Tuscaloosa, after the storm

[cimorene]

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.



• Alabama Power and the volunteer teams from out-of-state have been working round the clock like champs, and power is back almost everywhere, including my folks' house. Power was restored to most of their neighbors about a week ago; my parents had to wait a few more days until a crane could come to remove the large tree pieces from their house/power lines before their power was turned back on.



• Cable and internet still out.



• All their roof holes now have tarps on them. Friends and my dad's attendants have helped clear away a great deal of debris from the yard and made a path from the front yard through to the driveway and backyard, though as you can see in Facebook pictures if we are on such familiar terms, most of the rest of the yard is still hard to make out through all the greenery.



• The 100-year oak is still in the yard, lying on its side (its roots are, my mom estimates, maybe 11' high or so), but is no longer obscuring the driveway. The tree that I grew up calling the "little oak" fell and collapsed the roof above the library, and was removed earlier by crane. The largest (but not only!) piece of it weighed 3 800 lb. My parents' three black walnut trees, along with an oak and a pecan belonging to the neighbors, are all still on top of the large shed/carport in the backyard. The only surviving tree is a pecan, which has in the past suffered from being completely shaded by the other trees. Looking on the bright side, we all hope that now it has all the sun it could want it might produce a better crop in future. TBQH, the 100-year oak's is the biggest personal loss for me in this tornado. I don't know any people who were hurt. That tree had a lot of personality; visually it was more impressive than the house.



• There were several people from the Unitarian Universalist church I grew up in whose houses were nearly or totally destroyed. All are unhurt, staying with friends, and being provided for, and they've formed a group and already had their first meeting, although they forgot to tell my parents, who couldn't have gone anyway because my dad's wheelchair van was damaged. Meanwhile the UUA has sent a temporary substitute minister while theirs is on (sabbatical?), one whose specialty is apparently people who have lost things in disasters, and said minister has paid visits to everyone to carry news back and forth, as many people haven't been able to attend on Sunday yet. None of my dad's attendants lost anyone. Two students from my mother's schools were killed, but no students of hers. However, one of her students lost four members of his extended family.



• 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.