Bass <3 Rachel Antonoff "Alice" in Navy & White

Tuscaloosa, after the storm

Called my mom for Mother's Day this morning and got through on only the second try! Cell service in Tuscaloosa has improved mightily 1½ weeks after the record-breaking mile-wide tornado wedge that leveled enormous portions of the city. I wasn't able to give her anything particularly wonderful but she gifted me with this amazing Alabama/Tornado anecdote:

One of Dad's attendants' brothers was in Holt, a rather more rural part of Tuscaloosa County, walking around shortly after the tornado hit, looking to help people. He came to a house that was basically gone and where in order simply to reach it he had to shove and hack his way through a lot of debris. He found two dudes in the yard reclining in lounge chairs with cans of beer while an entire deer, cut into thin pieces, cooked on a fire they had built.

He asked them if they needed anything, and they replied, "We've got beer; we've got a doe smokin'; we're fine."

Also a lot of tornado-damage-centric updates, to wit:

• Temporary cell towers have been raised, which aren't as good as service was before, but are better than the mostly-non-service they had a week ago.



• ( Electricity: yes )



• Cable and internet still out.



• ( Roof: tarped, yard: paths cleared )



• ( Lost trees ;_; )



• ( Friends and connections in Tuscaloosa )



• The wheelchair van's lift was damaged, and so was the body, but not the chassis or the inside. It's at the garage and apparently the repairs are a bit time-consuming, but whatever, at least the rest of the city is basically at a standstill rn so my dad isn't missing much except work.



• The attendant who was with my parents when the tornado struck (and saw it coming because he slipped out of the relatively-safest hallway to look out the kitchen window, and saw "the twister coming and the transformers blowing up") lost his car. Specifically, a tree crushed it in my parents' driveway. For some reason his insurance refused to cover it so my parents have in the hope that the federal assistance stuff will later reimburse them. His brother has also been helping drag shit out of their yard pretty tirelessly. People are really great.



• My parents live on 13th Street, which I saw namechecked erroneously elsewhere on a linked-to lj post as "not there anymore" (for the record, they're far from the only people on this street who are still there, even if a significant portion of the houses further down it are gone). If you've been following the news, you've seen photos of what used to be a Hobby Lobby and/or Big Lots (same shopping center) at the end of said street. They went for a walk while they were talking to me and walked by a number of neighbors out in their yards, including two different ones with chainsaws trying to hack up fallen trees.