This is really long and detailed, but I wanted to remember all of this past week!
*I wrote the first part of this the first week in May and the 2nd half today*
Tuesday, on the way home from dropping John Henry off at school, I heard James Spann on Rick and Bubba talking about how Wednesday would definitely bring tornados. He said that we were in the high risk category which was rare, and that meant that we would definitely have F2 tornados or higher. The day was supposed to beat some day in 1974 that was the worst tornado day on record.
I am (was) not afraid of tornados, so I usually make fun of Kurt for how nervous he gets. Every single person I know that grew up in Cullman is scared of tornadoes. I do understand why though. I remember being around 7 years old and asking my mom why tornadoes always went to Cullman County. J Little did I know I would be living here and going through a tornado!
Wednesday around 1:00 pm our friends Eric and Lindsay and their kids, Kase and Lily came over b/c they don’t have a basement. (Apparently there was a tornado that morning, but we slept through it.) Macey woke up from her nap around 2:00, and I realized she was burning up. I didn’t want to say anything b/c I felt bad, but I finally told Eric and Lindsay that she was sick and they could stay and get sick or go home and brave the tornado. Thankfully Eric and Lindsay are very laid back so they said they didn’t care and stayed (and her kids never got sick, which is amazing considering this virus is highly contagious).
Around 2:45 Lindsay and I were sitting in my den/kitchen area watching NBC 13. Kurt called to say he was leaving work. I swear that Jerry Tracey said there was no rotation with this storm, but it did have 110-115 mph winds. I called Kurt back to tell him it wasn’t a tornado and there was so reason to come home, but he was already on his way. At 3:00 Kurt got home and got on our cordless phone on a business call. Lindsay and I took the kids to the basement and let them play.
Almost as soon as we got down there I got a text from Shaydah, Laudan’s little sister, that said, “Are you guys okay? There is a tornado ½ mile wide in Cullman.” As I was texting back, “Yes we are fine. It is all north of us,” (b/c that is what 13 was showing on the map) the power started flickering. Kurt ran downstairs to complain that he had just lost an important business call. Right then my ears started popping and there was lots of pressure. I looked at Eric, who was sitting across from me and said that my ears were popping. He said his were too, and we all realized what was going on.
We started yelling at our kids to get into the storm shelter. I remember that John Henry was on the other side of the couch from me and he didn’t know whether to come to me or follow Kase and Lily. I ran around and grabbed him, and we all ran to the storm shelter (which is like 5 feet away but feels like forever in that situation). Under our front porch is a concrete room with concrete ceilings where we have always planned to go during a tornado. As we were running in the room, I heard a big bang.
We were only in there for about 1 minute and it got silent outside. Kurt and Eric went to look out the windows to the backyard and they both started screaming that trees were down (I thought maybe one of our Bradford Pears had split), so they ran upstairs and actually saw the tornado moving over the water away from us. The next few minutes was chaos, but when we got out we realized that we had 6 trees down in our yard and all were on structure. 2 were ours, 3 were our next door neighbors, and 1 was the neighbor behind us. The 2 trees in the front yard hit the house, but just clipped the corners of Macey’s room and the garage. The 4 in the backyard hit our well house, kids’ swing-set, porch, waterfall, and fence.
***This is where I stopped writing in May. It’s now September, so this is going to be much less detailed!***
We went outside where all the neighbors were and talked to everyone. Thankfully everyone was safe. Our next door neighbors got the worse damage with 4 trees on their house.
Our cell phones barely worked, so we were just trying to get texts out to someone. I finally got one through to Laudan to call my mom and tell her we were fine. She was shopping at Lowe’s and had no clue we even had a tornado. I didn’t even think to call my dad b/c I figured he wouldn’t hear about it in Atlanta, but he said when he turned on the new the first thing he heard was how bad downtown Cullman was. Tina’s husband is a fireman, so he would call with reports all night. We heard how bad the damage was, but I had no clue until I saw it in person the next day.
We had no power and weren’t really sure if more tornados were coming our way, so we ended up with 20 people in our house at one point b/c we have a basement. There were 2 elderly ladies from down the street that were cracking me up. They left shortly after they got here. I think they decided they would rather risk their lives in their houses than to be stuck in ours with 7 kids and 10 adults. J
Tina, Brittney, and Olivia came to spend the night. They live in Hanceville and had sat in Oliva’s closet through the 6:00 am tornado, so they came to town to our neighbors that had a basement for the rest of the day. Then the 3:00 pm tornado hit the neighbor’s house and blew out the windows, so they came here for the rest of the night.
That night Lindsay, Lily, Tina, Olivia, Brittney, Kurt, John Henry, Macey, and I all slept in the basement. Eric and Kase slept upstairs.
The next morning tons of people came to help and try to cut all the trees down so everyone could get out of the neighborhood. We were so thankful for all the help. There is no way Kurt could have handled all the trees at our house by himself.
I had a fever and Macey was sick, so we decided to go to my mom’s to spend the night. We went down there for Thursday night. Kurt came home the next morning to have the generator hooked up and start cutting down trees. He also went by Costco and bought tons of food that we could eat in the dark without cooking. I came home later that night for the first night of the neighborhood cookouts.
It is now mid September and we are finally almost finished fixing our house from the damage! From the pics it doesn’t looks too bad, but we had lots of things that had to be repaired and replaced. We have put hardiplank on the house, painted it, had the stone walkway fixed, gotten a new driveway (ours cracked from the trees), built the wellhouse (plus a storage shed) back, fixed our deck and redid it in Azek (which we love), repaired the waterfall, and redid our landscaping (the trees fell and destroyed our old shrubs and the huge upright Japanese Maple, which I was so sad about). I hate that the tornado hit, but I am thankful for our safety, that no one was killed in the Cullman tornado, insurance, and for our basement!
