"When Disaster Strikes'

My friend Meredith shared this blog with me today:

http://blog.freshideasgroup.com/?p=184

I will let Sarah's words and pictures tell the story. She lives in Glendale Gardens, the neighborhood next to ours.

One thing I find ironic about the aftermath -- Sarah pointed out something about people who owned chainsaws: Our chainsaw and other power tools were in the garage. Eventually Tom was able to pull it out, and although the case was crushed the saw itself helped clear debris for weeks afterward. But for that first 24-36 hours, it was out of reach. We still don't know who cleared the street in front of our house. By the time we got back on the 28th, the road was open.

--Jennifer
(this magpie is something like a phoenix)

never too late for an update

We moved back into our house over the 4th of July weekend. Work is still ongoing well over a month later, and of course the insurance and mortgage companies don't make anything easy. But we are back in and are hosting a shindig for our neighborhood this weekend on our shadeless driveway. Fun amidst the recovery!

--Jennifer
Oooh, look, shiny things! 

catastrophes and whatnot

I have a new appreciation for the word "catastrophe." Ever since the day we took the Subaru to the State Farm tent (May 3), where I saw the nice people wearing their Catastrophe Team hats, shirts, and badges, I've realized what a loaded word that is. Since then I've seen it on trucks and banners and vans all over town -- all of the insurance companies and aid organizations have sent their catastrophe teams to deal with us.

This afternoon I need to respond to an email from State Farm; the sender name is HOME CLMS-CATASTROPHESERVICE and the address is statefarm.catastropheservices@.... *sigh* It feels odd to be a catastrophe. Another sign of normal being nowhere in sight.

--Jennifer

Cooper!

Sunday, April 3, 2011. Tom and I brought Cooper and Big Man, two cats that had lived across the street from our old house on 31st Place, to be our outside cats at the house in The Downs. Within 15 minutes, they both were gone. Cooper had jumped a fence and headed down the creek, and Tom retrieved him, but then I lost sight of both of them. Gone.

Wednesday, April 6. I made and distributed flyers about the missing cats. I positioned them near the approximate route between the two houses, which you can see here. That evening, Big Man came out from under our house. We continued to look for Cooper, who we had assumed had headed for home.

Sunday, April 10. A woman who had seen one of the flyers called me to say she thought she had seen Cooper. She lived at the end of 24th Street, off Price Ave., which you can locate on this map. Her house was just above the direct line between our house and our old house, and her yard backed up to a creek that was too deep and wide for a cat to cross. I drove over to her street and called him for about half an hour, then I let Donald, his former owner, know that he should call in that direction, too. (Donald walks in the old neighborhood and comes close to that creek from the other side.)

Wednesday, April 27. Tornado. Big Man hunkered down under our house, and we wondered where poor Cooper had sheltered from the storm. We hoped he had been adopted by someone along the way; he hadn't been content to stay with us, but maybe after trekking for days or weeks he had settled down with someone in between the two neighborhoods.

Tuesday, May 31, 2:15. I was on my way back to the house to print something before meeting a Kaplan student. Just before the last curve in the road before my house, I saw a black and white cat in a yard. I think it was between houses 15 and 16; I live in 25. I stopped the car, told myself it couldn't be him but that I had to at least get a better look, and as he turned away from me I saw that he had a white stripe across the back of his back legs. He was about 5 lbs lighter, nearly half his body weight, but it was Cooper.

I said his name as he walked away from me, and he stopped. I kept saying it, as I walked toward him, and he meowed. Then when I got there he started snaking in between my feet, rubbing my ankles and talking to me. I picked him up and cradled him in my left arm, and then I drove around to my driveway. I put him down in front of Big Man's bowl and he ate as fast as I've ever seen a cat eat.

As this was happening I called to Big Man. They initially hissed at one another, but then Big Man backed away. Unfortunately, he was backing up to reload. He arched his back and slowly moved closer so he could strike. I yelld, "Big Man!" which startled Cooper, who flipped over the bowl as he ran away from me and Big Man. He ran around the side of the house, toward the front, and crossed the street. I once again scooped him up, and this time we went into the house.

I sat with him in the bathroom, letting him enjoy the cool tile floor, while I decided what to do (and called/texted Tom, Meredith, and Kristy). I also called Donald to tell him that Cooper had returned. We decided that I would take him to the vet to get checked out, and then he would go back to Donald's house. He is now as happy as any cat could be.

