This photo from the subsequent cleanup was the only one The Planet could readily lay hands [planetary rings?] on nine years after the tornadoes that devastated Dade on April 27, 2011. Do you have your own tornado pics and tornado stories? Marshana Sharp at the Dade County Public Library would like to see them.
In this shot, which was taken for The Dade Sentinel in June 2011, the original cutline was: Phillip Brown (left) and LeBron Williams pose in front of one of the many piles of tornado debris on Highway 301. Georgia has forbidden FEMA trucks to pick up rubble along state roads, preferring to do the job itself--but so far, say residents, nobody is doing it.
Editor's Note: Marshana Sharp, manager of the Dade County Library, is putting together a book for the 10th anniversary of the April 27, 2011, tornadoes next year. She is collecting photos and stories now. If you'd like to contribute yours, stop by the library or email Ms. Sharp at msharp@chrl.org. The following is my personal recollection. rfw.
During this winter's smattering of climatic scares, my mind has skittered back to April 27, 2011, the day that taught us all to take the weather seriously. Before then, I'd always enjoyed a good storm. Now I'm like dogs I've had through the years who spend thunderstorms shivering under the bed hiding from the boom-booms. After three tornadoes hit us in one day that spring, I'm no longer so crazy about boom-booms myself.
I remember April 27 was a Wednesday because that was the day The Dade County Sentinel came out. The Sentinel was my newspaper then and probably not one human being ever read the front-page story I'd written that was published that day. I think it was something about the Hutcheson deal, when Erlanger had lent the failing public hospital millions of bucks and Dade and the other two counties it served were asked to back a bond to pay Erlanger back. Now that doesn't seem interesting enough for the front page--but it didn't seem interesting at all on the morning of April 27, when the first tornado hit around 8 a.m.
At my house in Deerhead Cove, we were affected mostly by that first one. My husband was supposed to drive to Chattanooga but didn't--our dirt road was blocked by fallen trees in both directions. Wednesday was a lazy day for me and I was still lying in bed, but I woke up when the storm knocked down a mighty oak at the bottom of the yard. Our electricity went out, not to come back on for 11 days. The huge tree fell diagonally almost all the way to the house, obscuring the whole yard, taking out the vegetable garden and spoiling the rest of that spring's asparagus harvest.
But that was it, nothing much in the grand scheme of things, nobody hurt and no damage to the house. That's what I said when we were talking about 2011, a little clump of us at the library a few weeks ago, while I was checking out some books. Volunteer Linda Wilson said at her house in Rising Fawn, that same 8 a.m. tornado had knocked a tree onto her husband's pickup truck in the driveway, doing some damage--but then she made a similar disclaimer to mine, that they'd been lucky and everybody had made it through the storm just fine.
That reminded me of the general post-tornado atmosphere in Dade and the Rising Fawn Metro Area nine years ago. We all kept making the most extravagant avowals of how blessed and fortunate we were--wasn't it lucky the tornado had happened at the end of April, commented one of my neighbors, so that cooking outdoors was a pleasure and we didn't miss the electric heat? Repeating it here, it all sounds a little Pollyanna, but we were all absolutely sincere. Those of us who had made it through unscathed were giddy with relief and gratitude--because not everybody had.
That was abundantly clear as we discussed it at the library. Library manager Marshana Sharp, who lives on Sand Mountain, had much more dramatic stories to tell--multiple friends and neighbors killed, multiple friends and neighbors who had lost their homes, the library itself devastated.
The library, you'll remember, was temporarily housed that spring, while the permanent building was being renovated, in the old CVS storefront in the Ingle's shopping center, which took a pretty good licking. Roofs came off at both the library and the Ingle's. Marshana and the other staffers waded through the debris, saving what they could of the library's historical collections. The library had to move into the old Trenton Depot with the Dade Chamber of Commerce, and the Ingle's didn't open back up until Labor Day. It was a pain for regular shoppers but much worse for the staff--I'd see some of them at the Ingle's in Jasper, Tenn., when I went there, and they told me others were driving even further afield to stay working.
Photo: This newspaper box, with the April 28 headline, stood on the Ingle's sidewalk for months as the building was repaired. I think I went there hoping to get a shot of the April 27 Dade Sentinel as well, with my boring piece about the hospital that nobody ever read.
