Very lucky, as this excellent graphic from the front page of the Tuscaloosa News shows. Note the green area labeled “UA” — that’s the campus, and it just avoided a direct hit from the massive tornado that devastated Tuscaloosa:
As things stand, life at the university has been tremendously disrupted — power out, nearby buildings destroyed, some student housing damaged, final exams canceled, commencement postponed until August, even football season ticket sales delayed — but if the tornado had edged just slightly to the left (or if it had formed a little earlier, and grown to the size it was near Peterson while it was over Tuscaloosa), the campus would have been largely destroyed. Thank God that didn’t happen.
[UPDATE: Since I published this post, it has been confirmed that eight University of Alabama students died in the tornadoes. That’s a tragic loss of life, and I hope my use of the term “lucky” doesn’t seem flippant in light of the news. My point was simply that it could easily have been — and almost was — far, far worse for the university, given the utter devastation just blocks away.]
Here’s another map of storm tracks and death tolls. Of course, this stuff will get much more precise once the National Weather Service sorts it all out, but that will take time, and it’s helpful for us non-Alabamans to see these maps in order to get an initial idea of the disaster’s geography.
The death toll, incidentally, has officially passed 300, though the exact number is hard to pin down. The highest number I’ve seen reported is 313, which would clearly eclipse the Blizzard of 1993 or “Storm of the Century” (highest reported death toll 310; some reports much lower), and might or might not eclipse the Tornado Super Outbreak of 1974 (I’ve seen that toll variously reported as 310, 315 and 330). But the toll is still rising, of course, and the bottom line — as I’ve been saying since yesterday afternoon — is that Wednesday’s tornado outbreak will almost certainly end up as the fifth-deadliest U.S. disaster of any kind in the last 60 years, surpassing the Super Outbreak and trailing only 9/11, Katrina and the 1980 and 1995 heat waves. It also looks likely to be the deadliest tornado outbreak in the U.S. since April 5-6, 1936.
On another note, probably today’s best front page belongs to the Birmingham News:
These were the most intense super-cell thunderstorms that I think anybody who was out there forecasting has ever seen. 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].
Auburn fans on the receiving end of Tide for Toomer’s have started Toomer’s for Tuscaloosa to support their tornado-stricken rivals at Alabama. It’s a very small thing amid all the overwhelming, tragic devastation – now 272 dead and counting, seemingly putting yesterday’s tornado outbreak on track to become one of the Top 5 deadliest U.S. disasters of the last 60 years, trailing only 9/11, Katrina, and a pair of heat waves in 1980 and 1995 – but it still makes me smile that college football rivals, in the SEC no less, can come together at such a time. And then again, of course they can: they’re human beings, after all. But it still makes me smile.
The SEC: it can come together in PEACE!!!
The title, by the way, comes from a bunch of Facebook comments that I saw on this topic, expressing both sentiments together – “War Damn Eagle and Roll Tide Roll,” sometimes shortened to “WDE & RTR.” At any other time, that would be blasphemy, but today, football means nothing to folks in the South (and that’s saying something).
My first Instalanche in more than nine months is bringing in almost 1,000 visitors per hour at the moment. I like Instalanches better when they don’t arise out of death and destruction, though.
The Carolina Panthers chose Auburn QB Cam Newton with the number one pick of the 2011 NFL draft. Life should be much simpler for Newton now that he is in a league where getting paid to come play for a team isn’t a major rules violation.
The death toll from yesterday’s historic tornado outbreak is now well over 200. Here’s my latest update, posted at the hangout of the late Alan Sullivan’s “rare readers.”
When I tried to type “birthers” on my iPhone just now, it was autocorrected to “northers.” What does Steve Jobs know that we don’t??? Was Obama born in Canada???
[UPDATE, 2:00 PM MDT: Since I composed this post, the death toll has risen from 247 to 272. So yesterday’s disaster is now #8 on the list below, #6 if you exclude manmade disasters, #4 if you also exclude heat waves, or #3 if you do all of that and you think the listed “Storm of the Century” toll is inflated (some accounts have it much lower). Among natural disasters, only Hurricane Katrina, the 1980 and 1995 heat waves, and the 1974 Tornado Super Outbreak are clearly deadlier — and yesterday may yet surpass the latter. God Almighty.
Original post below.]
The official death toll in yesterday’s epic, calamitous tornado outbreak is now at 247, including 162 in Alabama alone. Judging by this Wikipedia page listing all “United States disasters” — both manmade and natural — by death toll, it will go down as one of the deadliest disasters of the last 60 years. (And yet, somehow, the media coverage doesn’t seem commensurate with the scale of the catastrophe.) Here are the Top 15:
1. September 11, 2001 attacks – 2,973 2. Hurricane Katrina, 2005 – 1,836 3. United States Heat Wave of 1980 – ~1,700 4. Chicago Heat Wave of 1995 – 739 5. Tornado Super Outbreak of April 3, 1974 – 315 6. “Storm of the Century” blizzard, 1993 – 310 7. American Airlines Flight 191 crash, 1979 – 273 8(t). Midwest/Northeast heat wave, 1999 – 271 8(t). Palm Sunday Tornado Outbreak, 1965 – 271 10. Hurricane Camille, 1969 – 256 11. American Airlines Flight 586 crash, 2001 – 265 12. Great Tornado Outbreak of April 27, 2011 – 247 13. Rapid City Flood of 1972 – 238 14. TWA Flight 800 crash, 1996 – 230 15. EgyptAir Flight 900 crash, 1999 – 217
That list includes all U.S. disasters that killed 200 or more people. If we exclude manmade disasters (9/11 and the other plane crashes), so it’s just a list of natural disasters, the list shrinks to 10, and yesterday’s outbreak moves up from #12 to #9. If we also eliminate heat waves, which happen over a longer period of time than a tornado outbreak or a hurricane or a blizzard, yesterday ranks #6 — or maybe #5, given that the “Storm of the Century” death toll is disputed, and by some accounts isn’t even over 100. And of course, yesterday’s toll is still climbing. Conceivably, it could end up trailing only 9/11, Katrina, and the 1980 and 1995 heat waves on the above list — though, for God’s sake, let’s hope and pray not.
