Thursday morning was the day of realization. Our battery-powered radio provided a little information. Our portion of Limestone County was out of power, and the entire county of Madison was without power. (Madison County is the largest county in the state of Alabama.) The bad news was that a main trunk line from TVA had been compromised. They were predicting that we would probably be powerless for 4-5 days.
What does that mean? It has more ramifications than just no lights. We have no telephone service and no dependable cell phone coverage as cell towers are down or compromised. No TV, no hot water, no comforting hot showers, no clean clothes.
All traffic lights are non-functioning. We are under a dusk-to-dawn curfew. No stores have power (although a few managed to get some power from a generator), and the lines for gasoline or groceries are never-ending. With no power, the only purchases that can be made are on a cash-only basis, and no ATMs work. Some gas stations ran out of gasoline or rationed their supply. There are no generators to be bought anywhere, and no fuel available for them, if you happen to have one. Cooking must be done on an outdoor grill…until you run out of charcoal. There is plenty of wood available to build a fire to cook on, but with the seven inches of rain that accompanied the storms, the wood is too wet to burn.
There is no power to run refrigerators or freezers, so the food in them must be destroyed. No internet. No Facebook. No way to read the travel blogs I had been hoping to keep up with this week. No ice. No cold drinks. No hot tea.
We were fortunate enough to have a generator, which we set in the driveway between our house and Barry’s. We are managing to keep the freezers going, and grilled and ate the items that began to thaw.
Early Thursday we made the same drive around our area to see if anyone needed help. This time the destruction was unbelievable. There was major damage a quarter or a mile from our house and many of the country roads were impassable with so many trees uprooted and over the roads. Since we have no phone service, news only reaches us by word-of-mouth. We heard that our dear friend, Shirley (whose property had been fine when we drove out around noon on Wednesday) had lost everything in the late-afternoon tornado. We located Shirley at her niece’s house. She was bunged up and had stitches in her arm, but had survived the tornado by hanging on to her bathroom toilet as she and the toilet were transported out of the bathroom and to another location. Unbelievable!
The WAFF radar tower anf what is left of the Bethel Church of Christ.
We spent the afternoon straightening trees in our yard and picking up debris left by the tornado. Several papers that ended up on our property were interesting…one child’s math homework (30 problems in multiplication, but he had only done five of them. “The tornado took my homework” is the new excuse replacing “the dog ate my homework”, I guess.) We also found pages from a Bible (Heb. 11-13 and I John 2-4), someone’s triage evaluation, a page from a Bible dictionary, and a page from a history textbook. We found half of a LP record from the artist Jimmy Reed. Ironically, one song listed was, “Take Out Some Insurance”. We found a page from an April-May day planner from 2003. Whoever it belonged to got a perm on April 25, went to Nashville with Kim on April 26, visited Sonny after his hernia surgery on May 5, and went to Weight Watchers on May 20. I hope my day planner never gets in the wrong hands! Of course we found plenty of shingles, insulation, wallpaper, parts of window blinds, sheet metal, etc.
Barbara Jo and her family have electricity. She spent the day cooking meals for their friends who suffered storm damage or lost their homes. Norm spent his day helping people in need, and delivering the food Barbara Jo cooked. She kept her washer and dryer running as she washed clothes for people with no power or people who had pulled clothing out of a house that had been hit by the tornado. She fed our family Thursday evening and shared her shower with us. We had to be back home for the dusk-to-dawn curfew, but enjoyed the few moments of hot food and power. We ate, charged our computers and cell phones, and came home.
We went to bed as very thankful people. It had finally sunk in what had really happened and how extremely fortunate and blessed we were to have our entire family safe with hardly any property damage, while being so close to total destruction.
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