But back to April 27, 2011: The second tornado hit around 3 p.m., the third that evening, as I recall around 6 p.m. I think it was no. 2 that took the roof off Dade Elementary School. By no. 3, everybody's nerves were a-jangle. We knew it was coming--the forecasters were tracking it closely. At our house, my husband had fixed up a bolt hole for us in the hall closet, which is nestled under the stairs that go up to the second story. He'd stocked it with flashlights, food--a loaf of bread, I think, very helpful--and jugs of water. He's a caver and doesn't mind closed spaces. I'm not and I do. I imagined us huddled there in the dark gnawing pieces of bread while the house fell down on top of us, and I refused to have anything to do with it.
Instead, as zero hour approached, I sat on the porch in a rocking chair. My plan if the tornado hit us was to run for the driveway and get in the truck with my seatbelt on. My husband didn't like it but he came out to die with me, and we sat there sipping red wine and listening to the weird sounds the storm made. Thunder seemed to come from all sides, constant and all around us. I thought of that Bob Dylan tour in the '70s called Rolling Thunder, but what I have always afterwards compared the noise to is what it would sound like inside a vacuum cleaner. It was scary as hell.
Here's a parenthetical memory about that horrible sound: Across the front of a house on South Main Street in Trenton that got hit--what was left of it--the owner painted in big red letters you could see from the street I THOUGHT IT WAS A TRAIN. That always struck me as a fine bit of gallows humor, plus local color at the same time--as locals know, there is no place in Dade that life is not dominated by the sound of those trains hurtling down the tracks that run smack down the middle of the valley. But I also thought, what good would knowing it wasn't a train have done the homeowner? The tornado was fixin' to hit just the same.
But back to my house: I don't remember how long we sat there on our porch waiting to be blown to Oz, but somehow it was abruptly all over, with no harm done. I concluded cheerfully that it had been what Mr. Shakespeare called "sound and fury, signifying nothing." It wasn't for an hour or so that we learned that the entire south part of Trenton was gone.
Dade County had lost any number of houses and buildings--Moore Funeral Home, doctors' and lawyers' offices, apartment complexes, not to mention the school. Two people had been killed. On Sand Mountain it was much worse, something like 30 dead on the Alabama side. In the aftermath, I remember corpse-sniffing dogs going through the rubble of the apartment buildings on Highway 11.
That's a dramatic memory, but this is a personal account and here's one that isn't so dramatic: Hats. For the first few days after the tornado, everybody wore 'em because nobody could wash their hair. First there wasn't any water, then there wasn't any hot water because there wasn't any electricity.
I remember veritable armies of bucket trucks from the phone and electric companies, and "armies" is a good word because Dade County looked like a war zone. Power lines were down everywhere, but I remember them posing particular danger on Back Valley Road, where they were waving free or trailing along the pavement. You can still see the tornado's path down Sand Mountain and across to Middleton Estates on Back Valley.
Georgia Power got Dade's lines back up fairly chop-chop, but Rainsville, where the power cooperative that serves those on the Alabama side is headquartered, had been utterly decimated, so Alabama residents were in the dark a good deal longer.
At our house the lid of an empty garbage can had blown off during the high winds and it had filled with water during the torrential rains. This was providential because we used this to flush the downstairs toilet for the next week. Probably it didn't do that good a job but since the bathroom was unlit until the electricity came back on no sensibilities were irreparably offended. We're on a well with an electric pump, so we had to do without running water longer than most. We in fact eventually had to move out for a while.
Meanwhile, at the newspaper we were doing our best not just to memorialize the disaster but to get information out about where to find relief. And help could be found all over. A woman I met later, who had moved to the area shortly before the disaster, told me she had decided this was a mean, gossipy little place and was thinking of leaving. Then, after the tornado hit, she was so impressed at how everybody pitched in to help everybody else that she changed her mind and settled in.
Everybody pitched in. Clothes and hot meals were provided by volunteers at Trenton United Methodist and around the clock at American Legion Post 106. Volunteers made the parking lot of Trenton First Baptist into a days-long cookout. The vets at the Legion post formed into chainsaw gangs to deal with houses cut off by fallen trees.
