Tornado, then terror as family took cover
Alabama twister tossed homes around like toys
BEAUREGARD, Ala. – Jordan Miller now knows the terror that comes from calling 911 and not getting help. He also knows how to use a chainsaw.
Miller, 17, survived the Sunday afternoon tornado that devastated a swath of his rural hometown and killed 23 people, including his best friend’s grandmother. His skills with a chainsaw helped save several lives.
Miller huddled with his friend’s family inside their double-wide mobile home on Lee Road – his friend’s sister, mom and grandmother beneath a mattress – as the twister roared through, plucking the house from the ground and tossing it like a toy.
“Ain’t nobody in Beauregard deserved this,” Miller said Monday night after helping sort through debris. Sitting in a pickup plastered with tornado-shredded grass and mud, Miller shuddered as he remembered what happened barely 24 hours earlier.
“We heard it coming, but by the time we knew what it was, it hit us. That’s when all hell broke loose,” said Steve Whatley, 36, a refrigerator mechanic who owns the home where Miller sheltered. “It picked us up and dumped us back down 50 feet away.”
The winds were so intense, they “sucked the contacts out of my eyes,” Whatley said in disbelief.
Whatley’s wife is hospitalized with
“We heard it coming, but by the time we knew what it was, it hit us.” Steve Whatley
multiple injuries, grieving the loss of her home and her mother, Vicki Braswell, 69. The home collapsed, trapping the three women beneath the mattress and a wall. Whatley, his son and Miller squirmed free and tried to lift the wall from the women. Too heavy.
Miller called 911, the phone ringing and ringing and ringing. A full minute went by. No one answered.
Panic set in. The women were trapped, injuries obvious. The wind had died and an eerie calm fall over the area as the temperature plummeted.
“It’s like we were all alone,” Miller said. “You call the one person you call when you need help, and nothing.”
Rain soaked the men as they frantically tried to rescue the women. That’s when Miller remembered the chainsaw in Whatley’s shed – a shed mangled beyond recognition by a storm that snapped trees like toothpicks and sent power lines snaking across the road. He grabbed the saw from where the wind jammed it into the ground and fired it up.
“Once I saw the girls were stuck, my first thought was ‘Find the chainsaw, ’cause that’s the only thing that will work,’ ” Miller said.
The women were freed. Whatley said they tried CPR on his mother-in-law but couldn’t save her.
The twister was part of a brutal storm system that also roared through parts of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida on Sunday. Meteorologists say it hit Lee County as an EF4 tornado with winds of 170 mph, slicing a nearly mile-wide path over at least 24 miles.
Many of the dead were sucked from their homes and either thrown or hit by swirling debris – including one victim who died after being tossed into a parked car outside – as family members watched in horror, Harris said.
Whatley and his friends spent hours Monday picking through the crushed remains of his family home. A native of the area, Whatley rubbed his eyes as he thought of what might come next. The fresh scent of pine from the broken and cut trees hung in the air as he surveyed the damage, the clean smell at stark odds with the devastation on display.
Pink insulation torn from homes fluttered in shattered trees. A cabinet drawer sat alongside the road, hairbrushes and rollers apparently thrown clear but left otherwise untouched. The remains of Whatley’s beige trailer slumped against a tree, its top snapped off.
“That’s my house upside down, right there,” he said with a sigh.
A few driveways down, Kevin Davis, 41, burned a towering pile of branches, sparks soaring high into the cold night.
“Yesterday, I was scared for the first time in my life,” said Davis, a crane operator, as he watched the bonfire.
The Sanford Middle School parking lot became Harris’ makeshift morgue, where coroners and investigators brought 22 bodies. The 23rd body was that of a severely injured child who was rushed to a hospital, where he died, Harris said.
As a cold rain fell, Harris watched as morticians and drivers wheeled the bodies from a refrigerated trailer into hearses and minivans, each covered carefully with a blue blanket, workers’ breath steaming in the near-freezing temperatures.
“I thought I could handle this, but I found out right quick it was beyond my scope,” said Harris, 64.
Miller and Whatley acknowledge their hometown will look very different for decades to come.
Even once the physical damage has been repaired or removed, Beauregard will bear the scars from this disaster. Family celebrations will be irrevocably altered, schools will be missing kids, and churches will memorialize parishioners who died.
“I wish I could just go to sleep and wake up in a few years,” Miller said.