resources I've stayed in touch with weather and studied it a lot for probably about 25 years got Watchers for ABC 33 40 and we were quite confident that there was a storm that was making a Mon Tuscaloosa that is lowering see a few little fingers there in that particular day every storm was isolated and it was maintaining strength and it was rotating we were looking at a storm and John says my a lot of people are going to die today and they just don't know it yet I am a student at the University of Alabama studying journalism for about six years I've been working at a local TV station in Tuscaloosa it was well I was in one of my eight classes that we started getting word that the weather was going to be a little rougher than we thought and so my professor asked if this station needed me and at that point I was able to go to the station and that's when things really started to progress West Alabama is bracing for more stormy weather and the same system has already been blamed for several deaths and destroying many businesses and homes all across the south for the latest I'm the news director and anchor at WVU ATV being the news person people are asking you Lin is this going to be as bad as people say it is and you really don't have any answers it's really not in your hands at the same time you're having to think about your own personal safety this potentially could hit the building where we are right now so again getting the lowest floor of your home put as many walls between you and the outside as possible we had converge in the studio to watch the tower camera and we saw the tornado come down take shape and it became fairly large it'll take a chance with us saying this is obviously a very dangerous situation what we're looking at but then in just a few moments we saw it lift back up and it goes back up into the cloud and it looks like it's lifting you could show that collective sigh of relief it appears that it's not on the ground in the second and I said it's gonna get angry and come back down even worse and in just a couple minutes it did exactly that it looks like it's now touching down just to the west of Tuscaloosa yeah we see the power flashes so we have an emergency situation this 22 is now on the ground and looks like it says now South Pole tornado we're watching live this is coming right towards Tuscaloosa situation until so if you are watching us I've lived in Tuscaloosa pretty much my entire life I was out of school working for my dad at the time I had one of my friends make you it with me the storm was pretty bad and so we'd had actually left work a little bit early personally driving I couldn't see the storm that well however after the trees move it becomes apparent that the storm is coming directly at us freaking is the thing is massive any tips we need to go faster it's coming right at us strangest straight never bought a lot closer we're sitting on the interstate having no idea where the storms actually going I didn't really realize the severity of the situation once I actually looked over I didn't realize that we were nearly as close as we were when it was right on top of us we need to we need to go that way you can see the brie in the air when either we need to go that way fine go back I'm not kidding [Music] and they felt like we were too close and that's when we probably went about half a mile in Reverse down the wrong way on the interstate get us far enough away from the storm it's awesome that interstate right where we were oh my god it became apparent as to exactly how much damage was being done you can actually see what appears to be full-length two by fours I mean just everything and anything had been sucked up and was spiraling around a half mile circle and the other reports we've had this thing is clearly a large violent tornado that is down on the ground I tried to indicate that this is a genuine genuine emergency this is not a false alarm this is an extremely violent situation notice the power flashes it's very hard to stay composed on the air because you know that if many people don't do anything in the path of that there's a good chance they're going to lose their life I want everybody in the city limits of Tuscaloosa to stay sheltered I have a wife and two children but you cannot be fatigued you cannot be distracted you cannot be emotional nobody should be on campus walking nobody should be driving [Music] this was different on a lot of levels you don't normally see a very clearly defined funnel like you did with that tornado had multiple vortices meaning there was a lot of small funnel life shapes that circulated around the outside of the tornado itself debris everywhere now it's doing as we were standing there we were watching this come into a metropolitan area know it's going to destroy a big chunk of this pollution nothing being safety it was just obvious it was a horrendous situation [Music] I am an on-air personality program director for a radio station all of a sudden they started blaring the sirens tornado was rate in front of the radio station look out at this crowd of black dust that just goes all the way up to the heavens this thing is huge it was breathtaking this is a very large tornado coming directly our way this inclusive University of Alabama campus if you see anybody outside tell them to get inside right now the majority of people who were gathered in that studio Tuscaloosa is home for them this is coming right towards our television station you could feel the power of the fear just radiating from people you want to get everybody out of the hallway and into our studio if that is possibility because this is definitely a life-threatening situation we just all huddled underneath our news desk and it was people