What Stands in a Storm (10 page)

Mrs. Spann worked hard, loved her son, and supported him in her job as the high school secretary—the best job she could get in Greenville without a college degree. She would never remarry and she remained a single working mother in an era when that was not common.

In fifth grade, James and his mother cut loose from Greenville, hoping to find better luck and employment in the bigger city of Tuscaloosa. Only the fifth-largest city in Alabama, Tuscaloosa still felt vast
and bewildering to a twelve-year-old small-town boy. Spann and his mother would live in an apartment the size of a bathroom until Mrs. Spann was able to finish her degree and get a job teaching high school English. But in this new town they met people who encouraged and helped them in ways he would never forget. With the blind fortune he would later relate to in the movie character Forrest Gump, James stumbled under the wing of several father figures who taught him many useful things and treated him like a son.

A physician who lived in a fancy neighborhood taught James how to operate an amateur radio and gave him his first equipment. James would later study electrical engineering in college. He was fascinated by structures and buildings, and he took things apart and put them back together to understand how they worked. It made him giddy to think that a wire antenna could enable you to talk to someone on the other side of the world. He took up ham radio with a passion eclipsed only later by his love of weather.

When he was fourteen, James paid a dime to Radio Shack for a little book that taught him how to go about getting an FCC radio license. He had to learn Morse code and take a written exam that was only offered twice a year in Birmingham. He climbed on a Greyhound bus for the hour-long ride to the biggest city in Alabama, walked a few blocks to the courthouse, and took the test in front of an FCC commissioner who came from Atlanta to proctor.

That license became his ticket into a world of new friends and confidence. Before he could drive, James helped cover severe weather as the network controller for the Office of Civil Defense, where he served as an operator for a nationwide network of storm spotters who radioed in ground truth. Once he was old enough to drive, he joined them in the field, chasing storms. He spent long, delicious hours driving the back roads of the Alabama Black Belt, climbing towers to hang repeater antennas, talking to the locals who congregated at gas stations, always turning his tires down the roads less traveled. Along the way he developed a mental map of Alabama
geography that would make him one of the best broadcast meteorologists of his time.

At sixteen, James was offered his first paying job, at a local commercial radio station. It was 1972, when stations still used giant reel tapes, which James fed into an automated machine that played them on the air. This was an FM station, but back then AM was the big thing, and James dreamed of one day speaking into a mic that would project his voice over the AM waves. Six months into his reel-loading job, he got that chance. His boss invited him to do an AM shift.

It was a cold November Sunday night, and in his mind, every single person in the range of that 250-watt station was listening when he played his first song, “Jessica,” by the Allman Brothers Band. He picked a longer song because he needed all the time he could get to curb the adrenaline coursing through his veins like a current. When the song ended, his heart was still pounding as he leaned into an open mic and spoke his first words on the air:

“The Big 1230, WTBC-AM!”

His skin broke out in goose bumps. The moment was—and remains to this day—the most thrilling of his career.

The summer before his senior year, James got together with some fellow radioheads and started a school radio station at Tuscaloosa High. Located in the attic of the school, it had two turntables and a microphone, and the signal reached no farther than the parking lot. James was beanpole-thin with a mop of brown hair, which was long enough to cover both ears and parted on the left. He wore collared shirts with stripes and sleeves that reached to his elbows, and headphones bigger than earmuffs. He still spoke with a Forrest Gump accent that would gradually vanish, along with his hair.

Two months before James's eighteenth birthday, the ingredients for a massive tornado outbreak came together in just the right recipe, and the atmosphere above thirteen central states convulsed with violent
thunderstorms. Warm, moist air—the fuel of a storm—drifted north from the Gulf of Mexico. A mass of air chilled and wrung dry by the Rockies slouched east. The cold front wedged itself under the warm air, further encouraging that less-dense air to rise. An area of low pressure hovered over southern Wisconsin, and air from surrounding areas rushed to fill it, as milk converges toward the spot in a glass being emptied by a straw. High above the earth, where airplanes fly, the river of air known as the upper-level jet stream shot northeast. A lower jet, closer to land, flowed north. Together, they spun the massive blob of rising air like a giant, invisible top. The rotation set into motion whorls within swirls, like curls of smoke.

On April 3, 1974, the sky unleashed 148 tornadoes upon a geographic alley that stretched from Alabama to Ontario. Many of them came in “families,” multiple tornadoes spawned by the same supercell thunderstorm. A staggering proportion of these funnels were large and violent: Seven F5 tornadoes and twenty-four F4s were confirmed in a twenty-four-hour period. At the crescendo of the outbreak, sixteen tornadoes raked the earth at once. When the winds died down, 319 people were dead. Alabama saw three F5 tornadoes that day and lost seventy-seven lives, more than any other state. It was the largest tornado outbreak ever recorded, an event that would be unparalleled for decades.

