The Tornado Recovery Action Council released a comprehensive report regarding the April 2011 tornadoes to Gov. Robert Bentley on Tuesday.
Organized by Bentley in August, TRAC was tasked to study the events and response of April 2011 and develop recommendations to better prepare Alabama in the event of future natural disaster.
TRAC, led by Executive Director Ron Gray, is made up of 19 community, corporate and non-profit leaders.
Gray said the council wanted a variety of ideas that could be easily accessible to the public.
“We began working to develop recommendations that were actionable,” Gray said. “We wanted to make sure to develop recommendations that people could look at and get done.”
According to the council’s website, tracalabama.org, they focused on issues spanning four areas and divided their report into four chapters: prepare, warn, respond and recover.
“We wanted to save lives, make sure services could be delivered quicker, have more cooperation between responding agencies and minimize the impact to our economy,” Gray said, referring to each chapter.
Some of the council’s recommendations, like weather radio and smartphone technology promotion, can be easily implemented in communities.
Other recommendations, such as the establishment of a Utility Workgroup for Disaster Response to foster communication between facility providers and financial incentives to build safe rooms in homes, are not as simple.
“There are more aggressive recommendations that will be more difficult to implement,” Gray said. “But our first goal is to save lives. So, the the recommendations related to storm shelters and preparedness – the recommendation on how we warn our citizens – will probably be the most important.”
The 115-page report is woven with anecdotes and photos of the tornado destruction.
TRAC illustrated the devastating aftermath many small Alabama towns struggled with by opening the introduction with Hackleburg, a small town where 27 of 1,500 residents were killed and 75 percent of the town was destroyed.
“We could understand if some wanted to give up on the town. Truth be told, like much of rural Alabama, Hackleburg struggled before the tornado. But this was, and is, their town,” TRAC’s report reads. “And when a team from the Tornado Recovery Action Council visited on the evening of Sept. 13, what we found was even more defining than the winds that uprooted their community. Hackleburg was determined to build back, and to build back better.”
TRAC held seven forums, one in the Hackleburg area, to collect citizen input in addition to meeting with weather experts, building officials, response coordinators and government officials to gather information and ideas.
In a TRAC press release, council co-chairs Pam Siddall and Jimmy Johns shared with Bentley that the council’s recommendations could prevent the future loss of life in Alabama and across the country.
“Individually and collectively, we believe these recommendations can be implemented to create a stronger state for future generations, and it is clear we must act with urgency.”
The full report can be found at TRACAlabama.org
