Alabama Tornadoes: One Week After
May
4
Written by:
5/4/2011 11:59 AM
It has been an emotionally exhausting week since tornadoes cut a path through much of the Deep South on April 27th. While I was working away under a tornado watch here in Tennessee, I was unaware that a tornado was cutting a mile-wide swath out of my home town of 30 years, Tuscaloosa, AL and through my sister-in-law's backyard in Fultondale (north of Birmingham) over 60 miles away. Tornados ringed Huntsville, where my mother still lives, destroying many outlying homes and businesses and knocking out all the power coming into the city. A week later Huntsville is just beginning to get power to some of the 565,000 people who lost it. The reports today said that it will be summer before the transmission lines and towers are repaired.
Besides the outright destruction that resulted from the huge number of tornadoes that struck an area well over 100 miles wide, the widespread loss of power and communications made it difficult to find out about loved ones. It took about 3 days, piecing together occasional phone contact, text messages, and Facebook postings to determine that our friends escaped physical injury.
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Our Friend Bill Survived in a Bathtub with Leah and Her Mom
Photo by Mike McCracken
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One friend in Tuscaloosa took shelter in an interior hallway, while the tornado ripped off her roof. She said it was the "scaredest I've ever been." Seconds later, two of our oldest and dearest friends and her mother took shelter in a bathtub and covered themselves with a mattress as the tornado ripped the house apart and leveled the historic and picturesque Forest Lake subdivision. It was clear that, following the weather broadcast instructions saved their lives, and they walked away from the house.
I went down to Huntsville on Friday to take my mother some ice, food, cash, and other emergency provisions. It was eerie to be on the nearly empty streets of Alabama's fourth largest city at rush hour with no traffic signals, and no stores or gas stations open within sight.
CERF+ has been busy trying to locate craft artists who were affected, and we have already made contact with a handful of artists in Tuscaloosa and other parts of the state who were hit. It will take a while to know how artists fared, since the devastation was so widespread. We are in contact with arts organizations in the state and are working with them to help connect artists with assistance.
Here are a few tips for getting by in a widespread and extended power outage that I picked up in Huntsville last weekend:
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Don't open your refrigerator or freezer unnecessarily after power is off.
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Always have a good cooler on hand-and ice in the freezer.
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Get your food out of the refrigerator before it goes bad, and throw out anything that is questionable. If you get sick, it may be difficult to get emergency services.
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Turn off power to your appliances, especially your stove and other things that could cause a fire or injury if they came on unexpectedly. Turn off power to HVAC, water heater and other heavy power users, to help avoid a spike in demand when the power comes back on. Leave a light or two on so you will know when you have power.
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Have some emergency cash on hand. Even if stores are open, most will only be able to accept cash because of loss of power and/or data lines. Radios were reporting on open ATM machines 30 miles away with hour-long lines.
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Conserve water. Have a back-up supply of drinking water. In Huntsville, there was initially no power to water treatment facilities, pumps, or monitoring equipment. Along with hospitals those were the first priorities for power.
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Conserve gasoline. It was several days until gas stations were able to get generators and rig up to their pumps. People had to drive long distances to the few open stations and wait in long lines to get gas. Most heavy traffic was around open gas stations.
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This should be a no-brainer: If you have a generator, don't put it inside. There was a rash of carbon monoxide poisonings from running generators in enclosed spaces like garages.
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Don't try to rig up a portable generator to your house wiring. Besides being dangerous to you, the power goes back down the lines and line-workers get electrocuted.
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Run the generator only for critical functions to conserve fuel. Also, turn off the generator before refueling.
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Have a battery-powered radio on hand-this is your lifeline. Be sure you have a good stock of batteries. Once stores began to open some batteries were difficult to come by, particularly D cells. And be sure you have a NOAA weather radio with a battery back-up. It may save your life, especially if a storm hits at night.
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A portable cook stove or way to build a fire safely is handy if you require coffee, tea, or an occasional warm meal.
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If you are in a warm climate, like Alabama, you can heat water for bathing in the sun in a dark plastic container or garden hose. Truck stops in Tennessee were advertising free showers to people with Alabama tags.
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Keep your temper and cut EVERYONE lots of slack!