Outside her window, the sky darkens, the wind howls. She looks out and sees the funnel of a tornado. Trees, branches and debris have been swept into the wind and are dancing across the sky. It looks like it is coming towards her.
She is terrified as she watches it cut behind her house. Her house loses power.
After it passes, she gets in her car to check on a church member because phone lines are out.
She doesn’t realize the tornado is on its way to one of her students’ apartment complexes. It hasn’t even crossed her mind.
It takes her four hours to get to the church member’s house. Debris is everywhere, blocking every road she tries to drive down.
‘Oh my God, I hope people are alive,’ she thinks to herself as she views the wreckage.
The next day, she and her colleagues and volunteers file into the Temporary Emergency Services building, one after another. The tornado has passed and now it was time to pick up the pieces and get to work.
The building has power, but no phone lines. She looks around the room, counting her workers and volunteers. She sees all but one.
People from all over Tuscaloosa would come to Temporary Emergency Services for help in the hours, days, weeks and even months after the tornado.
They keep waiting and waiting for Danielle, a senior volunteer, to walk through the door.
She never will again.
“You’re just waiting every moment for the door to open and Danielle to walk through,” said Karen Thompson, executive director of Temporary Emergency Services. “This other student John knew where she lived. He kept calling and her phone was going to voicemail. He said, ‘I’m going to try to go over there.’ He couldn’t quite get to her house that day. He tried again the next day, because by then the National Guard came in. The next day is when we found out she had passed away.”
It has been five years since the April 2011 tornado in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but Thompson remembers every detail. Temporary Emergency Services, like other places, became a hub for displaced citizens to find food, clothes and, in some cases, shelter. A huge theme throughout the months to come would be people helping each other.
“We kept thinking Danielle was going to come through the door,” Thompson said. “Probably our greater weakness was we lost a family member. We lost our student who was getting ready to graduate. By now, it’s the end of the semester so we knew her. We knew about her sister’s bridal shower. I mean, we knew everything.”
It was extremely difficult for the volunteers in the beginning, she said. They have food and clothing that’s always in stock, but not in abundance. By the third day, people were coming from all over Tuscaloosa and the surrounding areas for help.
The media arrived to ask what they needed. Following the media came trucks full of canned goods and food. They stored the extra supplies in a warehouse behind their building.
“Before you know it, people are bringing stuff to the extreme,” she said. “We didn’t realize the Salvation Army and the Red Cross were blown away. All the sudden, this little bitty agency had to carry a big load.”
She said the community and the country were extremely responsive to their needs, and they never had any problems helping people after the first few days.
“We were fortunate in that we never missed a beat,” Thompson said. “The community responded wonderfully to our needs.”
A heavy load
Jessica McCrackin, a senior majoring in risk management, restaurant and hospitality management, and food science, was 17 and living in Huntsville at the time of the tornado. Her older brother was in college at the University. She was asked to serve as a first responder. She arrived in Tuscaloosa a day and a half after the storm.
Communication was impossible, she said, because phone lines were down and power was out in many places. She couldn’t get a hold of her brother.
“I was here working as an EMT and didn’t know if my own brother was alive.”
McCrackin was assigned to work in Alberta.
“My first ten minutes on site, I lifted a door up to three infants dead,” she said.
The horror continued. Roads were covered in debris, and it was difficult to get people to hospitals. The first day they walked from DCH to Alberta, only able to use what they could carry back and forth.
They sutured people’s faces, putting them back together to stabilize them enough to move them.
The National Guard and residents of Tuscaloosa moved debris from the road, she said, but it was still not enough. People volunteered to help.
“We were just hoping they were good people and sending them to walk with victims towards the hospital because we were applying gauze and taping things up,” McCrackin said.
People helping people
Doug Key, an Elder at University Church of Christ, said the phones at the church didn’t stop ringing for days and weeks. The church became a staging area for work in the days after.
“We continued to have the doors open and people stay with us for three or four months,” Key said. “People used our buildings to sleep in. We fed them and just tried to do what we could.”
The church became a drop-off place for food from all over the country. Key said tractor trailers full of water arrived at their doorstep.
“We had M&M candies all over this building,” he said. “Boxes full. We stored them under the stairs. We had a tractor trailer load of Gatorade coolers. The water. The water was constant. We got water from all over the country.”
Key said he saw people from Arizona, Connecticut, Michigan, Louisiana and Florida come to help.
“It’s just people helping people,” he said.
Disaster teams took shelter at the church.
“It was months that people stayed and crews would come in and stay,” Key said. “We made sure they got fed and made sure that they got whatever they needed. We were happy to do it.”
Some days, Key said, it was chaotic.
“To begin with, you don’t really know what you’re doing,” he said. “You just have to do something. It becomes smoother and smoother.”
The church feeds over 150 families in need a month on a regular basis. They continued to feed these families, as well as others and disaster teams during the aftermath of the storm.
“We geared up because we had to,” Key said. “When this happens to your city, you’ve got to gear up. You’ve got to do what you can. We didn’t know exactly what we were going to do, but we opened the doors. The good lord provided us work to be done, and we were able to do it.”
Evacuation
It was approximately 4:50 p.m. in the Ferguson Center when she heard the message to take cover. There had been several weather alerts throughout the week, and most people didn’t think it was a big deal.
Karen Greear, an American lunch coordinator at the American Lunch Truck and a graduate of the University who was a student during the tornado, left the Ferguson Center and went to Palmer Hall, which was across from Paty Hall.
“I was in the building on the third floor for about 10 minutes before lightning struck the building and all the alarms went off,” Greear said. “Immediately people were screaming up the wells get down, and the police were evacuating the building.”
They evacuated Somerville as well, and moving everyone into Paty. They moved everyone in Paty to the first floor, thinking the basement had been unlocked. It hadn’t.
“They had all five floors of Paty plus 100 people from Somerville plus 100 people from Palmer all in Paty at the same time,” Greear said. “I remember cops screaming at people who were coming from the parking deck, and they were just looking like ‘why are you screaming at us,’ and then they looked back and saw debris flying off the parking deck.”
It took three police officers to shut the door. The last thing seen outside the doors before they were shut was a funnel cloud passing the other side of the stadium, Greear said.
After the storm, the American Lunch truck averaged 160-200 lunches a day. Right now, they average 50-60.
“The outcry and the need was that drastic,” Greear said. “They were out there for three hours and they would always run out of food every single day, just trying to supply that need.”
Recovery efforts went form the top down, she said, so the hardest hit communities usually got the aid last.
Greear still feeds families who went into hardship because of the tornado.
The tornado completely changed her. She took a year off of school to piece back together her life.
“There’s the person you were before the tornado and the person you were after the tornado,” Greear said. “Once you lose everything, it makes you question everything you know.”
Coming together
Thompson said they saw people of all income levels and races after the storm. It didn’t matter whether you had a home or didn’t before hand.
People often think, Thompson said, that a place like Temporary Emergency Services is for a particular kind of person. After the tornado, they had to realize that things can change in an instant, and they become that kind of person. It changed their perspective.
“It put everybody on the same level,” she said. “Everybody became the same.”
