Steve Miller
April 19, 2016
All week long on Alabama Public Radio, we’re looking back on the tornadoes that hit the state five years ago on April 27, 2011. Twelve percent of Tuscaloosa was destroyed, over fifty people were killed, and countless lives were changed forever. The very first victim of the tornado APR met face to face was Steve Miller of Tuscaloosa. Now, five years later, APR’s Pat Duggins checks in to see how Miller is doing…
“Has it really been five years? Oh, my gosh…”
Steve Miller’s come a long way since April 27, 2011. He lives in Tuscaloosa’s Hillcrest neighborhood. His new home has lots of windows and there’s plenty of art on the walls. You might not think anything was out of the ordinary. But, the first time APR visited here, things were a lot different.
“All we could hear were sirens. And then, at night, houses going up in flames around. We could see that there were houses were burning. And that was the only light, except for the distant light of the city. And it really felt like the end of the world."
He made even more disquieting observations five years ago. “My neighbor two houses down, went into his backyard and found a young lady wrapped around one of his trees. She had passed away. Miller shared those moments with APR in 2011. “The sound was the loudest thing I ever, ever, heard. It was so loud, I couldn’t hear it anymore. It because so loud. And, mud and dirt and dust were smashing around and flying from all directions down there.”
It took thirteen months to rebuild. APR stopped by again in 2012 to see how things were going…
"I'm Gonna save this clock … Now we have a place to have puppies intro tango
Like a lot of parrots, Tango imitates he hears. If Miller needs a reminder of what he went through over these last five years, there’s always this… That’s not a construction truck backing up. It’s Tango. And the reminders don’t stop there…
Miller says despite losing his house and his beloved pecan trees, one friend stood in his backyard and made a comment that changed everything. Five years later, However, even five years later, it’s not over for him… Still, Miller is planning a party for next Wednesday to remember that night five years ago.
T-Town Joplin/Pat
April 20, 2016
All week long on Alabama Public Radio, we’re looking back on the tornadoes that hit Alabama on April 27, 2011. In Tuscaloosa, twelve percent of the city was destroyed and over fifty people were killed. The home of the University of Alabama wasn’t the only community hit with a life altering storm that year. And, how Tuscaloosa went about the process of rebuilding was considered controversial. Five years later, Alabama Public Radio’s Pat Duggins has a report card in this tale of two cities…
“At that point, we understood this was going to be something like we’ve never seen in the history of our city.” “You could look north and south and east and west, and you couldn’t see any familiar landmarks. They were all gone.” Mayor Walt Maddox and Mayor Mike Seibert sound like they’re talking about one disaster--they’re not.
An EF-4 tornado hit Tuscaloosa five years ago this month… Joplin video Three weeks after Tuscaloosa’s storm, one hundred and fifty Joplin residents died when an EF-5 twister tore through here. Mike Seibert is the Mayor…
“And, all of a sudden I’d come to a five lane road, and I had absolutely no idea where I was.”
“It was like hell on earth….” Judy Petty remembers that day. She owns Frank’s Tavern on Main Street in Joplin.. “People walking, people crying, it was awful…awful. Houses blown away, everything down. It was very sad."
Petty owns Frank’s Tavern on Main Street in Joplin. She describes it as, literally, the bar where everybody knows your name. The name Frank on the door, in case you were wondering, is Petty’s late husband. He bought the place before they got married… “Yeah, the bar came with him…” More Joplin tornado effects “there was nothing left. Just a pile of bricks and stone and rooves.
Judy Petty’s story is a familiar one to Brian Sanders. He owns the Express Oil Change auto shop on Fifteenth Street in Tuscaloosa. That where he was in 2011 when that tornado hit his town. It was just about closing time…
“So, we’re just sitting here, sitting here, sitting here, and they say ‘hey, this thing’s turning,’ and we saw it come from behind McDonald’s.”
Sanders and his staff hid in a grease pit until it passed. When they came out, his business was gone.
