Unimaginable disaster

The stories from the areas hit by the tornadoes are stunning. An entire vast area decimated. It’s amazing that only about 40 deaths have been reported so far, the latest one the baby who was blown ten miles into a field, but with severe head injuries, while its entire immediate family was killed.

Here are two short (and comparatively mild) scenes from this article, which has many more:

Janet Elliott was sitting on her bed in Chattanooga, Tenn., when a severe weather warning scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Fierce winds were blowing, and her cats seemed clingy. Her dogs had gotten low to the floor.

She ran to the basement and tried to pull the door shut, but she couldn’t. She heard a ripping sound as the ceiling peeled off and wind wrenched the doorknob from her hand.

“I looked up and I could see the sky,” she said. “I realized if I had stayed on the bed two seconds longer, I would have been sucked out or crushed.”

and this:

Gene Lewellyn, his son and his son’s 7-year-old daughter saw the tornado come over the hill, rushed to the basement of his one-story brick home and covered themselves with a carpet.

“It just shook once, and it (the house) was gone,” said Lewellyn, 62, a retired press operator.

- end of initial entry -

March 5

Buck writes:

My eleven-month older brother worked his whole life, beginning in high school, for one of the Baby Bells, which became Verizon. At the age of 55 he met a women and they married. He sold his high-rise condo of 30 years, quit his job of nearly 40 years (the only job he ever had); and took a lump-sum retirement. He departed the only place that he had ever lived to begin a new life with his new wife on a new farm in Tennessee. He spent nearly all of his retirement money on the purchase of the farm, a new tractor, and the building of a new studio for his artist wife. He felt like he was finally going to begin living a life.

Due to underwriting issues that arose because of a number of rescued Doberman Pincers that his wife maintained charitably at the house, their home owners or farmers insurance policy was not yet in force. Within their first months together, a tornado cut it’s narrow, destructive path directly through their farm. It literally left nothing behind but the ground. They had sought shelter elsewhere and were unharmed. They went from hope and happiness to temporary despair and lingering destitution within a mere moment.

Looking at the satellite image of his farm and the county, you see a large, sprawling farm region with large tracts of land and very few of the tiniest residential structures, well spread-out as targets. Knowing the narrow path that the tornado cut, it seems that even a world-class sniper couldn’t have taken a cleaner shot; taking out my brother’s home and everything that he owned, yet leaving everything around it untouched.

They’re alive and struggling to pay their bills, and they’re still taking in neglected or abused animals.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 04, 2012 10:34 PM | Send