What Stands in a Storm (28 page)

In Priceville, Danielle's family slept fitfully. Her father, Ed, had fallen asleep in a chair by the phone, waiting for a call that never came. He had not heard from Kelli's mother since eight or nine o'clock, when she had called to tell him that the house had been hit, that the rescue workers were on site, and that they should wait to come until morning.

Terri finally nodded off despite the gospel music that had been playing in her head since the hour of the storm. It was the strangest thing. She had never really listened to gospel, such a contrast from the solemn hymns that sighed from the organ of the Catholic church. She found it curious but not unpleasant. It drowned out the ringing that filled her ears most days, damage from working around humming electronics. But this evening she felt ensconced in a cone of silence, with no background noise to interfere with this strange and enchanting music being piped into her head.

At 1:00 a.m. an African-American woman's voice, robust and lovely, blasted her awake. It was soulful and powerful, with a crisp and joyful chorus. Her husband, Ed, heard nothing. But Terri could hear it as clearly as if this woman were belting it out in her room. She turned to her husband.

“Let's go.”

4:45 A.M., THURSDAY, APRIL 28, 2011—TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA

A mile-wide gash bisected the city. Along it, more than 1,200 homes had been destroyed, and another 1,612 homes damaged. More than twenty thousand Tuscaloosans lived or worked along this path, and more than twenty-five hundred families were now homeless. The sewer plant had been hit. The water system had failed. The death toll was unknown. From the look of things, it had to be staggering. Would there be fifty? One hundred? Five hundred bodies? It would be days before they knew for sure. Refrigerated trucks were standing by to catch the overflow from the morgues.

The situation almost seemed like nature's cruel joke, as if the tornado had chosen its path with wicked intent, destroying the very things the city needed to respond. The EMA headquarters were demolished. Much of the city's heavy equipment for removing debris was totaled. Two communications towers were crushed. There were broken gas lines, water lines, and power lines citywide. The hospital was overwhelmed by several orders of magnitude. The agencies that came to aid in times like this, the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, had taken a hard hit themselves.

Search-and-rescue teams all over town were changing shifts. The surface victims had all been swept to the hospital, and now the primary search was under way, the hunt for buried victims in the closing window of time in which they might still be alive. The missing-persons
list was growing into the hundreds, and the mile-wide corridor of devastation was six miles long.

The search was methodical and tedious, covering a grid drawn over a map of the city, each box crossed off as it was cleared. It was also dangerous. Some structures teetered on the verge of collapse, and the blanket of debris concealed perils underneath. One fireman stepped onto a patch of rubble that gave way under his boot like a trapdoor; had he fallen into the swimming pool beneath, his heavy turnout gear would have dragged him to the bottom like an anchor. With the chaos and ruptured communication lines, teams found themselves searching areas they did not realize had already been cleared. The body count and missing-persons lists were riddled with duplication.

But crisis is a catalyst for courage, and teams of responders from all parts of the state drew together like bands of brothers. Driven beyond exhaustion by adrenaline, they crawled over a thousand felled trees and lifted ten thousand splintered boards.

At a lonely intersection, a single police officer from another city waved traffic through. Friends had arrived to help.

6:07 A.M.—DRUID CITY HOSPITAL, TUSCALOOSA

The staff at the hospital had been working for twelve solid hours on patients who had arrived in droves, bleeding through the hallways, waiting in a wounded, pitiful line that stretched out of the ER's sliding glass doors and into the parking lot. Babies had been lost and found. No one had any idea how many patients they had treated, or even the real names of the ones in the beds. Organizational procedures had gone to hell.

But help, too, had arrived in droves. Off-duty doctors and nurses showed up for work, as did medical professionals employed somewhere else. A group of students from the Capstone College of Nursing
arrived and offered to pitch in. Just shy of getting their licenses, they could not legally treat patients, but Andrew Lee put them to work in other ways. He handed them babies, told them to walk the halls until the babies reached out for a parent. More than a few families reunited this way.

They did not stop to eat, but strangers kept them fed. A box of Little Debbies landed like air-dropped emergency munitions, and the staff had passed them hand-to-hand in the hallways. A woman brought an SUV filled with deli sandwiches. Pallets of water and Coca-Cola appeared in an endless stream. The pace slowed a little as the evening wore on, but the doctors and nurses braced themselves for another wave of patients chasing the dawn.