“The only thing I remembered thinking was what am I gonna do now? You know…it was terrible.”
Both Petty and Sanders chose to rebuild, and that meant wading through red tape. They say their experiences in Joplin and in Tuscaloosa were different in some ways, and similar in others.
Back at City hall in Joplin, Mayor Seibert says his city chose to issue permits fast… “One of the things we’ve really worked hard on is just to take of our own, but to do that in a manner that people can get back to their normal lives as quickly as they can…” That’s not how Tuscaloosa did it…
Mayor Walt Maddox chose to slow the process down and bring in consultants. Following the tornado, residents filed past drawings of urban centers mixing residents and retail. Maddox says Tuscaloosa wasn’t worried about losing residents like Joplin if homes weren’t rebuilt quickly…
“Coupled on top of that, the twelve percent of the city that was destroyed was economically depressed. So, we knew we had an opportunity to remake these areas, if we could slow down and be strategic. We had time. We were not under a housing crunch. But, a different kind of crunch came in the press. A year after the storm, the Wall Street Journal ran an article critical of Maddox’s slow building route instead of Joplin’s speedier approach. The Mayor still bristles at the story…
“The people of Tuscaloosa went through hell and back, and they deserved a rebuilding plan that mattered. That was going to improve this community now and into the future. And, I’m glad that this city decided to be part of that, and when the challenge came, they had the courage of our convictions to see it through.”
But, five years after the fact, how did each city do? We first met Brian Sanders at the Express Oil Change in Tuscaloosa in 2012, the day he reopened his shop eighteen months after the tornado. The reviews that day were good…
“The first one that pulled up this morning, when I walked out to her car, she said ‘yay’. She said ‘I’m so glad you’re back.’ And, I said well, I’m as happy to see you as you are to see us.’ Four years later, we checked back to see how things were going. Sanders says, in hindsight, his dealings with the city went just okay…
“I know they wanted to put a park in, and they wanted to put several businesses in. But, it was frustrating to think we might have to move. Because this part of town is home to us, and it’s been real good to us over the years, and it would have definitely hurt our business.”
The city didn’t build a park. But what was a vacant lot behind Sanders’ business in 2012 is now home to a new Fresh Market grocery store, a Dick’s Sporting Goods store, a Bed, Bath and Beyond, and restaurants serving everything from Tex-Mex to burgers to pizza. Sanders says between ten and three, the traffic is brutal…
“If you’re brave, you try to cross Fifteenth Street.”
Back at Frank’s tavern in Joplin, Judy Petty remembers her run-ins with city hall. “A little bit hard to get along with. But, in the long run, it turned out okay.” One bone of contention was where Petty could rebuild. Frank’s Tavern used to be right up against the street. “I was grandfathered in Other business waited, and they got to build closer to the road. Petty blames Joplin’s speedy route. “I’d have been better off if I waited six months before I built back. But, like everybody else, I wanted to get back up and running.” So, Joplin built back fast and Tuscaloosa went slow. Ironically, five years after both tornadoes, neither city says it’s fully recovered and it could take five top ten years to finish the work.
Ultimately, we asked Petty and Sanders, how they’re doing five years after the storms… “I’m happy with it. My husband would have been very pleased with it. It turned out good. Did good.” “Every month, with the exception of the first month that we were opened, was better than any month we had before the storm. We’re really doing well here now.” And, that may say it all. PD, APR news is Tuscaloosa.
