The NYTimes is front-paging a raft of heart-stopping pictures, stories and video from last night’s record-setting barrage of tornadoes:
Tuscaloosa — At least 285 people across six states died in the storms, with more than half — 195 people — in Alabama. This good-time college town, the home of the University of Alabama, has in some places has been shorn to the slab, and accounts for at least 36 of those deaths. Thousands have been injured, and untold more have been left homeless, hauling their belongings in garbage bags or rooting through disgorged piles of wood and siding to find anything salvageable.
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While Alabama was hit the hardest, the storm spared few states across the South. Thirty-four people were reported dead in Tennessee, 33 in Mississippi, 15 in Georgia, 7 in Virginia and one in Kentucky. With search and rescue crews still climbing through debris and making their way down tree-strewn country roads, the toll is expected to rise.
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“History tells me estimating deaths is a bad business,” said W. Craig Fugate, the Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator, in a conference call with reporters.
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President Obama announced that he was coming to Alabama on Friday afternoon, saying in a statement that the federal government had pledged its assistance.
The Red Cross has a request for donations up on its site. No dedicated link at the ASPCA site, yet, but if you are shopping for Mothers Day/wedding/graduation gifts, GreaterGood.org has a page for donations to the International Fund for Animal Welfare through the Animal Rescue site store.
I did not grow up in tornado territory, and when I first moved to the Midwest I found it difficult to appreciate how dangerous ‘mere wind’ could be. This super-storm, though… I guess the best analogy I can think of is “a tsunami of air.” As another NYTimes story about the “guessing game of prediction” phrases it, “Tornadoes in particular, researchers say, straddle the line between the known and the profoundly unknowable.”
… Usually, when tornadoes strike, they will devastate a single town or small area of a state. What was unusual in Alabama was that a mass of twisters ravaged the entire northern half of the state.
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No single storm took a linear path. Rather, an untold number of tornadoes hit an untold number of homes and buildings in a chaotic flurry, touching down and picking up power at different places at different times. By the time they were gone Wednesday night, the devastation was huge, in terms of lives lost, neighborhoods crushed…
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Alabama is not part of what is traditionally considered Tornado Alley, which covers the Plains States. But it is part of Dixie Alley, which runs through the South. Tornadoes in Dixie Alley can be worse because they are more violent, the Southern states are more densely populated, and the tornado season is less predictable, so residents are not always prepared. Studies have also said that housing in the South was made of less sturdy material than that in other parts of the country, making homes more susceptible to storm damage.
BD of MN
check out the map of all the tornado warnings layered on top of each other. (and the article is very informative, too…)
I’m a Skywarn trained spotter, ham radio geek, and will occasionally go chase up here in MN…
MikeJ
After the passport “story” of the other day how can I take this seriously?
mclaren
Global warming should actually be called “global weather disruption.”
More violent storms, hotter record highs, more freakish unseasonal lows.
The third world will suffer a Malthusian dieoff because of these increasingly violent storms, floods, droughts, typhoons and hurricanes.
TaMara (BHF)
Yes but Al Gore is fat and lives in a big house.
Dork
I hate coming off like a selfless dick by saying this, but these are the VERY same fuckers who blast the federal govt, rally around “small govt” and states’ rights, want to pay no taxes, and generally shit on everything the feds stand for.
But when their house and car and dog go kabloowee, then suddenly they want Uncle Sam’s ducats. Unfuckinbeleievable.
peach flavored shampoo
Something’s jacked up, b/c the southern states never got this many twisters in years past. KS, OK, even NE got a bunch. This year those states have been largely ‘nado free, while AR and now Bama have gotten crushed. Global climate change, bitches.
D. Mason
As a resident of north Alabama, which wasn’t hit as hard as t-town, I can tell you it’s very bad. I left the state immediately after after the storms and flash flooding was already a problem on major highways. One friends house is now just a concrete slab framed in a pile of debris, thank god he got trapped at work by the storms. Another friend and his family are trapped at home, not that they’re eager to leave, due to total destruction of the roads around them. The only place I know of in the area with power, the city of Athens, had lines at gas stations which remind my older relatives of the 70’s gas crisis. The nuclear plant took damage, nothing to be concerned about from a nuclear perspective, but it will be days before the area has power due to the nature of the damage. Sorry if my post reads like word salad, I’m struggling to pull out the newsy bits.
Martin
The number of reported tornadoes has increased steadily over time, as has their magnitude. Climate change will be rejected as an explanation in favor of wrath of God.
