Tornadoes hit students' hometowns

Shea Conaway ’10 was watching Super Tuesday coverage with a friend when news broke of the dozens of tornadoes ripping across the Southeastern United States. A resident of Memphis, Tenn., Conaway quickly called his family to make sure everyone was safe.

The prospective operations research and financial engineering major would later learn that his family collected candles, flashlights and a short-wave radio before seeking shelter in their basement as they waited several hours for the tornado to pass.

The Conaway family was just one of the thousands affected by the nation’s deadliest set of twisters since 76 people lost their lives in Pennsylvania and Ohio in May 1985. Emergency officials now estimate that 31 people were killed in Tennessee, 13 in Arkansas, seven in Kentucky and four in Alabama. No fatalities were reported in Mississippi.

“The skies were a strange color, and the air was very still, eerily quiet,” wrote Mimsy Conaway in an e-mail to her son Shea earlier today. “Then the sirens started and ran for hours.”

The twisters left behind flattened streets and tree lines, shredded mobile-home parks, flipped tractor-trailers and trucks, and left behind bare concrete floors where thousands of homes once stood. There are no comprehensive estimates on the damage.

The storms hit close to home for Memphis resident Greg Burnham ’10 as well.

“The eeriest part of the whole experience was seeing Hickory Ridge Mall in shambles,” he said. “I’d renewed my driver’s license at that mall just before coming to school, and you don’t really expect buildings you’ve been in to show up crushed and collapsing on the news.”

Meteorologists correctly read weather conditions, and forecasters issued preemptive warnings in many hard-hit areas. The National Weather Service issued more than 1,000 tornado warnings between 3 p.m. Tuesday and 6 a.m. Wednesday in an 11-state area.

The threat of destructive tornadoes is nothing new to Marshall Everett ’11.

“Living in the south raises an intense fear of tornadoes,” the Florence, Ala., native wrote in an e-mail. “Many times growing up my family [and] I had to take shelter for fear of an approaching tornado.”

Despite the destructive power of a twister, residents can become complacent after years of false alarms, Everett said.

“You start to think that you’re never actually going to get hit,” he said. “Then something like this happens and it reminds you how real the danger is.”

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Much of the devastation was caused by rare “long-track” tornadoes, which can wreak havoc across up to 50 miles of land.

Brittney Johnson ’10 said in an e-mail that her father, a disaster-relief worker, is leading a team of 50 volunteers in her home state of Arkansas and in Tennessee. Her father’s personal secretary just escaped the storm herself, Johnson said.

“She had been traveling during the storm and came upon one of the tornadoes on Tuesday night,” Johnson said. “She and her grandson had to evacuate the car immediately and hide under a nearby highway overpass. Luckily, the tornado changed its path, and they were not hurt.”

Johnson said that a handful of her hometown friends attend Tennessee’s Union College, whose campus suffered more than $5 million of damage. More than 20 students at the school were temporarily trapped behind wreckage after the dorm buildings came down around them. Johnson, whose father is coordinating recovery efforts at the college, said that classes have been cancelled until Feb. 13.

“My friends are okay, and many students are staying with local residents until their families can pick them up,” she said.

Michael Hammond ’09, who lives less than a mile from Union College, said in an e-mail that the devastation around his home was severe.

“My dad drove past the campus yesterday and said it looked like a bomb had gone off,” he said. “Almost all of the buildings have some sort of damage and classes have been cancelled. I’m just amazed at how lucky my family was to escape any damage.”

While Mississippi did not suffer any fatalities, Oxford, Miss., native Peter Dunbar ’10 said his family’s house sustained minor damage. “No one that my family knows was injured or killed, but as Oxford is a small town of 10,000, many of the houses that were severely damaged belong to family acquaintances,” he said.