“These were the most intense super-cell thunderstorms that I think anybody who was out there forecasting has ever seen,’’ said meteorologist Greg Carbin at the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.
“If you experienced a direct hit from one of these, you’d have to be in a reinforced room, storm shelter, or underground’’ to survive, Carbin said.
The storms seemed to hug the interstate highways as they barreled along like runaway trucks, obliterating neighborhoods or even entire towns from Tuscaloosa to Bristol, Va. One family rode out the disaster in the basement of a funeral home, another by huddling in a tanning bed.
In Concord, a small town outside Birmingham that was ravaged by a tornado, Randy Guyton’s family got a phone call from a friend warning them to take cover. They rushed to the basement garage, piled into a Honda Ridgeline and listened to the roar as the twister devoured the house in seconds. Afterward, they could see outside through the shards of their home and scrambled out.
“The whole house caved in on top of that car,’’ he said. “Other than my boy screaming to the Lord to save us, being in that car is what saved us.’’
At least three people died in a Pleasant Grove subdivision southwest of Birmingham, where residents trickled back Thursday to survey the damage. Greg Harrison’s neighborhood was somehow unscathed, but he remains haunted by the wind, thunder, and lightning as they built to a climax, then suddenly stopped.
Governor Robert Bentley of Alabama said his state had confirmed 204 deaths. There were 33 deaths in Mississippi, 33 in Tennessee, 14 in Georgia, five in Virginia, and one in Kentucky. Hundreds if not thousands of people were injured — nearly 800 in Tuscaloosa alone.