MacKenzie Tornado Feature
April 27, 2016
The April 2011 tornado outbreak caused widespread destruction, costing lives and billions of dollars in damage. Local TV weathercasters helped spread the word on where tornadoes were and where they’re going. But what happens when the weatherman becomes a victim of the severe weather while he’s on the air? APR’s MacKenzie Bates has the story of one forecaster where on April 27th, 2011, the saying the story hits close to home takes on a whole new meaning…
(Richard Nat up)
Ask anyone in the TV news business, and they’ll tell you people tune in mostly for the weather…
(More nat)
And, on WVUA-TV, that’s Richard Scott’s job… Some days it’s hot, some days, there’s rain. Then there was April twenty seventh, 2011…
(Nat of April 27, 2011 WVUA Cut-In)
“I have no idea. I can’t answer this to this day. I had a cold chill running down my spine especially when the tornado got as large as it did. The tornado appeared to be weakening for a brief amount of time, and then what we call a wedge tornado, a very wide tornado just sat down. The most scary feeling you can imagine, I had running through my mind and through my body. Just the feeling that this tornado is going to kill people.”
Oddly enough, Scott had seen this storm coming for days…
“All of our forecast model data over seven days out was showing the exact same scenario. The chance for widespread severe weather. A classic tornado outbreak and that’s really unusual. Typically we have numerous computer models that kind of disagree with each other. When you see that consistency and the look of severe weather that is concerning especially in April.”
(More cut in Nat)
What hit Tuscaloosa was an EF-4 tornado. That’s a weather term called the Enhanced-Fujita Scale. It means a storm packing winds anywhere between 166-to-200 miles per hour.
(Nat of Cut-In and then Power loss)
While delivering his report, Scott noticed the path of the tornado was heading to a familiar sight. He was living in a house off 16th Avenue in Tuscaloosa, putting home sweet home in the cross-hairs of the twister. Richard 5: 15secs
“When I saw what had happened, now this was about ten minutes after the tornado hit, took off towards my house because I knew our director of the TV station was staying there for a while and I couldn’t contact him. Cell phones were down. My fear was that I was going to my house and find him dead.”
That him was his roommate Jonathan Newman Newman 6: 15secs “I gotta be honest, that was the happiest I’ve ever been to see Richard in my life is when I saw him walking down the road.” Newman works for a television station in nearby Birmingham now.
On April 27, 2001 he was just one of those people hanging on for dear life.
Newman 1: 13secs
“Living here for a few years, I’ve gotten used to there being tornadoes in the area but always either going south of us, north of us, just never really hitting right in the middle of Tuscaloosa. So I kind of had this mindset of just it’s not going to hit here.”
Newman says it went from being sunny outside to almost pitch black in what felt like seconds.
Newman 3: 11secs
“I run across the house, jump in the tub and as I’m falling in, I grab the shower curtain and that literally is all I had on top of me. About five seconds after I fall in the tub, the window in the bathroom goes out.” The tornado was right on top of the house.
Newman 4: 10secs
“At that point, That’s when I thought was probably it. Because I see the roof lifting off and I think either I’m going to get sucked up through the roof or something is going to come flying in on top of me. And all I’ve got on top of me is a shower curtain.” Aside from a few cuts and bruises, Newman knew he was going to be alright. The same couldn’t be said of his home and his neighborhood.
Newman 5: 18secs
“All of the houses on this side of the street were pretty much destroyed. Amazingly, some of the houses from across the street were barely touched. Like some of the shingles got knocked off and but like their windows were still intact. It was just amazing how, like just across the street some houses were almost unaffected. And then on this side of the street it was complete destruction.”
And even though their house was destroyed, Newman and Scott took solace knowing they were both alive. Because it was like, ‘Alright. I’m glad to see somebody. Somebody I know, some way I can hopefully get out of there. Because at that point I felt trapped because I felt like, you know, didn’t know where I could go to get out of here.” And if you thought Scott had plenty to worry about back in 2011, 2016 offers a new perspective.
(Nat of Parker)
He’s a dad now. Scott and his wife, Tara welcomed their first child, Parker in October of last year. Tara Scott says when Richard talks about bad weather and staying safe, he means her and Parker too.
Tara 1: 12secs
“But now I know we have a safe place to go and I know he’s going to keep us updated. If we don’t need to be at the house he tells me well enough in advance to where I can go to my parent’s or a friend’s house to make sure I am in a safe place.”