There was a spirit of volunteerism you could have cut with a knife. I myself made my first-ever church supper casserole--I'm not a churchgoer but I wanted, ached to help like everyone else, so I took a big weird pan of something I'd cooked on a camp stove to the UMC. Later I kicked myself for not thinking of donating the contents of our freezer to the kitchen there. They had electricity and we didn't, and I ended up burying a lot of it in the garden. Luckily all sorts of people had thought of that, plus the stores chipped in, and the churches didn't lack for food.
This is a personal recollection and I have a memory that has been described as merciless, so I will note that in all this flow of community love there were a few sour notes, too. The Food Lion gave away free gallons of drinking water. I noticed Bi-Lo had raised their price. It seems a little less mean to remember that now that both grocery stores have been sold.
The Red Cross set up a temporary shelter in Trenton but the administration infuriated local volunteers--they wanted cash only, please, not the food the guys in the church parking lot were cooking on their grills. There was some similar SNAFU with bedding provided by the churches. So the "official" Red Cross shelter only lasted a night or two and people stayed instead at the unofficial one at the UMC. Everyone got mad at the Red Cross!
Including me. Again, I have that unforgiving memory and since the tornado, running The Planet, I've noticed whenever there's a disaster anywhere near here how many press releases the organization sends me about all the good they're doing. Right, I think: At the hint of high wind, you get your PR writers right on it. Anyway, I don't publish the releases.
Maybe there's a lesson there in how we country folks deal with officialdom v. neighbors, later illustrated rather dramatically when the FEMA and GEMA (Federal/Georgia Emergency Management Agency) people showed up at the Dade Administration Building to dispense largesse from Atlanta.
As I recall there was some problem on the highway and they arrived a couple of hours late. People were getting testy, I suppose, but one way or the other there was a nasty atmosphere by the time they got here. I remember a man shouting as the agents walked in, "They'd have been here soon enough IF WE WERE BLACK!" Which several of the Atlanta people were, of course. I was embarrassed--everyone had been so neighborly and sweet recently; why did they have to turn mean now? I'm originally from Atlanta myself, and I wanted the city folks to like us.
State employees are notoriously surly, though, so I don't reckon I had much chance there in the first place. I remember getting my head torn off by one of the GEMA guys later on (a white one, FYI). I was trying to interview him about what the emergency folks were doing in town, just featury, general-interest stuff. He was not cooperating, just getting surlier by the second, pretending not to understand what I wanted. Finally I said, "I mean, when you go home at night, what do you tell your wife you've been doing all day?"
Bang! The surliness tornado touched down. "You can abuse me all you want, they pay me to put up with people like you, BUT LEAVE MY WIFE OUT OF THIS," he screamed. "THEY CAN'T MAKE ME TALK ABOUT MY WIFE. THERE'S NO WAY YOU CAN FORCE ME..." I figured, what? Maybe a divorce or something? Anyway, I didn't get my feature.
There were plenty of skirmishes between Georgia and the county government in the cleanup, too. The photo I used at the beginning illustrates one--the county wanted to clear up the masses of detritus on Highway 301 but it was GDOT's road and the state wanted to do it itself...eventually.
Well, I'll stop harping about the snarls. People in general were good to each other, spectacularly so. I'd never seen anything like it.
It took forever to clean up after the storm, and I don't want to close without mentioning the things we would find walking in the pastures down here at the bottom of Sand Mountain. We found pieces of people's roofs, of course, but also any number of personal items from inside their houses. I remember finding medical bills, dress patterns, photographs.
I will now shut up, not having meant to go on as long as I have. But April 27, 2011, was a monumental piece of our local history and there is a lot to say about it. That is a reality that Marshana Sharpe will have to deal with as she collects material for the book she plans to publish at the Dade County Public Library next year for the 10th anniversary of the tornadoes. Her original thought was for it to be a book of photographs, but then she began instead talking about a collection of photos and stories. I told her in that case it will have to be a pretty long book.
If you would like to contribute to the commemorative project, please email your photos-slash-memories to Marshana at the email address listed above, or drop by the library, where, by the way, the staff can help you scan and retain any hard-copy photographs. For more information, the library's number is (706) 657-7857.