As the sun peeked over the horizon at 6:07 a.m., the disaster coordinator, Andrew Lee, took an elevator to the seventh floor to look out on the city. He joined about a hundred others pressed against the glass, gaping at the ragged corridor that stretched out in both directions.

It missed the university by a mile.

It missed the hospital by less.

In the lobby of the Wingate, guests milled around the continental breakfast bar like refugees. They lingered by the flat-screen TV, where live images flashed in awful succession, tiny thumbnails of the giant horror unfolding just a few miles away. The hotel's ninety-seven rooms were all booked with a motley mix of people: families who had crawled out of ruined homes, parents searching for their college kids, emergency workers from other states, news crews from around the world. Some guests had lost every possession they owned. Some had lost even more.

Ashley Mims glanced at the news as they passed through the lobby. On it, she saw a mother waving a photograph of a pretty brunette, a university student around Loryn's age. The mother had been
up all night, searching in the dark for her daughter. Ashley felt chords of empathy quiver in her chest.

The day after the tornado hit, Danielle's sister rode quietly in the passenger seat on the drive to Tuscaloosa, next to her fiancé at the wheel. Michelle had brought the stack of missing-persons flyers they made last night. Outside it was cooler and drier than yesterday. Mississippi's eastern plains were lush with trees filling out, unfurling new leaves, stretching skyward with the hopeful, effervescent green that is the color of spring in the South. It was a beautiful day, but she could not shake the black dread that coiled in her belly like a viper.

Her parents were driving south to Tuscaloosa from Priceville, and her father called and talked quietly with Clay. They agreed to meet up at Druid City Hospital, where they hoped to find Danielle. Ed Downs was wary of what they might see there, and he worried about Michelle seeing it.

“Don't let Michelle go in the hospital,” he told Clay. “Whatever you do, keep her outside.”

Around eight o'clock, Ed and Terri Downs pulled off the interstate and became ensnarled in traffic on McFarland Boulevard, where emergency vehicles were fighting their way through a river of gawkers. Throngs of onlookers dumbly waved smartphones at the people lifting boards. A responder in steel-toe boots looked at all the flip-flops and shook her head.

The Veterans Affairs Medical Center stood like a sentinel in an out-of-the-way part of town where most students never ventured. Built in 1932, it was a beautiful structure, the centerpiece of a campus of medical buildings on 125 wooded acres. No longer a hospital or emergency facility—it had stopped performing surgeries and taking inpatients many years ago—it now provided outpatient care and housed a
nursing home. It also had the largest morgue in the city, with bays for forty bodies.

At the entrance to the VA lobby, a pretty blonde woman with a clipboard stood in front of the sliding glass doors. A VA administrator and a former RN, Connie Booth was prepared for an influx of veterans. Some would be newly homeless and might need a place at the Red Cross shelter, which was being set up in the auditorium. Others might have lost their medicines and need a new prescription. Some might be injured and come to the VA for emergency care, even though the city's only operating ER was just a few miles away at DCH.

Before she saw a single veteran step through the sliding doors, she felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned with a smile to a young face pale with panic.

“There's a family here,” the young employee said. “They're looking for their daughter's body!”

Booth stared back at her, uncomprehending, as the ambulances began arriving.

Bodies? Why are they bringing us bodies?

She soon learned that the VA was the city's official morgue, as laid out in the mayor's new emergency plan. Her morgue already contained about a dozen bodies that had been brought in overnight. A temporary morgue, a trailer cooled to frigid temperatures, was on its way from Montgomery. A temporary morgue? How many casualties were there? No one could even guess.

A police officer dropped off a stack of color photographs documenting each recovery. Taken on the scene before bodies were moved, they were gruesome and disturbing, like something from a crime scene investigation. As a nurse, she had seen death before, many times, but she blanched as she looked at these photographs.

I can't show these to a parent!

Booth called her staff photographer, a young woman who was only twenty-five, who took pictures of ribbon cuttings and smiling veterans. This girl had never seen a cadaver. But she did not hesitate when
Booth explained what she needed to do. They gathered in the morgue with a group of VA nurses who were equally inexperienced for the task at hand, and equally willing to rise to it. All the women agreed: They had to clean up these bodies before the families arrived to claim them.