It’s been five years since Scott watched his own house be smashed by the tornado. So, as Tuscaloosa recovers, he thinks he is too… “The scar is slowly healing. And that’s an incredible thing to experience. I’ve been here since the tornado and to see that change every day, it’s been a heartwarming experience to see that, ‘Hey people are coming back.’ We’re not going to let a tornado get us down. We’re going to make it back out of this.” For APR News, I’m MacKenzie Bates in Tuscaloosa. ?
Phil Campbell 5 Years Later/ Ingold
All week long on Alabama Public Radio we’re looking at the progress of people and areas five years after the devastating April 27th 2011 tornadoes. Tuscaloosa got a lot of the attention during the disaster. But, it wasn’t the only community hit hard. A-P-R’s Stan Ingold has gone back to the small town of Phil Campbell to see if time has healed some of the wounds…
(open with sounds from the actual tornado)
This was the sound in Phil Campbell nearly five years ago. An E-F-5 tornado ripped through the small northwest Alabama community leveling much of the town.
“This is one of the hardest hit areas, you see, it looks like land has been cleared, especially this area we’re fixin’ to go to over here. Police Chief Merrell Potter and I drove around Phil Campbell to survey the damage… It looks like, almost like pasture land that’s just been cleared off, you can tell there used to be houses there but the green grass is starting to grow up through the debris that has been cleared.”
One year later, Potter says things were looking better… “I have a feeling of comradery that came together when our town got hit, neighbors became neighbors, that is something we haven’t seen in a while and what’s great about that is that feeling has lingered on and neighbors that became neighbors are still neighbors and this is awesome to see people out in their yards working with each other and talking with each other and being a neighborhood town again.”
Now he says the reality is finally setting in… I believe we’ve accepted that fact that some things are gone and it’s not going to be back. One thing that it is has done is give us an opportunity to grow in other areas, take chances on things probably years ago they wouldn’t have.”
One of the things that did come back was the Phil Campbell High School. It’s considered by many to be the heart and soul of the town. Principal Gary Odom says the original building was heavily damaged in the storms and had to be torn down…. “But the worst part was when we were moving out of the mobile units and into the churches, we had three churches, we had to divide grades up. We had, you know, 11th and 12th going to one, 9 and 10 in one and 7th and 8th in another.”
Shuffling from one location to another is all behind them now and students in Phil Campbell are in a state of the art facility.
Before we ask…Odom says it’s storm proof… “There is a storm shelter that will serve every student that we have plus some extra room. We’ve got it organized enough that each grade can be in a room, it just works out good for us and we feel safe.”
When APR first covered the Phil Campbell disaster, we told the story of Alex Jackson. She was in ninth grade at Phil Campbell High School when the storms hit.
“I watched them get a body out from under a tree and I mean it was just like…it just hit me, people are gone, people’s houses are gone everything’s, nothing’s going to be the same. I mean my brother lost two friends, and I’ve never seen him break down like that, it was…hard…”
(17 sec)(old alex)
We caught up with Alex a year later. To see how she was doing.
“I still think about it, but it’s like, I don’t know, I don’t know how to explain it. But like it’s, that’s the reason we’re here. It’s like we’ve came so far from pulling bodies and just getting emotionally stable again, I mean watching that was hard but now it’s kinda like, well, it’s over, here we are.”
(22sec)(alex1)
Now we’re five years since the storm, and Jackson says it is still hard to see the town… “Oh this town is different, it’s different, this town it will never be the same, I barely remember the landscape before because this is kinda what I’m used to now.”
She says she has changed as well, and still recalls what it was like the following day… “When you’re living it, it is nothing like you see on the news. I remember coming back here the day after and it looked like a movie set. It didn’t look real, this was not the place I was yesterday, April 26th, this is not where I was at, and looking at it, it was crazy.”