Waiting in line at the hardware store, the person before me and the cashier were discussing how hopeful they are the rapture is coming soon. One sees it as a solution to her personal debt. The other to a job she doesn’t like. Just a different variant of ‘fuck you, I got mine’. They probably both drive Suburbans and run the AC 24/7. What the fuck do they care, they go to bed every night expecting to get beamed up before they wake the next day.
BGinCHI
O/T
Cole, you gotta get a duckling. Rosie doesn’t stand a chance.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/27/duckling-vs-dog-video_n_854078.html
zach
That’s the craziest thing about tornadoes… the places that get the most of them know exactly what’s going to happen. I lived in the heart of tornado alley once, but I also lived amongst hills which are apparently incompatible with tornadoes. I’ve been in or near tornadoes in Missouri, Michigan, and Florida, but despite years of tornadoes hurdling towards me in Kansas I never came with a few miles of one while living there.
I live in Baltimore now, and there’s a definite difference in how weather potentially spawning tornadoes is reported — watches and warnings are handed out for storms that would’ve been totally run of the mill in Kansas, where someone had to actually see cloud rotation to merit a tornado warning… so the folks in charge of warning us about these things know that there’s some extra caution required for places that don’t normally see this sort of weather.
dslak
I can’t imagine what’s keeping Pat Robertson et al from blaming this on Alabamans themselves.
Anne Laurie
@Dork:
Uhh, go look at the photos… I would guess that a great many of those victims were Obama voters, even if their votes didn’t count for much in the eyes of the Electoral College. The local officials with their hands out may well be Teahadists, but the people looking to fill a trashbag with what’s left of their entire lives & history, maybe not so much.
TaMara (BHF)
@Martin: Well the joke is on them. I have it on good authority that the rapture has already occurred and they were “left behind”. /snark
Martin
@peach flavored shampoo: Well, these clusters do happen now and then. This was no different than the 4/4/74 cluster that ran from Alabama to Michigan. Six F-5 tornados in one storm.
One cluster is an outlier, but there are more tornados overall, and they are bigger.
sb
“I hate coming off like a selfless dick by saying this…”
Too late, asshole. All that’s missing from your post is taking a shit on a Christian; then you, Anne and mistermix (or is it DougJ? I get those two confused) could exchange high-fives.
Those very same “fuckers” are your fellow Americans, not all of whom are birthers, racists, wingnuts, etc. So, in a Christian way, fuck off for now and please, donate where you can.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@dslak: I can see the Westboro Baptist Church signs now: “God hates the Southeastern Conference.”
mclaren
One wonders what an F-6 tornado would look like.
There’s no such thing, of course…
…Yet.
MB
1) Fuck you people immediately swinging this around into politics. Yes, I’ve had the same thoughts. No, I had more decency than to verbalize them and make it my first statement on the matter.
2) Please direct any assistance you can give to human beings before pets. I know this goes against the preferences of many here, but jesus christ.
Jennifer
@peach flavored shampoo: Um, not really true, at least for here in Arkansas.
We get hammered by tornadoes EVERY year. I think we’re number 1 in the country for tornado deaths. Whoo-Hoo! We’re number ONE! That’s a combination of both poorer construction (as elsewhere, the great majority of deaths come from people in mobile homes and as a poor state, we have lots of folks living in mobile homes) and geography – we have the good fortune of sitting in the sweet spot where warm, moist air from the Gulf collides with cold air sweeping in from the northwest. In fact, the largest number of tornado deaths here are attributed to November & December tornadoes…pretty much every year, we’ll have a day or two in December where temps get spring-like, up into the mid-70s…and inevitably, a cold front will sweep in, because it’s fucking DECEMBER on the northern plains and presto…killer tornadoes.
BGinCHI
@Martin: I was 7 that day, and the day after me and my dad drove up to Monticello (a little north and east of us) to see the town.
It was flattened. I’ll never forget that sight.
Martin
@TaMara (BHF): I was seriously tempted to mention something similar to them, that why would God beam up whiny people with shitty lives that they’re so eager to get out of.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@zach: My kid spent two hours in the hall today doing nothing because of potential tornadoes in South PA. I got the phone notice from the school that the kids were being moved “away from windows and doors.”
