Less than 24 hours after an EF-4 tornado, the largest in city history, devastated Tuscaloosa, FEMA announced plans to travel to Alabama to tour the state alongside Gov. Robert Bentley.
“Yesterday, we had a major catastrophic event in Alabama with the outbreak of numerous, long-track tornados,” Bentley said. “We do have major destruction in the state, especially in northern Alabama. We have 131 confirmed fatalities at the present time, and we do expect that number to rise today as we get out and begin our rescue. In fact, we’re sure it will.”
Craig Fugate, a FEMA administrator, said the president has asked him to travel to Alabama.
The president has asked that I meet with the governor’s team to ensure that, at the federal level, we’re doing those things that the governor needs us to,” Fugate said. “The most important thing right now is life safety activities. We’ll begin assessing what those recovery needs are for survivors.”
Bentley said there might be as many as half a million to a million in the state without power at the present time.
“We do also have massive destruction of property in certain counties, especially in Tuscaloosa, Cullman, Marshall, DeKalb and Jefferson County,” he said. “We are evaluating all of the fatalities at the present time.
Bentley said the state has all local responders out at the present time.
“Yesterday, we declared a state of emergency very early yesterday morning,” he said. “We asked the president last night to declare a state of emergency for the state of Alabama, and he did that. Today, we will ask the president to declare an expedited major disaster request. I think when our FEMA partners come with us today and visit some of the areas in the state – there’s probably millions of damage in just a few of blocks of Tuscaloosa – that have been totally destroyed, so we have some major damage.”
EMA Director Art Faulkner said the State Emergency Operations Center has been activated at Level 1 since yesterday morning.
“We have approximately 16 counties that make those total fatalities, and we also have additional major damage in five counties,” Faulkner said. “We have activated the governor’s 2,000 National Guard soldiers to come in and help with search and rescue and other multipurpose tasks today. We are working with the local first responders for life safety issues first today and then we will be dealing with other issues in the coming days.”
One thing Faulkner urged the public to do is stay out of damaged areas and so first responders can get there to do search and rescue.
Bentley said the people of Alabama were very prepared for the storm.
“The National Weather Service and all of the television stations, they do an excellent job warning people, but when you have a catastrophic EF-4 and EF-5 tornado that hits, there’s not much that you can do to change the outcome of that,” Bentley said. “We were prepared. It’s just that you cannot prepare against an EF-5 tornado. You just cannot move massive amounts of people when it hits a largely populated area like Tuscaloosa.
“You cannot move thousands of people in five minutes.”
