Tuscaloosa Tornado Images, 2011

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I grew up in Tuscaloosa, AL. Those were wild, fun, broken years. My High School experience was defined by a lot of great music, a lot of crazy stories, and a lot of angst for my parents. I needed to get away from Tuscaloosa as soon as I graduated, and life started elsewhere. My family moved to Tennessee, and I didn’t have much reason to go back except to visit friends. My group of friends peeled off for various reasons and lived vastly different lives.

Tuscaloosa... the land of Dreamland Barbecue, Alabama football, and a lot of history, some of it pretty shameful. But it has a rich heritage for such a small town. I hadn’t gone back in years, but the tornado that hit on April 27, 2011 decimated the city and a piece of my heart. It left neighborhoods and whole sections of Tuscaloosa wiped out. As is often the case in the cruelty of natural disasters, it hit the most poverty-stricken areas the hardest.

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I knew I had to go back immediately, I could feel it in my stomach. I friend of mine and I loaded up his car with a chainsaw and supplies and went down there ten days later, and they were still pulling bodies out of houses and buildings. The national guard had put the whole city on lockdown, and took up what seemed like acres in a tent city they had created off of university blvd.
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There was a girl who had terrorized me in high school, but was the only person who I could make contact with who knew what was going on on Facebook. She was a truck driver and worked for six days and did tornado relief on her only day off. She did this not for 2 weeks, like many people did, but for 6 months. She could do more with a chainsaw than I have ever seen. She got us some of the last two motel rooms in the city, and we stayed for three days and worked our tails off, but she worked twice as hard as anyone else. The friendship that came out of those trips back to Tuscaloosa was one of the most redemptive things that came out of that trip.

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We made friends with a couple whose home was in Alberta City, one of the hardest hit areas in Tuscaloosa. Cynthia was a well beloved lunchroom lady at a local school. Mike did construction and was so brave and real about what they were going through. Six months after the storm, 7 claims adjustors from their insurance company had come out, but they hadn’t received any money or help. They were in the bathroom when the tornado hit, and like many, could feel the storm trying to suck them out of their own home. They started to pray, and told the storm how big their God was, and felt it start to move on. Their home was one of the only ones standing on their street. The church, less than 100 feet from them, was totally demolished.

I went to Tuscaloosa four times to capture this story, to visit the friends I made, and to watch the city be restored. You can see some of the photos here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/makano/albums/72157626746331648/with/5732343202/

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.
~William Kennedy

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