Ground Zero Tuscaloosa Alabama

I am writing this in my son's apartment in Tuscaloosa Alabama. A light rain is falling and the power has just gone off. It may be for a few minutes or a few hours, or longer. For the people who have nowhere to go, this life, even in an undamaged apartment, must be depressing. I realize now why all the digital clocks in the apartment are flashing at me.

As I sit in Ian’s apartment the sounds of mourning doves are interspersed with chain saw engines, and the noise of the cleanup from across the street. I arrived here yesterday via Southwest Air from Jacksonville through Birmingham. Driving from the airport one never got the impression that anything very bad had happened to this area just a few days before. But, when we arrived in Tuscaloosa it got different fast.

Ian lives in the Midtown apartment complex in Tuscaloosa. It is a new, three story building with covered parking decks on each floor and located one block west of McFarland Blvd. on the south side of the University campus—not far from the intersection of 15th Street and McFarland. I had seen pictures of the damage to this area on the net so I was prepared for some pretty spectacular sites. What I wasn't prepared for was the total destruction of homes, churches, businesses, and neighborhoods that surrounded where my son had been living.

After dropping my things at his apartment—navigating to which was no small task—we made a quick drive through of a neighborhood which was representative of the numerous “affected areas”. This was a very modest neighborhood of homes surrounding a pretty little lake lined with trees. I had seen this area once before as we were looking for living quarters for Ian last fall. It contains a mix of student off-campus housing and resident owners. As we left my son’s apartment complex and crossed 5th Avenue we started down a side street. Each house we passed had massive damage. The cars which were destroyed by the blowing debris laden winds had been removed. But the ones which had been crushed by falling trees and structures remained. After four days of continuous clean-up effort, it was impossible to tell that anything had been done, except for the massive piles of trees and shrubs and vegetation that had been piled in front of each house.

As we left 5th Avenue and processed south I noticed that the roof damage was getting significantly worse. The first houses were missing shingles and roofing felt. They had been covered with blue plastic tarps like giant blue bandages. As we made our way southwest the damage intensified. Roofs were not only missing shingles and felt but structural members, then whole sections of hips and gables, and then entire roofs were gone. A few blocks further it was impossible to even distinguish where a house had been or if what I was seeing had once even been a house.

Along our route were an army of bucket trucks. With their outriggers splayed out to stabilize the truck they were busy stringing new power lines. It was an interesting sight because I soon realized that every line they were stringing was attached to a new pole. And what I had at first thought was a random arrangement of power poles were in fact the denuded remains of large trees. The tornado had stripped the leaves, branches, and bark off of every tree I could see and had then snapped the tree like a twig , fifteen or twenty feet above the ground. Other trees, like the oaks, had been uprooted and deposited on top of a convenient car, truck, or house. Some of the houses were simply cleaved in two by massive oaks which had fallen or been deposited by the storm. In one driveway and late model Chevy SUV was parked, completely totaled by a tree. A young man was working diligently trying to remove a bicycle from the car. It was obviously a futile effort as the bike was also crushed by the giant tree. Further along a giant oak, five feet in diameter, had reduced a two story brick home to rubble. All around the pile of debris stood silent fifteen foot tall pine sticks, once fine trees in their own right.

Some houses were relatively inhabitable. Their residents worked outside or inside clearing away trash and debris. Some just sat on chairs in their yard or driveway—if it was clear—and watched in numb silence. One guy sat in a lawn chair, his shotgun casually laying on his lap. On the corner of his property was a hand painted sigh that read, “Occupied and armed. Looters will be shot.” People are generally tired, fearful, and pissed.

But, last night as we wound our way back to Ian’s place we passed two houses holding lawn parties. The grill was smoking and the driveway was outlined with tiki torches. It reminded me of a Fourth of July cookout. It may be a long time before things return to normal for those in the affected areas, but every day brings a little bit of happiness. Two steps forward, one step back.