Living in a Tornado Alley

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Living in a tornado alley is an experience not for the faint of heart. Every week during hurricane/tornado season, which was pretty much nine months out of the year, the sirens went off weekly. The best thing the small southern town did was to invest in loud enough sirens so that nobody would be caught unaware of impending potential disaster and were able to hide in a safe place like a shelter or a bathtub.

Trailers were shaken and rattled from their tied foundations like cheap carnival rides that needed urgent repairs. Some became easily airborne before they were smashed into smithereens.

At first, we automatically hid inside the tornado shelter in the garage which, in retrospect, was not such a good idea. It had thick walls that would withstand a lot of wind power but there was a water heater in the dark, dank room with not much fresh air coming from the garage through the slats of the very thick and heavy wood door. It gave us a false sense of protection, I suppose, since we could easily be subjected to scalding water if the house would be damaged.

So, we started “hiding” into the basement where at least we had a couch to sit down on and bookshelves with magazines and my collection of books. But it was dark, and electricity was always the first thing to go. I never bought a generator; it was something we could not afford to have - too expensive for the budget of a single parent and teacher.

The power would go out on a dime and we suffered various levels of misery – extreme heat or extreme cold, depending how hot or how cold was outside. The temperatures inside would reach unbearable levels in August and terrible wet and icy levels in early spring or late fall.

We started out with 16 majestic tall pines that the previous owner and builder had planted in the 1950s and, in the span of fifteen years we had lost all but one to various hurricanes, tornadoes, and straight line winds.  These fallen sixty-foot trees blocked the entire cul-de-sac, our and neighbors’ yards and required serious clearing intervention.

During Katrina, the entire street was blocked by significant debris and cranes had to extricate a passage for people to be able to get out. The roots stood high in the air and left huge craters behind after being completely pulled up like weeds by the unimaginable force of the wind.

We were grateful to out of state cleaning crews, food and water trucks from local churches and neighboring Mennonites, who would show up with axes and chainsaws and start clearing and cleaning, cutting lumber, piling it up out of the way, and bringing a hot meal and bottled water long before the first FEMA trucks pulled in.

We could only imagine the additional devastation in flood areas like Louisiana where the water surge would inundate homes up to the ceiling and having to deal with the destruction of everything they ever owned being covered and destroyed by mud and mold.

And the people who survived by some miracle the devastating winds were shocked to discover that their homes disappeared completely from the face of the earth and they found themselves only in possession of the clothes on their backs. Digging through the muck sometimes brought out a serendipitous family photograph that somehow was spared and was left behind. The concrete foundations of their former homes were the only physical evidence that the homes had ever existed in the first place.

After days of not being able to shower, going to the temporarily opened gyms for a shower became a blessed luxury. Finding a room in a local hotel that finally had power and being able to sleep in comfort again made us appreciate that much more what we had before the power went out for days and weeks at a time.

The harder to fill huge craters in the yard and the feeling of desolation made life that much more depressing. It took its toll on our next-door neighbor who, after two weeks of darkness, no heat, and living in his house like a mole, took his own life in his bedroom.

It was so sad that none of us knew what he was going through, he did not choose to share his misery and despair with the rest of us, perhaps we might have been able to save his precious life. We were all trying to survive within the confines of our limitations. People seldom realize how quickly everything crumbles like a house of cards without power, heat, A/C, water, and food.

We lost count how many times the entire content of our freezers and refrigerators spoiled after days without power, how many shorted television sets, microwaves, and other electronic devices we had to replace, items struck by lightning or burned out by power surges. We replaced three air conditioning units crushed by fallen debris and large trees and four roofs in an eighteen-year period.

Once we were shopping at the tiny local mall, three miles from our house, when all the windows blew out by straight line winds. Another time I was driving on the highway and was blown over on the other side of the road like a tiny toy. Luckily, there were no other cars in sight to cause a crash.

If a tornado hit or skimmed our town while it was cold outside, the house would become freezing cold fast. No number of blankets or clothes would keep us warm. We even tried to foolishly warm up with the outdoor grill which we brought inside. With no fireplace, the fumes were too much to bear, and we gave up, opening doors to air the house which made it that much colder.

The campus where I worked was hit twice quite hard. Several buildings were damaged, and a couple had to be demolished. With each tornado, more magnificent magnolia trees were uprooted, trees that had been there for generations. A dormitory was hit while students were huddling in their bunks and were missed by dangerous and lethal flying debris like pieces of lamp posts, impaling their beds or living quarters by mere inches from their bodies.

During sudden freezes, following a heavy rain, power lines would snap like bread sticks, and, aside from the treacherous and slippery roads, we had to contend with live wires on the ground, and miserable cold temperatures inside. God’s saving grace was that we still had our lives and the homes were still standing.

The ominous dark clouds, high winds, and driving rain or hail were always replaced by beautiful blue skies and sometimes rainbows, shining light over swaths of devastation that had obliterated people’s lives and sometimes their very existence.  And the memory and psychological desolation of those devastating times is still painful to this day.