While many people would seek out counseling after an event like this, Jackson says that isn’t the case with her… “No, I’m pretty much the counselor, I’m who people talk to, like all my friends they come to me, they come to me for anything, whether it be about the storm or anything personal. That’s me.”
Alex says her experience has been one of the better ones… “Since I did not lose that much, you know, I’m, I’m lucky, I am lucky. I’ve mentally handled it well.” It’s been a long road for the residents of Phil Campbell, and while progress can be seen five years later, the road looks longer still for its full recovery.
VORTEX Feature / AuBuchon
April 22, 2016
All week long on Alabama Public Radio, we’ve been looking back on the tornado outbreak on April 27, 2011. The storms impacted homeowners and businesses and you’ve heard from many of them during our coverage. Now we’ll look ahead. For the past two months, dozens of scientists have been conducting groundbreaking research on tornadoes and severe weather right here in Alabama. APR’s Alex AuBuchon has more on the impact that research could have on forecasters’ understanding of severe weather and forecasters’ ability to predict it.
James Spann FX up
Here’s where your daily weathercasts end…
[FX UP: Weather Briefing chatter]
Here’s where they begin. It’s a beautiful spring day in Huntsville now. But, a group of forecasters and other scientists are laser focused on what’s coming tomorrow. All their models suggest severe weather on the horizon and the potential for strong tornadoes. The National Weather Service forecasters and emergency managers seem concerned, but other scientists seem almost hopeful. Or maybe “hopeful” isn’t the right word.
“It's kind of a fortunately / unfortunately question."
Tony Lyza is a Ph.D candidate at the University of Alabama at Huntsville “We certainly don't want to see the destruction, but we do need the storms in order to conduct our research. So we don't hope for them to happen, but if they are to happen, we're there to study them.”
Lyza is one of the main researchers in VORTEX-SE, a massive study examining severe weather and how tornadoes form specifically in the southeastern U.S.
More group FX (talking back and forth)
VORTEX stands for…….
Which is why we’ll call just plain VORTEZ from now on. At the head of the project is Dr. Erik Rasmussen. He designed this study from the ground up, and led two previous VORTEX research projects in Oklahoma in the mid-90s and late-2000s. Rasmussen says when the funding for VORTEX-SE was announced, there was some controversy. Some scientists thought tornadoes are tornadoes, no matter where they occur.
“And, in fact, tornadoes probably pretty much are tornadoes. But how a thunderstorm causes a tornado and supports a tornado – those things vary radically from one part of the country to the other. In the plains, they’re done by supercells, these big, long, live rotating storms. In the southeast, they seem to spring up a lot more quickly from storms that are a lot less well-defined. Definitely, the way storms produce tornadoes in Alabama is quite different from the way they’ve been studied elsewhere.”
And so the researchers came to Alabama. Rasmussen says he had hoped to design this experiment based off his previous two VORTEX campaigns in Oklahoma, but that plan got scrapped.
“VORTEX in the plains relies on a dense road network, flat roads, no trees, no hills, storms that you can see coming for 30 or 40 miles, and so the science you can do out in the plains is completely different than what’s possible to do in the Southeast. So we’ve had to pretty much redesign the whole concept.”
For one thing, storm chasing isn’t an option. “We can’t chase storms in the Southeast because of blockage by trees." Kevin Knupp is director of the UAH Severe Weather Institute Radars need to have a good view of the horizon, and there are only a few, relatively few areas where we have good radar sites where you have good visibility in all directions.”
The terrain here also makes it very difficult to track storms. “In the Plains, that’s usually pretty easy to anticipate. You can almost forecast where a cell will form several hours in advance and get ahead of it. But here, things evolve very quickly and there’s a lot of things that aren’t caught very well by our forecast models, so we have to basically throw out a network and cross our fingers that the most interesting weather will move through where we’ve put our instruments.”
Rasmussen says their strategy is essentially casting a big net with scientific instruments across north Alabama. That means a lot of waiting for the storms to show up. And they have a lot of tools at their disposal, thanks to the twenty universities and laboratories participating in the study.
