The National Weather Service fielded reports of washed-out roads, impassable routes and residential flooding. Tuscaloosa County remained under a flash-flood watch overnight. Tropical Storm Claudette falls to depression, heavy rains and flash floods threaten Alabama.
More: Tornado causes injuries as tropical storm lashes Alabama coast. Over 7 inches of rain led to widespread flooding — evacuations — trapped motorists — and especially heartbreaking — two fatalities," Tyner wrote. Picture frames, a small potted plant and a binder were among items Andi Jones had propped on the trunk of a four-door sedan as she sorted through her parents' belongings Sunday morning in Willowbrook Trailer Park in Northport.
Her parents' mobile home nearby sat washed out and crumpled from the flash-flooding the night before. Jones told the Tuscaloosa News she was texting with her mother when the flooding began at the mobile home park about Saturday evening.
By , water was making its way inside. Both parents are fine, Jones said, but the mobile home is destroyed. One end of the mobile home caved in, and it was partially moved off its base. Stains inside indicate the water had reached halfway to the roof at its highest point. What did they do? Even if you knew it was bad, what did you do to counter that? Maybe those are some good questions to ask.
Are you changing your lifestyle? What went right that day. But what about the things that helped -- things that kept the death toll from being even higher on April 27, ?
One was capturing the tornadoes on video, according to Myers. Social media wasn't quite as pervasive in as it is today, and much of the information relayed to the public was through broadcast meteorologists, many of them severe weather coverage veterans. Several were able to provide video of powerful tornadoes roaring through cities such as Cullman, Tuscaloosa and the northern suburbs of Birmingham.
Those images were powerful tools, Myers said. And that led to another big revelation in that post study: The public wants more than just your word for it that something bad is coming. They want to know, is it going to be near me? Is it coming toward me and when is it going to get to me? And they want secondary confirmation.
The videos give them that secondary confirmation," she said. Is it that bad? Is it a false alarm? That was another big thing was that a lot of people needed that secondary confirmation to realize, hey, even though they told us it was going to be this bad -- it really is this bad and I need to take action.
Another thing that could have played into the need for secondary confirmation was the so-called 'cry wolf' syndrome, or false alarms. And so the public was really kind of desensitized to the warning process," Myers said.
And so they've improved their false alarm ratio substantially. Another change since then are what are called "impact-based warnings. The weather service has added descriptive language to the standard warnings to detail the damage a storm could cause. Some examples are: "You are in a life-threatening situation," or "complete destruction is possible. They want to know impacts. They want to know is this thing strong enough to knock down power lines?
Is this thing strong enough to knock down brick buildings? And studies are still ongoing, even seven years later.
And it led to actual operational changes with the TV stations, with the weather service offices, and so they were working on ways to improve their criteria for warnings," Myers said. So we've been studying this ever since.
A lot of questions still linger, seven years later. I think there's always changes that need to be made overall to the system and enterprise, but I can't imagine there was anything we could have done more than at least we had access to. Are there things I would have like to have done? Well sure. Based on everything had -- information and technology we had currently I don't think there's anything we could have done more.
April 27, , was a historic, once-in-a-generation type of event. The warnings are there, but they have to be heeded. Note to readers: if you purchase something through one of our affiliate links we may earn a commission.
All rights reserved About Us. All forms of winter precipitation are possible — snow, sleet, freezing rain, etc. However, there have been times where Tuscaloosa has received well above the average amount of snow and ice.
The Blizzard of brought almost four inches of snow to Tuscaloosa, and the winter is currently the third snowiest in Tuscaloosa history. In the snowiest season on record in , Tuscaloosa received seven inches of precipitation.
If ground temperatures are below freezing and the roads are wet, ice will form and could spell disaster on the roadways, depending on the time of day. That is exactly what happened on January 28th, Late that weekday morning, temperatures were sitting well below freezing, and snow began to fall. Temperatures were projected to warm to above freezing, and no travel problems were expected. But, snow kept falling, and temperatures stayed well below freezing, leaving thick sheets of ice on the roads, and creating havoc on major thoroughfares across the Deep South.
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