FoxinSocks
My understanding is that the outbreak of tornadoes is a combination of global warming and La Nina (cyclical cooling of Pacific waters that causes a domino effect of weird weather). Studies have shown that during La Nina years, tornadoes are stronger and more numerous and many of the major outbreaks in years past have been during La Ninas.
But what’s making this far worse than your usual already full-of-suck La Nina outbreak is global warming. The Gulf of Mexico is warmer than it should be for this time of the year. When water gets warm, it evaporates into the atmosphere. So you’ve already got a situation that’s primed for tornado outbreaks, and into that you add a huge amount of moisture. It’s just a horrible combination.
BTW-I believe that at some point, as global warming gets worse and worse, scientists predict it will actually reduce the amount of tornadoes (something to do with changing weather patterns and reducing wind shear), but by then, Florida will probably be under water.
Villago Delenda Est
“Dixie Alley” is worse, because the South is more advantageously positioned to have higher temperature ratio air masses colliding and creating fun, fun, fun for anyone who is unfortunate enough to be in their path.
And, as Jennifer points out, poor construction practices don’t help, higher population densities don’t help, and the fact that the most sinful hypocritical people in the country live in those areas can’t make the Big Guy very happy.
Villago Delenda Est
@FoxinSocks:
Before that happens, all life will have been scoured away by monster hurricanes, so really, no problem.
jehrler
While I understand about poor construction, when facing an F4-5 tornado it seems to me that the real cause of deaths is the lack of basements.
I can’t imagine waiting for a tornado to hit while in the hallway or even bathroom above ground.
When we built our house here in Minnesota, we designed in a special part of our walkout basement that is further underground and specifically for taking shelter in a tornado.
Are these non-mobile home houses simply slab houses because they are cheap or is there a problem with creating a full basement or even a storm cellar in their geology?
Danceswithwords
I grew up in Birmingham, and I grew up with the tornado drills in school, the time spent huddled with the family in the basement with the battery-powered radio on. There have been some bad tornadoes in the state before–I remember one in the late 80s that killed about 30 people during a church service–but they were not huge, and they tended to skip over the ground. In fact, when my parents were building their current house in an inner-ring suburb south of Birmingham, a tornado blew the bay window off the back. I think what’s particularly devastating about this storm is the giant, sustained funnels gouging out everything in their path for miles and miles and miles. And yeah, I hope it’s an outlier, but it’s hard not to see it as a symptom of a disrupted climate.
Rural Western Alabama is a pretty poor area, and most of the suburbs north of Birmingham are working class at best. (Most of the wealthy suburbs are to the south of the city, and without power but otherwise fine.) This is a complete disaster for a lot of people.
Jay C
It isn’t just the South or the Plains that have to be worried about tornadoes, either: our summer house in the Berkshire Hills in Western MA was built (by us, btw) about 200 yards from the track of a killer tornado which tore through in 1995 (and, quite weirdly, again, on about the same path, the next year): the last previous twister in the county had been in 1947. SO they can happen anywhere: just a lot less frequently. A 40-50 year interval is fine with us: we’ll be retired by then.
Gina
Our animal rescue friends in Birmingham are working like crazy, lots of homeless people, lots of lost, injured and displaced pets. Luckily the city shelter is okay, and the animal hospital that does a lot of volunteering for them is up and running too. As always, the human shelters won’t allow pets, so they’re trying to help with that situation as well.
Jennifer
@FoxinSocks: Again, I’m not sure that’s why there have been more tornadoes this year. My personal experience having lived in a place where we hear the CD sirens go off at least 3 or 4 times a year – which they only do when someone actually spots a tornado in the area – is that this year the storms are worse because of an unusually cool spring. Typically by April we’re done with cool weather…this year, I’ve needed to run the heat on and off up through last night. So with the warm/cool cycle, we’ve had lots of opportunities for clashing air masses. The cool spring is attributable to a La Nina jet stream pattern and plays a much more important role in forming these storms…because as a 30-year resident, I can tell you that in April, warm, humid Gulf air is the norm…and due to the warm/cool cycle this spring, we’ve actually had a lot less of it around than we normally do in April.
Shadow's Mom
I’m trying to confirm the health and wellbeing of a friend from Alabama. I know her only through Twitter. In addition to the devastation in Alabama, something has happened with Twitter since Sunday and now her Twitter account is gone.
Her twitter handle was @jprondeau, she’d gay, and according to her lives in a ‘holler.’ Another twitter connection has her email and has sent a note, but clearly that’s not likely to get to her very soon. Does anyone in this community know her? If you do and have contact, could you pass on that her twitter community is concerned and that we hope she is safe?
