Stevie Bailey hadn’t spoken to her childhood friend in years, yet her memories of him became all too poignant Wednesday when she learned he died while driving in his car during a tornado that devastated her small hometown of Cullman, Alabama.
“We weren’t friends in high school, so I can’t say he was one of my best friends,” said Bailey, a Weinberg sophomore. “But he was my fourth grade Valentine.”
Cullman was just one community hit by the series of tornados that tore through the South last week, killing 250 in Alabama alone. Tuscaloosa, home to the University of Alabama, was particularly damaged after weathering the deadliest single tornado since 1955, according to the National Weather Service.
Weinberg freshman Sydney Black said she has a lot of friends who attend the University of Alabama, which closed early and canceled finals. Black said she first heard about the tornado warnings while watching CNN at Norbucks but believed them to be routine measures until she saw her friends’ statuses on Facebook. She then called her mother, an ER doctor in Birmingham, who told her that her family was okay before rushing to treat patients. Though Black’s parents, both doctors, don’t work in Tuscaloosa, she said their hospitals were flooded with tornado victims. And while the tornado missed Black’s hometown by a couple miles, she said she feels the storms’ impact.
“I was very lucky, but obviously it’s not a very populous state, so a lot of people you know have been affected,” she said. “You feel it.”
Although Black’s home was spared, Bailey said Cullman has been leveled by the storm. The historic downtown area just behind her neighborhood is destroyed, including the mom-and-pop businesses in which she said people in her small town had invested their lives.
“It’s flat. It’s just gone,” Bailey said. “Half a block from the backside of my house is just not there anymore.”
Bailey first heard about the tornados from a friend who attends the University of Alabama. He texted her Wednesday afternoon and suggested she contact her family before losing communication as the storm raged through Tuscaloosa. Bailey said she was unable to reach her family until Wednesday night due to poor service.
The first thing that crossed her mind, Bailey said, was the desire to go home.
“I thanked the Lord that my family was okay and it wasn’t any worse,” Bailey said. “And then, ‘I have to do something. I hate being here completely helpless, I can’t do anything for my family and friends and I want to do something.'”
To aid her home state, Bailey said she plans to set up a table in Norris University Center for an Alabama Tornados Relief Fund on Tuesday until Thursday. Bailey will sell bracelets or baked goods and accept monetary donations as well as toiletries, clothes and non-perishable food, all of which will go straight to the Red Cross.
“They need so much,” Bailey said, “especially manpower, cutting down trees and digging people out of debris and moving houses that have just been obliterated.”
Though Bailey’s house still stands, the damage is great: no power, shattered windows, a third of her downstairs roof ruined and a tree pushed through her living room. The tornado even ripped the porch off her house while her sister watched from the kitchen.
But Bailey said her family was relatively lucky. Some of their neighbors’ homes are practically unlivable.
“I have a bunch of people who I do know whose houses are gone, completely flattened,” she said. “My mom said there’s a house a few blocks away that was picked up off its foundation and rotated 90 degrees, and it fell back in the same spot. It just moved 90 degrees.”
Despite the devastation, the community has banded together to offer relief, students said.
“Luckily, we’re a very united state, and Southerners are known for reaching out to others,” Black said. “And we’ve had tornadoes before; it’s just never hit us at this big a scale, and people were very unprepared. There was no storm leading up to it. It just showed up out of nowhere.”
Black said non-profits and churches have organized mission trips to particularly damaged areas and citizens are searching for missing residents. Grocery stores have donated perishable food to churches to grill for hundreds of people on the streets, Bailey said.
“People from all over the state are coming to help feed everybody because no one has power and no one has food,” Bailey said.
The National Guard moved into Cullman, enforcing a curfew after dusk to combat looting.
“It’s like a warzone or something,” Bailey said. “It’s just very strange.”
Weinberg sophomore Julie Whyte, whose hometown of Harvest, Ala., was also hit by the tornados, echoed Bailey’s description.
“Apparently, it looked like a bomb went off,” she said.
Like Cullman, Harvest lost power, and many homes, grocery stores and gas stations were demolished.
“It’s just kind of unbelievable because, growing up, we always had tornado warnings, but I never thought anything of them,” said Whyte, whose family and house were not harmed. “I’ve heard of tornados being on the ground for maybe a mile around where I am, but apparently this one was on the ground for 70 miles.”
For now, Whyte’s knowledge of how the tornado ravaged her home will remain hearsay, witnessed only through her family’s accounts and pictures snapped by friends. Along with Black and Bailey, she is unable to return to Alabama before the quarter ends. Black said the distance from the South and her family has been difficult.
“There was definitely a disconnect being up here, and it made me realize how far away from home I am,” Black said. “I want to go home. It will be weird, but I think it’s very important to see the destruction, for me, and not just watch it on a television screen or read about it in people’s statuses on Facebook.”