“There's a group coming from Purdue University that's bringing a mobile Doppler radar, which helps augment the network we already have in place here. And they're bringing a sounding system, and then they're bringing this instrument called a distrometer, which looks at raindrops falling through these sensors, and measures how large they are and how fast they're falling.”
Purdue Instruments :16.6
Texas Tech University is in charge of an array of mobile weather stations called StickNet. Texas Tech graduate research assistant Aaron Hill explains. “They’re pretty simple.
It’s a matter of a surveying tripod that’s outfitted with instruments and computer systems.” Pretty Simple Maybe simple, but dozens or even hundreds of them spread out across the region can provide a lot of data about what’s happening where. Most of the research equipment, in fact, is being operated by students.
“Basically there’s four main instruments on the platform," Alex Staarmann is a senior at UAH, and he runs the Mobile Integrated Profiling System, or MIPS: “And they all shoot radiation vertically, and the received information basically gives us a profile of the atmosphere above us.”
[FX Up: Engine starting, then duck to bed running]
Carter Hulsey is a graduate student at UAH. He took some time to show off the Mobile Alabama X-Band radar, or MAX. “We can do different things. We can do a full PPI, which is where we get into the very top of the storms and stuff. PPI is……and RHI is ……. Then we’re also going to do some RHIs, which is where you do a top-down, get a vertical cross-section, so you basically start at the bottom in one direction and go all the way to the top.
Then we might do what we like to call sector scans, where you just focus on one area. But that’s still to be determined, as we’re finalizing the deployment strategy.”
Rasmussen and other administrators were hard at work doing just that. They held meetings most of the evening hammering out the final details of exactly where to be and when. “And then starting at about 4:00 tomorrow morning, teams will begin collecting soundings, where they measure the wind, temperature, humidity up through the atmosphere all over this part of Alabama.
And then at about 7 a.m., the mobile Dopplers and all the other instruments will start taking observations.” Dark and early the next morning,
[FX Up: MAX air brake and pulling out]
The teams headed out to rural spots across north Alabama to gather data that they hope will lead to a much better understanding of Southeastern storms. But Rasmussen says no matter how much of the science they understand, there’s another factor at play. “Even if we scientists learn enough that the weather service can make perfect forecasts – you know, they can say down to the city block an hour in advance where a tornado is going to be and how strong it’ll be – suppose somewhere in the future they can do that. That really does people no good if they don’t receive the information, or if they don’t know how to interpret it, or if they don’t know how to react to it, or if they don’t have shelter.”
One of the main reasons the VORTEX-SE study got funded is the extremely high number of tornado-related fatalities that occur in the Southeast. Even though the majority of tornadoes occur on the Great Plains, the vast majority of tornado deaths are concentrated in the Southeast.
Why is this happening?
Researchers have some likely culprits. One is population density. “In Alabama, people live on every dirt road. There’s always a church. You’re going to have someone be impacted by almost every tornado in the Southeast, and that’s a big difference between here and the Plains.”
That’s Kevin Laws, Science and Operations Officer at the National Weather Service in Birmingham. Another issue, according to Dr. Laura Myers with the University of Alabama’s Center for Advanced Public Safety, is the infrastructure in this area.
“We have a lot of manufactured homes, mobile homes, so there’s a lot of vulnerability, and so you’re going to have more fatalities with poor infrastructure.” Another problem is terrain. Trees and other obstructions don’t just block radar from seeing storms, they keep the people in the path of that storm in the dark as well.
MYERS: “…and so they may waste their lead time trying to figure out if it’s really coming, and it may be too late, because we can’t see them coming.” But by far the biggest factor according to the researchers is when tornadoes here usually occur.