It would be much appreciated. I’m a little stunned at the degree of emotional connection that I feel towards a friend I know only through 140 character conversations….
And to everyone who has family or friends in one of the affected areas, I hope that you learn soon that they are safe and secure.
Chris
@Martin: I’ve never heard anyone talk about that in front of me but I have planned this for the case of someone coming to my front door…
them: Gotta get ready for the rapture, you know!
me: Rapture? Wait, don’t you remember? Five years ago, Jesus came down and took all the good people to Heaven. We’re the ones left behind! And then there was that thing to make the dumb people forget about it so they wouldn’t be so worr… …er. Forget I said anything!
:-)
PeakVT
@jehrler: Cheap, for the most part. In the north a basement is often a freebie because builders have to dig down a ways to get the footers below the frost line.
hamletta
Yeah, this spring has been very cool. With intermittent 80+ days and tornado warnings.
I haven’t processed all this yet. We had to start taking calls from our people in Alabama, because their call center was hit by the storms, so I’ve been gobsmacked trying to set up cable for people who still have homes to put it in.
When you mentioned U of Al, I remembered my pastor, and O, my Lord, what am I doing for the church? They’re going to want to help.
I have to write a front page post like I did for Haiti and the floods. I’m just so tired, I don’t know what to say….
jehrler
@PeakVT:
Ah, that makes sense.
Maybe they need to rethink adding a minimum of a storm cellar to the building code.
Triassic Sands
I was in Ohio in April 1974. On the 4th, a rash of tornadoes devastated several states and more than 300 people died. The following day, a friend of mine and I, unable to contact his father, who had been in the direct line of one of the worst tornadoes — the one in Xenia — drove to his father’s house hoping for the best. As luck would have it, and nothing is more fickle than a tornado (unless it is the American voter, especially the “independent”), his father’s house appeared unscathed, though the roofing nails were all sticking up out of the fiber glass roofing shingles. The storm has passed just to one side of his house and in the process the pressure extremes had lifted the roof, before letting it resettle in place.
We went on to survey the storm’s damage and I’ve never seen anything like it. Three houses in a row totally decimated, then one apparently untouched, followed by more complete destruction. In one house an open Pepsi bottle sat on the kitchen counter but the roof and all of the walls except one were gone. A piano stool sat in the living room, while the baby grand piano itself lay in a shattered pile across the street in a neighbor’s yard. An Oldsmobile sitting in a garage seemingly without a scratch, while the rest of the house was mostly gone and what remained didn’t reach to the top of the roof of the car — it had been a two-story house. It was the strangest pattern of damage I’ve ever seen and far stranger than anything I could have imagined.
The weather was much improved that day, overcast but calm. However, as we looked around us and drove through more and more areas hit by the tornado, it became clear that less than twenty-four hours earlier that whole area had been a roaring hell of wind and flying debris. I saw what the storm did, but I couldn’t imagine what being in the storm would have been like. It was much spookier than the aftermath of a hurricane and far less explicable than the ruins of an earthquake. In the big scheme of things, both hurricanes and earthquakes are more destructive and deadly than tornadoes, but the tornado damage I saw often made no sense, and in that inexplicable chaos were all the ingredients of a pure terror that struck quickly and with very little warning. Until a house was destroyed, one probably couldn’t reliably predict it would even be hit.
On our way home, we passed the wreckage of a white car. It was rolled into a ball, with the headlights pointing at the taillights. It’s lone occupant had been a 19-year-old college student who had driven right into the tornado — it was the last and worst decision of his life.
Overall, the damage and casualties of yesterday’s tornadoes and those of April 1974 will pale in comparison to the devastation caused by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, but for the people who made bad decisions or were just plain unlucky, yesterday was the worst day possible.
At times like this, we need good government to come to the assistance of the storm’s victims — even those who, through sheer ignorance and/or stupidity think government is the problem. But helping people is going to cost money and that money has to come from raising revenue in the US, and like it or not, that means substantial tax increases. Program cuts are not going to help storm victims.
The South is the area most damaged by these storms, and the chances are I don’t have much in common with most of the storm’s victims. It’s likely that a majority of them happily sent lunatic Republicans to the House and Senate in 2010, and a big chunk probably are convinced that Obama is a Kenya-born Muslim. What will it take to make them understand that their no taxes/no government fetish means more death and more suffering, as well as a stagnant economy with a dwindling middle class? When Katrina hit we needed a muscular, effective government able to provide the right aid in the right places as quickly as possible. We didn’t get that. The Republican’s vision of government — something small enough to drown in a bathtub — is a vision of failure and despair — one of a government impotent in the face of disaster.
