“It’s the last day of March in Alabama. We should have tornadoes.”
Mom and I were talking earlier this afternoon about the interview that my grandmother did this week with researchers from The Weather Channel regarding the 1974 Super Outbreak, which leveled her hometown of Guin, Alabama. [It's really the only thing Guin's known for.] In the five minutes or so that it’s taken me to write this entry [and watch the TV and call Misty to make sure she knows that the weather's going to crap], the sky outside my house has gone from post-sunset dusk to dark. The nasty center of this storm—which is headed due east—is still 15 to 20 minutes of here, but … man, I was dead on when I spoke the title of this post to Mom on the phone.
This promises to be an ugly night.
Good luck! We’ve had our yearly tornado already and got through fine.
March 31st, 2006 at 18:57Hey woah, the super outbreak started in a town called Morris.
March 31st, 2006 at 18:58Tonight’s storm pretty well fizzled out when it crossed from Limestone County [west of here] into Madison County.
Yep! Predictably, it was my mother’s folks whose house was damaged by the tornado; my dad’s folks, who briefly lived in that town, had little damage.
The worst of the tornadoes that day was, arguably, the one that demolished Guin. It stayed on the ground at some intensity or another all the way from there to here in Madison County … over 100 miles as the crow flies. Scary and impressive.
March 31st, 2006 at 19:01Guin Tornado Video on Weather.com
Mom emailed me last night—after I’d gone to bed, actually; it’s been a crap week, as I said—and let me know that Weather.com had the video up from the interviews they did in Guin this week. My grandmother didn’t make the …
April 1st, 2006 at 12:20