that were working at the station as well as people that were just grabbed from outside in the hallway and told to come in it was really odd early terrifying I see the clouds moving like mad over there we both begin to see kind of a torrential movement of clouds but it was so close to the ground I mean it looked like it was right behind another house what is that fly in the air is the breeze there's debris flying in the carry that's getting loud the rumbling of the ground and the pressure change and the sound growing louder and louder and louder came towards us we were scared to the point of going inside oh my god did you see all the debris of why oh it's right there that's the tornado right there if I want to go down to the basement yeah let's as I turn around away from the door I see my tree disappear I said all right it's time for us to go downstairs and get to a safe place I grabbed all the couch cushions off the couch and threw them down there and then just kind of laid on top of those couch cushions and put them behind me and laid on top of my friend oh it's right there that's the tornado right there grabbed all the couch cushions and then just kind of laid on top of those couch cushions and put them behind me and laid on top of my friend oh my god and it's a treat landed here it is a hole in the room there are holes in the roof above my room and I are old computer room the entire roof was ripped off there was nothing left the porch is gone it was probably about five trees laying on top of the walkway to the house and in that situation it was when I was positive that we were in danger we're gonna have to get out of here this house could collapse this thing looks like it might be over 1/2 mile wide maybe up to 3/4 of a mile wide now Isaiah Harper you're seeing a tornado right now tell us what you got it was monstrous it was just huge and it looked like from sitting still at one point that it had a mind but it had personality I'm watching people down and at the same time my wife was on the east end of Tuscaloosa and my kids at home and I'm wondering which way is this thing gonna go the most areas moment of my life I mean I saw my life sort of flashed between my eyes oh my gosh Wow while I was filming the whole thing all I could think about was is this thing coming for me look like it was kind of making a turn for our direction we got back inside and then the station went dark [Music] and all we were left with was a giant black cloud that was staring at us oh my god the last time we had one this big was probably March 21st 1932 and before my time that destroyed so much of us we were huddled in this room and we were surrounded this little television this is where I've grown up this is where I have raised a family and now we were watching them on live television the tornado ripped through the heart of the city and that was the first moment for me where you get that weak in the knees moment it was the traumatic skyline Boulevard here and interstate 59 20 the quietness in the room was amazing and then the TV went blank I believe the tornado at that point was about halfway through our city all right this is a life-threatening situation we have a very large tornado coming right into the center part of Tuscaloosa this includes our television station in that moment you really don't know exactly what you're going to do at some point I started to pray this thing is coming right towards the University of Alabama campus we're going to stay on air as long as we possibly can we're getting power of glitches a very large tornado on the ground right now then boom just completely gone everything went black so I grabbed my camera and I just started running up flights of stairs in the building and as soon as I got out of the stairwell there it was and all you can do is just love it's such an overpowering feeling to be eyeball-to-eyeball with a killer like that absolutely rotation it's communicate facilities we've seen the rotation see debris it's such an overpowering feeling to be eyeball-to-eyeball with a killer like that it's coming over the campus ceilings you feel the power of this monster and when it came dangerously close I've dug back into the stairwell and just started to pray are you kidding me nobody should be out there you had two really important facilities close to the tornado path one was dch Regional Medical Center that would be the ultimate disaster that the tornado took out that hospital our nurse manager stuck her head in the door and said for us to take cover because the news had reported that there had been a tornado spotted it on 15th Street coming straight for the hospital we have this child who was intubated so we quickly decided that the other nurse put a lot over her head and then I would lie over her body on the stretcher and hang on at this point were unaware of how big this tornado was and then all of a sudden there was this huge black cloud just swirling and I screamed oh my gosh there it is it came so quickly and it was just so huge and it was so close it was almost like you could reach out and just touch it it was there and then it was gone and the sky was cleared in it looks like the tornado is beyond the range of the Tuscaloosa Skycam so it's moving away from the city but again I would say for about the next maybe 15 minutes I would stay sheltered until we can come out and assistant look at that right in public looking over there probably the biggest obstacle was all the debris there were whole trees down the road and the two-by-fours and signs at that point I think everything kind of became surreal the area we pulled up to it was about a block and a half away from where I work and had been just a couple hours before and it looked like