I hope the aid is forthcoming that will help tornado victims get back on their feet. I’d want and appreciate help if I’d been a victim, but then I don’t think of the government as my enemy (though in Republican hands it clearly is). My worst fear is that the government response is yet another bungled one, teaching the incorrect message that government wrecks everything it touches. It doesn’t have to, but it needs resources to do a difficult job well. Private charity groups can help around the edges, but there is no way they can do the job that was intended for government and is implied in the words “promote the general Welfare” in the Preamble to the Constitution. No one alive in the late eighteenth century had the wherewithal to comprehend the world of 2011, but I find it absurd to believe that the Founders would have expected that the size and resources of the Federal government would not grow to meet the challenges of a changing world.
In closing, let me just say that Donald Trump is a racist piece of shit.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@jehrler: You build a basement because the foundation has to be below the frost line. That’s why houses in the north have basements.
When I moved to Southern California from the northeast, I was puzzled how you could build a house on a slab. I found out that if it doesn’t freeze in the winter, it’s no problem. Because of winter, there’s a place in your house to shelter from tornadoes in Kansas, but not in Alabama.
PeakVT
@jehrler: Here’s a FEMA page on safe rooms.
Hill Dweller
Here in NC, we had our run-in with a slew of tornadoes a couple of weeks ago. I think the official count was around 25 in a relatively short period of time. Making matters worse were the winds and moisture being pulled up from the south and combining with the cold front coming from the west, leading to tornadoes holding together and staying on the ground for much longer than is normal in this area. It was more like a mid-western weather scenario, as opposed to the southeast.
Several homes a street over were severely damaged, some even destroyed, while we just had limbs and debris in the yard. It essentially boiled down to luck. On some level I felt guilty. Something akin to survivor’s guilt I suppose.
My thoughts go out to all the mourning families and displaced people.
jehrler
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
As I mentioned above, maybe it is time to add to the South’s building code the requirement for a storm cellar (at a minimum). It’s not going to be as expensive as the footers/basements we have to do up here in the North yet it would definitely save lives. Also useful in Hurricanes.
Ed
When I was a kid I was right in the middle of a major tornado, worst one ever in Chicago (some personal stories of it are here), and I don’t know any one of my friends or neighbors who didn’t change completely because of it. Just seeing the word tornado in print makes my hair stand on end.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@jehrler: Building codes are good, although they’re clearly sochalist do-gooder crap.
What they found out in Florida after Hurricane Andrew was that building inspectors are just as important, if not more so. You can have all the codes for construction you want, but if you starve the agency inspecting and enforcing the codes, guess what happens?
My experience is in erosion/sediment control. You can get the bucks for the one-time effort to set up plans and ordinances, but forget about enough funding for ongoing personnel to do the inspections.
jehrler
@PeakVT:
Thanks. Really informative and if you look at the wind speed graphs in figure 3-1 in their pdf:
http://www.fema.gov/library/file;jsessionid=6B7056979E59E64EF0406AD2C4341ED9.WorkerLibrary?type=publishedFile&file=fema361_chap_3.pdf&fileid=cc9e8920-8a0e-11dd-9484-001185636a87
it surprised me how much of the south is exposed to the exact same high powered winds as the traditional tornado alley. Some of that on the coasts may be due to hurricanes, but to have 250mph winds in the inland south that has to be tornadic activity.
Villago Delenda Est
@jehrler:
Oh noes! The evil state is dictating features to builders and homeowners, adding costs at the behest of the cellar lobby!
Church Lady
@jehrler: In Memphis, at least, it’s geology. Here, the odds are that if you have a basement, it will flood often.
Jennifer
I don’t know that I’d go along with requiring all homes to be built with a cellar…because face it, that does add a lot of expense and a lot of folks wouldn’t be able to afford homes with that extra cost added in (see “highest proportion of mobile-home dwellers” above).
But I definitely would support a requirement that mobile home parks be required to install underground storm shelters. They aren’t that expensive (around $5K for one that will shelter 15 people) and it’s been proven time and time again that in a tornado, people “sheltering” in mobile homes don’t have a prayer.
jehrler
@Jennifer:
A safe room, created when doing new construction, would not be that terribly expensive, particularly since it could be below ground in many situations.