(I only went back 60 years, by the way, because once you hit 1950 as you go backward in time on the list, mass-casualty events in this country become much more common. Just from 1940-1950, there were five disasters that killed 200+ people, versus the 15 you see above from 1951-2011. In the 1930s, there were six. And so on. We used to be much more vulnerable to mass-casualty calamities. But in the last sixty years, such events have been thankfully rare — just two-and-a-half per decade, judging by this metric. Yesterday, tragically, we experienced one of the very few to break that modern mold.)
And now, having said all that, let me make a point that runs completely counter to this post. There’s a certain slightly ghoulish quality to these sorts of death toll comparisons, as if there’s somehow a competition to prove that the latest disaster is the worst ever, or among the worst ever, or worse than X or Y previous disaster. I’m as guilty as anyone, indeed much moreso than some, but I also acknowledge the validity of the criticism. I’m reminded of something I wrote back in 2005, shortly after my life was impacted by two major tragedies, one national and one personal: Hurricane Katrina, and the death of my friend Sarah. Reflecting on this very issue, I wrote:
On a more philosophical note, one thing Sarah’s death has reminded me of is what you might call the “equality of tragedy” principle. We sometimes get hung up on comparing mega-tragedies: “ranking” a tragedy like Katrina among the “worst disasters ever,” wondering whether Katrina is really “our tsunami,” comparing the death toll that was to the death toll that might have been, etc. And there is certainly validity to all of these endeavors. Yet, at a human level, experiencing a personal tragedy reminds you that, to the people directly affected, it doesn’t matter whether 10 people or 10,000 people died; what matters is the one person you care about who is ripped away from you far too soon. The grieving 9/11 widow, the stricken Katrina husband, the father whose daughter is killed by a drunk driver, the son whose mother takes her own life — all of these people are, roughly speaking, equal in terms of their suffering. Whether your personal tragedy has a national dimension or not — whether or not it’s “newsworthy” — you still grieve.
Today and in the days to come, thousands of people across the United States will be grieving because of their own tragedies that occurred as part of yesterday’s mega-tragedy — their personal death toll of 1, amid the 250+ others who also died. And thousands more will be grieving totally unrelated tragedies — car crashes, heart attacks, suicides, senseless murders — that have nothing at all to do with the Great Tornado Outbreak, and their grief will be no less real. As we try to place yesterday’s catastrophe in historical context, we should also remember that.
UPDATE, 2:53 PM MDT: I added a new video to the top of the post, showing the live broadcast on the local CBS affiliate as the tornado moved through Tuscaloosa.
The scale and magnitude of destruction caused by yesterday’s tornadoes is almost more reminiscent of a hurricane than a typical tornado event. I hope the government officials tasked with responding to this disaster, and less importantly the national media, fully grasp this fact. Watching the incredible and horrifying videos from Tuscaloosa and elsewhere (some of which I’ve posted on my blog), I don’t know how they could miss it. But after Katrina, I never underestimate the ability of the government and media to miss the bloody obvious when it comes to grasping the scope of a natural disaster. In any event, this is unlike anything in my lifetime – the Super Outbreak of April 3, 1974, which spawned the famous Xenia, Ohio tornado, is pretty clearly the only analog in recent decades – and the aftermath will be very, very different from that of a “typical” tornado outbreak. It will require a defcon-1 level response from the authorities, and it’s the sort of thing that ought to swamp all the national media noise about insubstantial fluff issues (birth certificates, royal weddings, etc.) and spur “flood the zone” coverage for days. It’s that big of a deal.
Typically, tornadoes, although very powerful – at their worst, tornadoes’ winds easily exceed those of the strongest hurricanes – only affect a relatively small area of land, cutting a narrow path and lasting for a fairly short period of time. So while they might utterly devastate a small area, the damage they cause is limited by the relatively small amount of territory they affect. This is the fundamental difference between tornadoes and hurricanes, from a damage assessment perspective. It’s also the fundamental reason why tornadoes rarely hit cities: not because cities have some magical tornado-repelling power, but because the vast majority of this country’s land area (especially in the most tornado-prone states) is non-urban, and the odds of a powerful tornado’s small path of destruction happening to intersect with a heavily populated area are fairly low as a result.
But when you get a massive, mile-wide, EF4 or EF5 tornado that lasts for hours and impacts four states, as the Tuscaloosa/Birmingham tornado did, the math changes. And, even as long-lasting, massive, powerful tornadoes go, that one took an exceptionally terrible track. And it happened on a day where there were 100+ other tornadoes, at least several of them also huge and very powerful! Simply incredible.
The death toll should certainly be a clue to the highly unusual nature of yesterday’s disaster. I was about to write “it will almost certainly reach triple digits today,” but now I see, via Jim Cantore, that it’s already at 173, so there you go. The near-certainty of a huge, triple-digit death toll was immediately apparent to me when I saw those videos last night. I hope I’m wrong, but I bet we’ll end up in the 300s, just like the Super Outbreak. This is already, by far, the largest death toll from a U.S. tornado outbreak since that one; there hasn’t been another triple-digit death toll since then. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the Tuscaloosa/Birmingham tornado ends up being the deadliest single U.S. tornado since the 1940s or 1950s.
Just an incredible, terrible disaster for the folks affected. Keep them in your thoughts and prayers today.
