Debris from a home litters a yard the day after a tornado blew it off its foundation, lower right, in Beauregard, Alabama. Photo / AP
Debris from a home litters a yard the day after a tornado blew it off its foundation, lower right, in Beauregard, Alabama. Photo / AP
Three of us were headed back from a bachelor party in Savannah, Georgia.
The groom's little brother and a fellow groomsman piled in my car around 10.45 am US Eastern time, headed back home after a weekend of celebrating. We decided to take the back roads home to avoid the Atlanta traffic.
There was supposed to be lots of rain, possibly severe thunderstorms - there'd been an abnormal amount of rainfall in our state this year, overflowing dams and causing flash floods - and we didn't want to get stuck on the interstate in all that.
Ironically, that decision is what put us in hell's fire, there: smack in the middle of a deadly tornado outbreak.
Growing up in the Southeast, you get somewhat used to tornadoes. As a child you're taught to watch for abnormal wind and cloud movement, and what you're supposed to do when the sirens go off. At preschool in the '90s, we drilled by rushing away from the windows and cramming into the hallways and stairwells.
But what people outside of this area don't understand is that tornadoes don't give you a lot of warning. They can pop up out of nowhere quickly.
It's not like a hurricane; your warning, if you're lucky, is a 15-minute heads up. You learn to always listen to the weather forecast and never to take tornado watches lightly.
When at 3.30 pm we stopped for gas within a few miles of the Columbus, Georgia, area, all of our phones started screeching with the tornado alerts. We checked the radar and saw that the first wave of storms was barrelling towards Smith Station, Alabama, at about 55 miles per hour (88km/h). Our path would have taken us through it, so we decided to stay put, wait it out and possibly revise our route.
At first it was eerily calm and dark - way too dark for that time of day - and then lightning lit up the sky. As soon as we saw those clouds pass, and confirmed their trajectory on the radar, we were ready to get going. We thought if we sat for too long, we'd get stuck in the hours of storms that would follow, late into the night - and possibly in the direct path of another wave of tornadoes.
We drove past a gas station with blown-out windows and a billboard with its banner torn off, and then a wooded area, with its trees ripped away. It looked like a knife cut through the earth.
We started noticing the first-responder sirens and lights. This seemed both good and bad - on the one hand, people were getting help very quickly. On the other, people needed that help. The mood in the car turned tense as the adrenaline woke us up, and put us on high alert.
Alex Miller. Photo / Washington Post
When people who've never lived through a tornado imagine what it's like, in their heads they see a chiselled funnel cloud that looks as much like a tornado as the statue of David looks like a human being - they see the funnel that rips through Dorothy's house and sends her to Oz. Often, though, tornadoes are often shrouded in the clouds, which makes them even more dangerous. You're blind to the cell until you're right inside it.
At some point, I looked down at my phone and realised that the radar was lagging by some 20 minutes - which meant that the storm was much closer than it looked, and that it was strong enough to knock down cell towers, and we couldn't monitor its progress anymore. This is the dilemma: If you take shelter, you could just be sitting in the storm's path, but if you try to ride it out in a car, you could get hit there, too, in the last place you want to be.
When we got to Smiths Station, we spotted a gas station and parked right by the door. We weren't exactly picky about finding the safest refuge: In a crisis, you don't have the luxury of shopping around for an ideal shelter.
While one of us checked to see if the place was open, my friend and I stayed in our seats a few minutes longer, to give our phones some more juice. I kept an eye on the swirl of clouds. The traffic was thinning out, fast: a state trooper directed people to a Dollar General parking lot across the street, which was rapidly filling up with cars. Then our friend waved us in: the station attendant wanted to lock the doors to protect against the wind.
When I headed inside, I saw 10 to 15 people huddled in the back hallways, some of them hiding in the bathroom. Most of them were travellers, like us. There were a couple of little kids there, quietly playing with their dog. They seemed to think it was an adventure. Their parents, holding them, seemed much more anxious. Everyone was jumpy, on edge. We didn't talk much.
Kayla Causey sifts through the debris while helping her mother retrieve personal items after a tornado destroyed her home in Beauregard. Photo / AP
Outside, the climax began. We heard that high whistle of the wind blowing through the town, and the sheets of water beating the roof. A stormchaser van, tricked out with antennae and barometers, came screeching into the parking lot - you know it's bad when even those guys are seeking refuge - and then barrelled out again. The gas station attendants urged us to get away from the windows and bunkered down as it started to come in. Other people's phones were going off, their loved ones calling to warn them that worse was coming, making everyone more frightened.
After about 40 minutes, the rain was letting up, and the skies had brightened. Checking the time, we figured we had about 15 minutes until the next surge of storms. We could get out of there and beat this thing. My group sort of exchanged nods, then raced to the car and sped north. As we were leaving, we saw debris from what must have been the Beauregard, Alabama, area - broken plywood and fiberglass insulation from homes, sheet-metal sidings blown off warehouses, pieces of rubber tyre. A truck with a trailer had gotten flung in a ditch.
But then after about 15 minutes of driving, we hit the interstate. All we saw then was sunshine. It was almost surreal. You'd never have known that there had been a major storm.
When I settled in back home and saw the reporting about the destruction, and watched the casualty count rise, it really hit me. I knew, then, just how fortunate we'd been.
In 2011, the Tuscaloosa tornadoes hit my father's neighbourhood in north Birmingham, Alabama. It blew down dozens of trees on his property - many of them more than 70 years old - and ravaged his neighbours' houses; my dad said that from the shelter in his basement, it sounded like a train rushing over him.
But the flimsy patio furniture sitting outside his house didn't seem to have moved an inch.
That's the strange nature of these weather events: a tornado that could kill dozens of people and destroy their homes could somehow leave us without a scratch.
As told to Post editor Sophia Nguyen by Miller, who graduated from Auburn University in 2014, and now lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where he works in technology sales and software development.