Besides, those of us in the North have to have full basements and footers as noted above so the costs clearly aren’t super prohibitive.
As for mobile home parks, I do believe that storm shelters are required in some areas and I agree that should be mandated.
scarshapedstar
They knew the storms were coming; why didn’t they load up the school buses and evacuate? And why don’t they move Tuscaloosa someplace safer? Everyone knew it was a bad idea to build it there!
/katrinamemories
ronin122
Given where the tornadoes hit, I say “fuck ’em, let them take care of themselves. After all, personal responsibility.”
scarshapedstar
@ronin122:
Furthermore, if half of Alabama thinks Obama is a usurper, shouldn’t they resist the National Guard as a foreign occupier?
Dennis SGMM
@Jennifer:
There are considerable electromagnetic phenomena associated with tornadoes. I spent some years in South (Way South) Texas and twisters lit up on radar like Christmas trees. Although there weren’t many mobile home parks in the area it seemed like every other tornado would make a beeline for one of them. I always wondered if those grounded metal boxes actually attracted the things.
No one of Importance
@ronin122, @scarshapedstar
You stay classy, guys. That’ll sure show people that your side of politics is the compassionate one.
All you’re showing this Aussie is that you have hearts of stone and the empathic responses of your average sociopath.
opie jeanne
* shudder*
I can not imagine being near this storm, can not imagine how terrifying it was. I feel so badly for the people living in the path of these storms who have lost everything including family. Just devastating to see the pictures.
When I was a little kid we used to go to Missouri every other year to visit my grandparents and cousins. We always drove, and one year when we went through Oklahoma in this one little town there were several buildings that were destroyed and metal silos that looked like a giant had just crumpled them up.
My cousins in Missouri used to laugh at me when we were kids because I was terrified of tornados. They were far worse about the little bitty earthquakes when they came to visit us in California; I don’t know what they would have done if we’d had one above a 4 while they were visiting.
There was a “cold cone” tornado in Washington around 6 pm tonight, about 50 miles north of Seattle in Mount Vernon. It never touched down, which was lucky. Lots of camera phone pictures and videos of it on the 11pm news.
kdaug
@jehrler:
Here in central Texas, it’s because it’s solid rock. You want a basement, you’re gonna have to blast it out.
debbie
Does anybody remember this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHBZylcxIvw
bob h
The only thing I know is that it is Alabama today, New Jersey/New York tomorrow. We had warnings yesterday in NNJ, and there were tornadoes that set down along the NJ/NY state line.
DBrown
AGW – its the shit sandwich will are all being served – get use to it because storms like this will hit more often and even harder. But no one could have predicted AGW just ask the entire climate science community and besides, no way we could ever had a reason to cut back on our oil use and develop alternate energy sources – just ask Carter.
Now the really tragic part – counting all the bodies of humans that all had lives of value and are forever lost because of the price we pay for our fuel hungry ways. Millions will follow in the coming years thanks to our refusal to listen and our greed to have more, now.
WereBear
I’m … you know… flabbergasted.
I’ve always thought of it as a “Get out of Life Free” card; but to casually look forward to it just blows my mind.
You take out what you put in, I suppose.
4jkb4ia
Oh, shit. 195 people!
St. Louis was very lucky. Only the airport terminal got totaled.
Don Quijote
@jehrler:
But that would be government intervention, Socialism…
Don Quijote
@ronin122:
Mega Dittoes god buddy…
Don Quijote
@No one of Importance:
These people have spent the last thirty years trying to drag the rest of the country down to their level of ignorance and stupidity, they have voted for people who have done everything they could to prevent any preparation/mitigation of Climate Change/Global Warming, demonizing the Federal Government and the people who live in the North-East & the West Coast, now that the shoe on the other foot, f**k them, time to live with the consequences of their actions…
As for the non-conservatives who live down there, move out…
ET
I went to undergrad there and I am having a hard time figuring out where places are. Much has changed about T-town since the early 1990’s but the destruction is very disorienting.
Thankfully my cousin and her family live an strong house but she had a neighbor a street down whose house was destroyed (this was in the University McFarland Blvd area) not far from University Mall and 15th that really got hit hard.
No one of Importance
@Don Quijote:
Even if you could prove every single one of ‘these people’ had consistently and viciously done what you had said – which I doubt – you’d still be a soulless sack of shit for wishing this fate on complete strangers, people without any real power and likely people without any real wealth either.
