Chapter 5

A Tragic Year

Tornado winds turn sticks into spears, shingles into scissors, and boards into battering rams.

 

Eighth-grader Andrew Ellis looks like a linebacker. But the big fourteen-year-old is more than football tough. When Andrew was eight, an EF-4 tornado destroyed his grandmother’s home while he was inside it.

The powerful 2011 twister killed everyone in the house except Andrew. His brother, cousin, grandmother, and great-grandmother all died. Only Andrew survived, and just barely. The tornado hurled the then-second-grader nearly a quarter of a mile (.4 km) from the ripped-apart mobile home. He lay unconscious and badly hurt in a cow pasture for hours until rescuers found him. Andrew doesn’t recall being rescued, but he does remember the tornado.

 

The South was torn up by tornadoes in 2011. If you connected the destructive paths they took through the South end to end, they’d stretch farther than the width of the United States.

 

One of the 2011 Super Outbreak tornadoes folded this steel tower carrying power lines near Huntsville, Alabama, in half.

 

It happened outside Chattanooga, Tennessee. Andrew was watching TV at his grandmother’s house that evening when the lights in the mobile home flickered. Then his cousin went to the window to see what was making the wind chimes go crazy.

A growing funnel cloud was speeding their way. Everyone rushed into the bathroom.

“I jumped in the bathtub, and my grandma jumped on top of me,” Andrew said. Andrew remembers getting banged around in the tub and his grandmother being pulled away by the winds. “Then I’m like, flying in the sky,” he said.

While in midair, Andrew saw swirling bits of house and branches. He was terrified of falling and landing on glass or shredded metal. “Then I fell face first into the ground,” he said. “After I hit the ground, I don’t remember anything.”

The sun was rising by the time rescuers got Andrew to the hospital. His injuries were serious. One of his legs was badly broken. The winds of 190 miles per hour (306 kph) had dragged him over the debris-littered ground. The cuts all over his body were filled with glass, sticks, grass, and manure.

Andrew spent weeks in the hospital and months in rehabilitation. The eight-year-old had to learn to walk again. But with time and help, Andrew Ellis healed and grew into a healthy teenager.

“I was granted a fifty percent chance of living,” Andrew said in 2017. “And now I’ve played football. I’m running around just being a kid.” He knows that others weren’t as lucky. In the Tennessee Valley alone, eighty people lost their lives on April 27, 2011, including the four generations of Andrew Ellis’s family.

SOUTHERN SHOCKER

For three days, starting on April 25, 2011, tornadoes swarmed the South. Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee all took multiple hits. When the chaos ended, 338 people were dead. Thousands more were injured.

An unimaginable 350 twisters spun down onto the ground during those seventy-two hours. April 27 was the worst day. Tornado warning after tornado warning was declared across the region during the outbreak.

TV meteorologists broadcast live for as many as ten hours straight, begging residents to take shelter as town after town lost power. Hundreds of giant electric transmission towers were toppled, power plants shut down, and parts of Huntsville, Alabama, were in the dark for days.

Some of the tornadoes were small and weak, but at least fifteen were EF-4s or EF-5s. These monster twisters crushed cars like pop cans. One threw an SUV into a water tower a mile away. A tornado-tossed photograph was found more than two hundred miles (322 km) from its destroyed home.

 

This is Tuscaloosa, Alabama, before (top) and after (bottom) the April 27 tornado, one of hundreds during the 2011 Super Outbreak. The EF-4 tornado traveled 80.7 miles (129.9 km), leaving a path of damage 1.5 miles (2.4 km) wide.

 

The tornado that struck Trenton, Georgia, during the Super Outbreak of 2011 destroyed homes and knocked down tens of thousands of trees.

 

The Tuscaloosa tornado killed forty-four people on April 27, 2011. Its winds of 190 miles (310 km) per hour toppled even brick homes.

 

One of the EF-5s in Mississippi was so strong it ripped asphalt off a road, dug out two feet (61 cm) of dirt in places, and killed three people when it tossed their large mobile home three hundred yards (274 m) into a line of trees.

The 2011 Super Outbreak that ravaged Dixie Alley was a big deal for meteorologists, too. It topped the infamous Super Outbreak of 1974, when 150 tornadoes in thirteen states killed more than three hundred people. “We thought we’d never see another outbreak like it,” Robin Tanamachi says. “And then the 2011 outbreak came along and turned out to be even bigger.”

The staggering death toll shocked meteorologists. “How could this have happened with all of our technological advances, with all of our advanced understanding of how storms work?” asked Robin. “What went wrong?”