an absolute war zone there was nothing left except for a few power poles that were broken off houses were completely laid out over 30 or 40 feet but there was nothing structurally left of them [Music] Wow right through one right [Music] when she said that she could hear people screaming for help I think that's when we got out we started trying to help as we were in the vehicle I was getting updates about to communication towers being destroyed about 80% of the city's heavy equipment was destroyed nine-one-one being gone and a fire station being destroyed you would have entire houses that were blown off the foundation you could see trees strip to their bar most of the trees in many cases were just completely uprooted and tossed somewhere else cars tossed around like toys crumpled up into balls like a piece of paper a lot of people described like a bomb went off only over a long swath trees are blocking roads there's no information cell services dismantle to see what that beast did to this city was unbelievable I saw people just emerging people with cuts bleeding impaled objects they look to me almost like zombies I kind of describe it as an unraveling nightmare because we saw the landscape totally changed it was unrecognizable I was never really concerned about where I lived because I hadn't heard anything about Alberta or my apartment I say tell us where you are and what you got come on 13th Street I'm spending right here in the parking lot though there are no more they have been completely leveled at the complete disaster here James there was a Shell gas station on the corner of 13th and McFarland and everything inside that gas station had been gutted by the storm except for the counter and I remember walking up to a lady she was still holding on to the counter and she was crying she says I wrote this storm holding on to this counter and I'm not letting this go until somebody tells me for sure that thing is gone I Samantha the storms moved on and during the interview she let go there's hoping the neighbors are all right man I know they had all those kids over there you're worried about some of the things that you have but then that very quickly dissipates and you get to being where you need to go and check on everyone else around you this blues is not a very big town and we all kind of know each other a little bit around here especially our neighbors yeah okay hey I need to get over here buddy go check on these folks Josh we got power line it's a sketchy situation when you're dealing with high electricity in the disaster area over here we have to check the neighbors to my left they had a couple of trees leaned over on the side of their house and you know I was worried children were crying it's very stressful situation [Music] [Applause] [Music] there should be people on the way [Music] the neighbors to my left the daughter had fallen down the stairs that was just absolutely heartbreaking it was kind of a wild situation you know there was no power children were crying he just tried to do things as calm and take everything one step at a time I remember the first one we got to is an elderly lady and the exterior bathroom wall had fallen over and just basically encased her in the bathtub we went just pushed the wall up and helped her up and then me and Nate saw a little girl standing on a pile of rubble that used to be her house and she was just standing there crying for a mom and her sister we heard the sister first found her after a few minutes of digging and we could hear the mom calling we wind up having to tear a door off of some of the debris and used it as a backboard carried them all out an ambulance it was there the first three patients that came to the hospital came by ambulance and we never saw them on the trauma hall because they perished before they actually got into the hospital it was very difficult because their children patients came so quickly and they just continued to come it's like there was no end before you know it the whole emergency department was completely filled people sitting in the floors on counter tops rooms that were made for one patient would have four and five patients the hard part is you would have mamas and daddies coming and looking for their children so you had to tell them I don't know where your child is and so you have these panicked parents begging you to tell them that their children are okay and you can't [Applause] [Music] we didn't have some of the basic utilities that we needed to get by makes an uncomfortable situation and the only answer is to try to keep your comment about an hour to you getting them set up in an uncomfortable position and waiting for the amulets to show up unfortunately that little girl and we've fallen down the stairs ended up developing some bad pneumonia from that night and passed away [Music] I think it really hit me the next morning that the night video you just don't know but that first light of day chopper video was just horrifying didn't recognize anything it could have been any place in the world I wouldn't know what that was even though I've been doing this for 36 years and I've worked through many tornado outbreaks this was the big one for me [Music] there's a van on the side of it the fact we woke up to sunny weather was just very odd because we had just been through such a monster of a storm the fire station we immediately started seeing damaged in one of the first real places that we saw was a fire station this used to be the church I looked up and I saw just this gaping hole inside this church and every day they had this sign that was like inspirational there was a chandelier that was still there it was just the sad little Church that used to be so grand and beautiful and it