God, is compassion and common decency as outdated in your country as the concept of lending your neighbours a helping hand? So glad I don’t share a coastline with you.
Ash Can
@ronin122:
@Don Quijote:
You guys realize that there’s no difference between you and all those “God hates (disaster area du jour) because of (gays/lesbians/sinners/feminists/liberals),” asshole Bible-wavers, right?
Porsena
@Don Quijote: Uh, seeing as Birmingham was hardest hit and that the city is about 75% black (and a Democratic stronghold), you might want to be careful flinging around terms like “these people”.
Move out? And I take it you suggestion for African famine is to “just move to Europe!”? Fucking moron ….
chopper
@Triassic Sands:
the great plainfield tornado started in my town before moving on to wreck the shit out of pfield. drove through there the next day and the destruction was horrific. it looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off.
once you see F5 damage you gain a lifelong appreciation for mother nature.
scarshapedstar
@No one of Importance:
Yes, it was a sick joke, but it’s one that you don’t get.
I’m sure, on your side of the planet, the only reaction to the sight of 2,000 elderly, destitute New Orleanians being left to drown in Katrina was one of horror. It probably never occurred to you that a single blog commenter, much less an entire news network, would declare that these were all shiftless negroes who deserved their fate, and that it was about time somebody cleaned up New Orleans, even if it took the Hand of God. You probably wouldn’t believe that, even today, I still get a right-wing chain mail every couple months about how white people would have fixed the levees and saved the city. At least 27% of America would nod in agreement. Do the math. Welcome to America!
If the governors of Mississippi and Alabama can tut-tut about how they’d have done so much better than that woman Democrat and The Blacks(c), then I can send some snark their way. Along with support for the people who’ve lost their homes and loved ones, in whatever form that may take, but I don’t think a blog comment really matters much.
gex
I’m trying to think what I as a gay person did to cause God to punish these red states so. Can’t come up with it. Do you suppose this was just a weather event?
No one of Importance
@scarshapedstar:
Oh bullshit. It was a mean-spirited comment inspired by mean-spirited emotions which you confirm by saying “If the governors of Mississippi and Alabama can tut-tut about how they’d have done so much better than that woman Democrat and The Blacks”. The fact that other bloggers said vile things about Katrina (and yes, I’ve seen those, and the comments by Americans crowing about Japan’s disaster), doesn’t make your comment any less vile.
You meant it, and other commenters agreed with you. If you were really being sarcastic, you’d be chastising *them* for taking you seriously, not me.
You’re disgusting and so are they. You don’t show ignorant people who are afraid and confused by deliberate obfuscation of serious science issues that you’re superior by dancing on the graves of their newly dead – you show them compassion and kindness and a helping hand, demonstrating that right is really on your side.
scarshapedstar
@No one of Importance:
Who? Where? When?
Again: who? Nobody else seemed to think much of it.
scarshapedstar
I guess I should mention that I’m not just bringing this stuff up at random; I live in Louisiana and my house had six pine trees fall on top of it during Katrina, but it could have been much worse. And it wasn’t just bloggers heaping scorn upon the tragedy; my own goddamn grandfather was the one forwarding the racist emails. And I’m not kidding about the Governors tut-tutting us, either. Fucking look it up.
I’m bitter about it and that’s not gonna change. That said, you’re right. I shouldn’t be spreading the bitterness around like this.
No one of Importance
@scarshapedstar:
You mean you didn’t notice ronin122 agreeing with you when you answered him, or Don Quijote agreeing with both of you?
Bullshit.
The vile behaviour of others doesn’t make it okay to be vile yourself or mock the dead. Get over yourself.
Berial
@jehrler: I’ve lived in Mississippi my whole life. I’ve never really questioned why we don’t have cellars here, no one has them so you just don’t think about it, but I’m pretty sure it’s because you couldn’t easily keep the water out. The water table is VERY high here and our basements would become underground “cement ponds” in pretty short order.
Many people I know do have a storm shelter if they have the room for one. It’s almost always a buried plastic container separate from the house. Still think the people that own them tend to be people that have already lived through a tornado or two. That tends to be a huge motivator.
My home doesn’t have a cellar or a storm shelter simply because I don’t have enough land to put one in. My grandparents on the other hand had several acres and made a point of having a storm shelter, though why they put it 70 yards from the house I’ll never know.