“Typically out in the Midwest, those storms will fire in the late afternoon hours and the evening hours, and what happens after they fire in the Midwest is they’ll come into the Southeast during the nighttime hours, and it’s far more challenging for folks to respond to severe weather at night.” John De Block is the Warning Coordination Meteorologist at NWS Birmingham. Kevin Laws knows full well how dangerous nighttime tornadoes can be. “January 23, 2012, we had a major supercell come through Jefferson County. This was 3 o’clock in the morning.
A very high-end damaging EF-3 tornado was wiping homes off their foundations at 3 AM. Think about that. So you’re dead asleep. It’s hard enough to get up at 3 AM. What is going to wake you up? What is that process that that person goes through at 3 AM to get that message and get to safety?”
Laura Myers says it’s a challenge to get that warning out. “In the south, people tend to rely on traditional systems, so a lot of people rely on sirens – community sirens – and at night, inside your home, you’re not going to hear those sirens. So we want to understand how well that’s working for people at night, how confident people feel at night going to bed if there’s an event transpiring in the region, how do they deal with that and do they feel prepared to get the information as well as take action during the night.”
That’s a major part of her research in VORTEX-SE: What can meteorologists do to make sure that warning makes it to the people that will be affected? The National Weather Service says the first step is making sure the warnings they issue are as accurate as they can be. Here’s John De Block again.
“Right now, I think the best thing we can try to do is to understand the tornadogenesis in the Southeast as best we can, and to become better meteorologists. We need to practice what we do more often, and use those lessons learned for the next threat that comes along.” But no matter how good the forecasting becomes, even Dr. Myers doubts they’ll get to everyone.
“There’s always a percentage of the population who does get tired of it, and they get more fatigued. But that’s going to be the case with almost any type of warning. We can have very active tornado warnings with confirmed tornadoes, and the public will get upset that we’ve gone to wall-to-wall coverage, we’re interrupting Dancing with the Stars, they don’t want to know about it. And that’s going to hold true across the board, and we can’t change the minds of those people.”
Five years out from April 27, 2011, that doesn’t seem to be a problem in Tuscaloosa.
[FX Up: Storm Spotter room noise and opening banter]
ABC 33/40 in Birmingham sent their weather team to Tuscaloosa earlier this month for a citizen storm spotter training class. In a huge riverfront building, there wasn’t an empty seat in the house.
[FX Up: “Like Church” opening banter]
“Today, I mean, you see – not even an open seat, so that’s awesome to see. And also it says a lot about Tuscaloosa.” ABC 33/40 weekend meteorologist Meaghan Thomas was a student at the University of Alabama on April 27, 2011. She says she saw firsthand how important a basic understanding of severe weather can be.
“Like, a lot of my sorority sisters, they didn’t really understand weather. Everyone was panicking. Everyone didn’t know what they were looking at, or know how to be safe. And I’ve always said ‘If you know how something forms and what to look for, you’ll be safer.’” But the severe weather training these classes offer isn’t just for the students’ safety. It’s to help the meteorologists as well. “Instead of sending us a message that says ‘Hey, that’s a really ugly-looking cloud outside’, you could say ‘Hey, that’s a cumulonimbus cloud, that’s a wall cloud, that’s a funnel cloud’ – you’ll be able to distinguish between all of those things, which gives us a better idea of what you’re seeing, what can we tell the public.”
An informed and weather-aware public helps TV meteorologists do their jobs better, but they still rely on the National Weather Service for the best and latest data. And those meteorologists are hopeful that VORTEX will help them make their best even better. Here’s John De Block. “We’re hoping that with VORTEX, they’ll get into the nitty gritty details of the data, and indeed confirm, perhaps, some of the things that we’ve confirmed here locally.
That will enable some of the other offices in the Southeast, hopefully, to pick up on those clues about the difference in the storms from the Midwest to the Southeast, and issue better warnings for the folks in the Southeast.” The next step is making sure the public is equipped and informed enough to react to those warnings. Based on the turnout in Tuscaloosa, it looks like we’re off to a good start. SOQ