was just crumbling that was a scene that I will never forget you would hear someone screaming a name and just looking to see if they could find their loved one there was one gentleman who just instantly fell to his knees and she started to pray it turned out later that he was supposed to be inside that building that building was a restaurant and it just so happened it was his day off I did see some people who were pulled out that didn't make it and there were also some people that we felt like we could hear calling for help and we dig down and we can't find him there was this young college boy who came in and he had some really significant chest trauma and head trauma he reminded me of my son and I felt like I wanted to be the one to take care of him all I could think of was here is this young man who did absolutely nothing wrong but he's going to die and I knew he was gonna die and it just broke my heart a number of college students from the University of Alabama who live down there I actually talked with one she told me that she was in her bathroom when that tornado came through she says only the bathroom was left standing into her house and as we were out there there was a woman who said the storm blew her newborn baby out of her arms somebody heard a cry in the rubble and she was determined that was her baby we were all out there we were digging and moving the bricks with her but then our hearts drop when we got to the source of a cry and it was some kids doll that had a crying mechanism in it I don't believe to this day they ever found that child [Music] 16:53 the energy level seems to be pretty low today you can tell fatigue is starting to set in with some of these people who have lost everything a few people now we're doing stories about people who are still missing and I did a story of little Michaela Edwards she was a sweet precious little 4 year old girl and she's with some of her family huddled trying to hold on to some plumbing to protect themselves from this storm Edwards says the rest of his family survived by hovering in a bathtub and all of a sudden two of her family members are ok but they can't find little Michaela family and friends searched this area around the clock we went to the VA hospital and where they was you know bringing bodies in from the tragedy to happen and she was there she was there and she was dull having to report that after holding out some hope that she may be found alive I was really sad I wonder how far we're gonna have to walk in order to get to an area where cars can actually travel we had no idea of knowing how bad the damage was we just knew that we had gotten hit in our area we ran out of supplies and we decided to go up to University Boulevard and there weren't houses anymore everything was gone that was the biggest shock we didn't get hit directly it mean we're near as hard as I thought that we did as we had gotten closer and closer to my apartment we saw a building standing there I just kept thinking I am so lucky I'm gonna be able to get my things I mean we were celebrating we were not actually seeing my apartment what we were seeing was my downstairs neighbor's apartment and I was on the top floor and the top floor was completely gone it was just from on top of the world - it's worse than I ever thought I don't know what to do for a while I kind of bumbled around in the debris touching stuff was just everywhere it was just devastating I kept looking through the rubble oh my gosh my grandma's pearls and at one point we finds my grandma's pearls that she had gotten me Wow not all of it but there's some and so that was a moment that gave me a lot of hope like I could move on from this because I was getting little pieces of my life back the tornado was down for about 80 miles it's approximately at the widest point one mile the maximum wind velocity was about 180 to 190 miles an hour the death toll in my state that day was over 250 and that is absolutely inexcusable I've got to take the energy I have and work on preventing this from happening again you can be a part of a process that can deliver information that's potentially life-saving but we had one of the highest death counts ever so it was one of those days that I don't think I'll ever totally forget I worked as hard as I could but I still had patience to them you feel like I didn't do enough I could have done something else and that's time [Music] the president and first lady offered hugs and handshakes to members of a community that was suffered I've got to say I've never seen devastation like this it is heartbreaking I remember he would keep saying Walter I've never seen destruction like this I said you know mr. president you've never seen people fight back like this here in Tuscaloosa it was the people that came to the rescue and it made me so proud to say that Tuscaloosa is my home I was blessed that no one in my family was harmed I realized that life is so precious it really changed my outlook on life since the tornado I have become a firefighter being able to give back to my community in the weeks after the storm gave me a direction or what I wanted to do for my life when all the comforts of normal life are stripped away you will see a beauty and people like you've never seen before you'll see that person who has almost nothing give everything they have to help someone else and no matter how bleak the situation may be there's always hope

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Channel: Domin Ator

Views: 1,007,112

Rating: 4.8362188 out of 5

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Length: 42min 27sec (2547 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 01 2018

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