On a Sunday afternoon only three weeks later, it happened again. A mile-wide EF-5 tornado plowed through Joplin, Missouri.

Even with thirty minutes of warning time to take shelter, the tornado killed 158 people and injured more than a thousand. The Joplin twister’s winds of 200 miles per hour (322 kph) ripped the town apart, destroying eight thousand homes, businesses, schools, and other buildings.

“The May 22, 2011 Joplin tornado was the first since 1953 to kill more than a hundred people,” says Robin. “Up until then, we’d been patting ourselves on the back, saying there will never be a tornado that kills more than a hundred people ever again.”

VORTEX2 had taught meteorologists a lot about how severe storms form tornadoes. “We thought we’d solved that problem.” But in 2011, just a year after VORTEX2 ended, tornadoes killed 550 people in the United States.

“Mother nature came back and said, no, you didn’t solve it. You still have a lot of stuff to work on,” says Robin.

 

The 2011 Super Outbreak hit Alabama hardest. The lives of 243 people were lost in the state.

 

The tornadoes of 2011 did more than shatter homes and break hearts. Meteorological records were smashed, too.

 

The powerful tornado that tore through Joplin, Missouri, in 2011 turned thousands of homes into piles of trash.

MOTIVATED BY DISASTER

Tornado expert Erik Rasmussen explains the importance of VORTEX-SE to reporters.

 

To be fair, VORTEX2 didn’t study tornadoes where the 2011 Super Outbreak happened. “VORTEX2 was very focused on the Central Great Plains region of the United States,” says Robin. “And for good reason. That’s where most tornadoes happen.” But the Great Plains isn’t where most killer tornadoes happen. They happen in Dixie Alley.

In an average year, seven people die because of tornadoes in Oklahoma. In comparison, Alabama and Tennessee average thirty-eight deaths. That’s nearly five and a half times as many fatalities for similarly sized regions.

The higher death toll is partly because more people live in Tennessee and Alabama than in Oklahoma. But the numbers still work out to twice as many tornado deaths per capita in those Dixie Alley states.

Why do Dixie Alley’s twisters cause so much misery and mess? What’s different and so difficult about tornado tracking down South? Meteorologists aren’t the only ones wondering. Government officials want answers, too. It’s why VORTEX Southeast (SE) was created.

The mission of VORTEX-SE is to save lives through science and educate the public on how to stay safe. “Once we’ve learned about the storms, how they move and behave,” Robin explains, “we need to figure out how people receive information and what affects their perception of how urgent or dangerous a situation is.”

Knowledge doesn’t help anyone unless it’s put to use. “It’s not all meteorology,” adds Robin. It’s understanding how people live, get information, and make decisions.

Heading up VORTEX-SE is Erik Rasmussen. He’s studied tornadoes for the National Severe Storms Laboratory for more than twenty-five years. “This is the first VORTEX experiment to focus on tornado hazards as a whole,” he says. “From the storms and conditions that produce tornadoes; to forecasting, detection, and warning; to the way communities and individuals receive and respond to those warnings.”

Unlike the flat, wide-open Great Plains, the Southeast is hilly and covered in trees. Roads wind through hollows and wrap around ridges. Valley walls can act like a wind tunnel, shuttling wild wind gusts coming off a tornado down the valley ahead of the actual twister. Southern terrain likely affects tornadoes, says Erik. “But it also means you can’t see a tornado until it’s just a few seconds away from you. Which is a huge problem in trying to get to shelter.” Especially for those living in mobile homes. These less sturdy houses are more common in the warm South.

“Not only do people not see it coming,” agrees Robin, “but a lot of times they’re in bed asleep.”

Catching people off guard and unprepared is why nighttime tornadoes are more likely to kill. “Twenty-seven percent of tornadoes happen at night. But they’re responsible for about thirty-nine percent of fatalities,” says Robin.

Southern twisters aren’t just springtime events either. Twisters touch down in winter there, too. Another reason they sometimes surprise folks.

Everything that makes southern tornadoes hard to spot makes them hard to study. It’s not like the VORTEX experiments of the Great Plains, Erik says. “We could see those storms for thirty or forty miles [48–64 km] as they came at us. It was easy to set up instruments and make observations.”

VORTEX-SE has to work differently. “In the southeastern US, with all the low clouds, haze, fog, trees and hills, it’s going to be impossible to chase storms and catch tornadoes,” Erik adds. Instead, they plan to set up a storm-snagging net of radar trucks, instruments, and scientists, “and just let the storms come at us and observe them as they move through.”

Would it work? There was only one way to find out. Next stop: Huntsville, Alabama.