Tuscaloosa was not hit that night, but several other towns in Alabama were. In southern Limestone County, the small rural town of Tanner was destroyed by a one-two punch of tornadoes that hit thirty minutes apart. Each scoured the state for at least twenty miles. The first one sucked a water pump out of a well house and ripped power-line truss towers from their anchors and threw them; one was never found. The sun had already set and rescuers were rushing to help bleeding victims when the second killer emerged from the cloak of night. The two tornadoes killed more than fifty people, most of them in Tanner, and injured at least four hundred. One victim who had been critically injured by the first tornado was rushed to safety in a nearby church,
but when the second tornado struck the church, he died in its collapse. Ninety-seven miles south, the town of Guin was left in ruins by the longest-lived tornado of the day, an F5 that is considered one of the most violent ever recorded. It stayed on the ground for eighty miles.

As the storm raged into the night, James broadcast tornado warnings from the radio station. When he got off work at midnight, he rushed to the Civil Defense office and asked how he could help. He was dispatched with a police escort to Jasper, a small town about an hour north that had been obliterated by an F4. The Red Cross needed someone there with a radio, because the hospital was overwhelmed and had lost all lines of communication with other towns. Spann set up his ham radio in the emergency room of People's Hospital in Jasper.

Until that night, James, like many storm chasers, had wished for storms the way most boys wish for their team to win the World Series. Lightning and thunder were exciting, and the prospect of tornadoes—and the chase they inspired—was downright exhilarating to a teenage boy. He was happiest when the sky churned.

One night in the ER changed all that. What he saw in that hospital would give him night terrors for months. He could not erase the indelible sounds, smells, and images from his memory. He had seen death before, but not like this. Broken bodies. Torn flesh. Missing parts. Faces that mothers could not recognize. People killed and disfigured by airborne pieces of their homes. Only then did he understand what horrors the wind could inflict upon the human body. When it blew hard enough, household objects became missiles. Windows shattered and turned into shrapnel. If the wind could drive a pencil three inches into the trunk of a tree, if it could hurl a dump truck farther than a football field, if it could scour an entire town from the earth—what could it do to flesh and bone?

The smell the tornado left in its wake combined pine, sulfur, and natural gas with the sickly sweet smell of death. It was a nauseating, desperate smell that clung to his nostrils and turned his stomach in
every disaster zone he would ever visit. After one tornado, a man looked at him with ancient eyes and described the smell in words he would never forget:
It comes from the pit of hell.

But it was the people's eyes that would haunt him most. They were filled with terror, anguish, pain. In his nightmares they followed him pleadingly, looking out from bodies that were bleeding, impaled, and grossly disfigured. He wanted so badly to help these people, but he felt powerless to do so. Those eyes stabbed and wounded him in a place deep inside that would never fully heal. Spann would never speak in detail to anyone of what he saw.

“I saw things that no child should ever see,” he would later say. “That was the night I lost my innocence.”

3:00 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

James Spann had not had time to roll up his sleeves today. His jacket never made it on. The atmosphere was about to explode. The Cullman EF4 was still the only tornado on the ground in Alabama. But as it moved northwest toward Huntsville, other supercells were brewing in its wake.

The news desk had received encouraging reports from Cullman. The downtown had indeed taken a direct hit, but its buildings had been mostly vacant. The people who worked there had heard the warning sixteen minutes before the storm hit—enough time to flee to safety. The hospital had been spared by a narrow margin, and so far was reporting no fatalities.

Okay, maybe we're fine,
Spann thought.
Maybe we're gonna get through this.

In the Birmingham office of the National Weather Service, Meteorologist-in-Charge Jim Stefkovich leaned into his monitor, fighting the queasiness welling up in his stomach. He was not looking
at the Cullman tornado. His eyes were trained on Mississippi, watching the next round beginning to form.

It's about to happen
, he thought.
It's about to become the nightmare we said it would be.

Spann slid on his reading glasses and squinted at his laptop, where data streamed in from many different sources. Eight chat rooms were scrolling with warnings from eight NWS offices around the state. Twitter was exploding with ground truth. Spann's Facebook page was abuzz with live photos posted by viewers. The storm-spotter chat room was churning with observations, questions, and speculation.

Spann scanned and processed the data, quickly translating what he saw into something a third grader could understand and act upon. He thought of something a wise friend once told him:

The first storm of the event will talk to you. It will tell you a story. It's up to you to read the story.

The friend, Chuck Doswell, was one of the most respected research meteorologists in the study of severe weather, though he would scoff when people called him “the nation's foremost tornado expert.” At the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, Doswell had a reputation not only for his pioneering scientific study of storms but also for his blustery charisma. A six-foot-two native of the Chicago suburbs, he wore a battered straw cowboy hat, often paired with a Hawaiian shirt, and a Fu Manchu mustache that underscored a withering glare, which he aimed at anyone who professed “facts” about tornadoes that science had not proven.

Spann read everything he wrote but dreaded the prospect of giving a presentation with him in the audience. No one was immune from Doswell's concern for accuracy in presenting the science.

The two meteorologists had become good friends despite their many differences. A war veteran who spent eleven months in Vietnam, Doswell was a staunch and vocal atheist who described religion as a “narcissistic comfort in a myth . . . virtually certain to be a false comfort.” Spann was a devout Christian and a children's minister
who spent his weekends teaching Sunday school. Doswell was liberal, Spann conservative. They approached meteorology like two mountaineers climbing the same summit on different routes.