We think he returned to our neighborhood after deciding he couldn't ford the creek to get home, and in between the tornado hitting and his various travel routes, it took two months to find him. He is amazingly healthy and so happy to be back home.

--Jennifer

a month has passed

Friday was the one-month anniversary of the tornado, and today marks four weeks since we first awoke in our on-campus apartment. What a month it's been.

We spent the first three nights (Weds, Thurs, and Fri) sheltered at the UA rec center, where we learned that my being a student qualified us for a free short-term campus apartment. That Saturday night was our first night here. Had I known at the end of April that we would still be here for our anniversary and my birthday, I probably wouldn't have really believed it. But it's true. I'm just glad this was our 4th anniversary, not our 5th, and that I'm turning 39, not 40, next weekend. I'd hate to spend those milestones in Rose Towers.

That said, this place has been wonderful. Once the noisy roofing began at our house we were able to bring the indoor cats over with us, because the university waived the no-pet rule for the tornado refugees. The sound of the work on the roof was really frightening for them. Up to that point they were happy at home, being in familiar surroundings with us visiting them, rather than being in a strange apartment with us only with them at night.

The work on our house is progressing rapidly, at least on the outside. I think the fact that we are there for hours every day, and Tom et al. have worked nonstop to get the yard cleared out, has helped move our job along. We were ready for paint sooner than other homes might have been, because we trimmed back all the shrubs that border the house and removed the limbs.

The painters, who are fantastic, got the whole house painted in two days. There's a little bit of touching up still to do, but it was very fast work. (Being a brick home probably helped, too; the little bit of brick repair that we needed had been completed by the masons a few weeks earlier. Also we only lost one whole window, so when that one is replaced it will need to be painted. The rest only needed new glass, which was ordered and installed within two days.)

We still have no timeline on returning, although we hope to be back by June 30, our end date at Rose Towers. The interior work is the main reason we don't live in the house right now, and it hasn't begun; I have moved about 1/3 of the furniture and stuff out of the affected rooms, so whenever the ceiling repair/replacement is set up, I will call Tom in from the yard and get the rest of it shuttled into the kitchen and McKenzie's room, the two unaffected rooms.

Still need: Affected ceilings repaired/replaced and painted; affected floors sanded and refinished; and water heater inspected so gas service can be turned back on. Then we can move back in while the rest of the shoring up is completed (jacks installed in the crawlspace, gutters/trim replaced on roofline).

--Jennifer

order of events

I was surprised to reflect, a few days later, that the sounds of destruction had occurred in a rather linear fashion. It wasn't chaotic, with glass shattering and water spewing and bricks falling all at once; it was bricks falling, then window exploding, then door slamming: boom, boom, boom....

[Note: The storm came from the west-southwest, and the center of the track was just south of us. So the winds blew from the north, as if the tornado were folding everything into itself.]

Actually, let me take them one at a time. First it was the wind roaring. Not howling, but roaring. A circular roar that I thought sounded like a too-close helicopter. I've heard others say it sounded like a jet sitting over their house, and of course there is the freight train analogy. (One friend said, "It just sounded LOUD.")

We could hear it getting closer (louder), and then we heard glass shattering on the other side of the house. Tom said, "There went the back doors," because we have two sets of french doors that open onto the patio, and that would logically have been the first to go. Fortunately, we were mistaken; the sound was actually the storm door, the full panel of glass that shielded our front door. (Our neighbors on either side also lost their front storm doors, and I think the air pressure burst those doors instead of sucking out/blowing in the windows across the fronts/north sides of our houses.)

Next we heard/felt something happen on the roof, which I thought was going to leave a gaping hole over our living room. Turns out it was the roofing over the porch being pulled off, and our chimney being toppled. The porch has a flat roof, and its roofing and gutters were mostly gone. The columns on the east side of the house were askew, indicating that end of the flat roof had been lifted enough to shift the supports.

The chimney broke off right at the roofline, and it fell onto the driveway below. My Explorer took the brunt of the impact; it was bent such that the driver's door wouldn't open, and it had been pushed about two feet from where I had parked it. Either the bricks pushed it or the tornado lifted and dropped it, or maybe a little of both. The rear hatch was destroyed. Even the hydraulics were ripped out.

The bricks also landed on the front end of Tom's Subaru. A bench from the front porch had been slammed into the rear quarter panel, and half of the windows were shattered.

Typing on my phone is tricky, so I will publish this as it is and complete the description of the way things happened when I get back to a real keyboard.

--Jennifer
The new normal isn't shiny

the day time stood still, everything changed, and assorted other cliches

Wednesday, April 27, 2011, approximately 5:10 p.m. The power went out, and Tom and I could only hear the storm. With the TV on, James Spann (weather hero of north-central Alabama) was telling us about the storm's strength, track, and current location, but I don't recall being able to actually hear the winds until the power went out. At that point we sat side by side and waited to hear/feel how badly we were going to be hit.

Also I was on the phone. I was talking to my friend Meredith, who was in her house two doors down; more specifically, she and her 8-year-old daughter, Isabel, were surrounded by pillows in the closet at the center of the home, praying the tornado would miss us. I had told her that she was in the safest place she could be, that it was going to be scary for a few minutes, then it would be over and we would be fine. I remember her asking if I would mind repeating that to Isabel, who perhaps wasn't so sure her mom was correct in telling her they were going to be OK. I said those same words to Isabel, probably a few minutes after 5:00, then Mere took the phone back.

Intermittently I had been texting Mere, Jennifer (in Portland, Ore.), Kristy (in Charlotte, N.C.) and my mother (in Birmingham). I am so glad I spent part of those last few normal hours conversing with my loved ones about the status of things in Tuscaloosa, because now I have a textual record that helps me keep the timeline straight.

I clearly remember Mere asking me to please stay on the phone with her until the storm passed, and I agreed. But as soon as the power went out, I said, "I gotta go!" and hung up. In that moment, my ability to multitask vanished. All I could do was wait. And listen.

--Jennifer
My things will be shiny again someday!

limbs, cars, and security -- oh, my!

Limbs hauled away, Explorer totaled but not yet towed. Grandma's car has issues so taking to shop in B'ham tomorrow -- don't know what happens after that. Tom Land is staying at the house tonight because the National Guard is no longer stationed at the temporary entrance to the n'hood, and with no fences and much of the contents of our former garage stacked on the patio, he couldn't sleep away from home.

--Jennifer

direct hit?

I feel the need to clarify that what happened to us (and our house) was not a direct hit by an EF4 tornado. It was a sideswipe that was equivalent to a direct hit by a "normal" tornado -- the kind that tears off roofs and chimneys and uproots pine and oak trees and pulls AC units off their concrete slabs.

--Jennifer

feeling fortunate but very sad

Today I came back to my house by myself after dropping Tom off at work for a few hours. We are staying on campus, and he works across from Gordon-Palmer, so my route was down Hackberry, then right on Hargrove, and then left into The Downs, where we live (just before the intersection with 10th Ave.).

I KNOW how lucky I am to be alive and to still have a home to return to. But what saddened me this morning was that we have lost so much of Tuscaloosa. All those glorious trees and homes along Hargrove. Alumni and fans passing through for 60 years have driven past those same trees and homes. Even the apartments have been here for 40 or so years, and you can talk to alumni across generations who all lived/partied there. Gone. My uncle and aunt used to walk through my shady neighborhood when they were dating 30 years ago, and now there are only a few scraggly trees standing. And some of the homes are beyond repair.

We will rebuild our home and bounce back and move forward, but even those of us who didn't lose everything have lost an awful lot. I'm having to come to terms with it being OK to feel this sense of loss while knowing how lucky I am. It doesn't cheapen the losses of people who have lost everything for me to feel overwhelmed with sadness.

--Jennifer

the new year is a month old...

Updating this blog hasn't crossed my mind in ages. There has been more going on than I can begin to recount here: I became a full-time instructor for Kaplan in January, I defended my dissertation proposal in December and am waiting for IRB approval to launch my web survey, I've turned over a new leaf with regard to my diabetes and have been checking my BG like it's my job, and I'm getting ready to go back on an insulin pump for the first time in nearly 25 years.

It has been colder this winter than I remember Alabama ever being, and there's snow on the ground as I type. We're still loving the house,and last month Charles and Dalila moved back to Alabama. We have only seen them once, but it's nice to know they are near once again.

We've endured one great tragedy since my last post. Our dear old dog died in October, a few months shy of her 14th birthday. She went down very quickly, but the hole in our hearts still feels like it may never fully heal.

More soon, I hope....

--Jennifer
Oooh, look, shiny things!