The Veterans Weekend tornado outbreak of 2002 was one of the more significant and widespread second-season tornado outbreaks of the time. More than 70 tornadoes raked across the country from Ohio to Alabama with 36 fatalities, concentrated mostly in Tennessee and Alabama. An F4 tornado touched down in northern Ohio, one of the few violent tornadoes that far north this late in the year. A cluster of F3 tornadoes caused numerous fatalities across Tennessee and Alabama. This is the personal story from a pair of those F3s, the final tornadoes to be rated F3 on the old Fujita Scale in Alabama and the strongest tornadoes to occur in the state for more than four years until 2007.
In 2002 I lived in the tiny community of Prospect, along Prospect Road which stretches from SR-5 to Nauvoo Road, connecting Carbon Hill and Nauvoo. In this period of time my father was a youth minister, freshly having moved to a new church in this latter part of the county between those two small towns. My grandparents meanwhile lived in the equally tiny community of Saragossa, which is on the Norfolk Southern railroad a few miles northwest of Jasper. Both of these places would be targeted and suffer significant impact on the night of November 10th.
The day dawned warm and breezy, the sort of day that weary interviewees after the fact always describe as not feeling right. Highs climbing well into the low 80s with high humidity and strong southerly winds in mid November, indeed, were quite out of place, and set a record high for the date at many sites. An SPC high risk had been issued, but in this era before widespread household Internet, this wasn’t a widely disseminated fact to the average layman; the broadcast meteorologists nevertheless made it quite clear that the severe threat later in the day was dire, with strong tornadoes a possibility. Sunday services went as planned for most, the balmy air and mostly clearing skies with no rain or storms for the first part of the day offering little incentive for anyone to change their plans. Even into the late afternoon the radar was free of echoes. There’s something highly ominous about an empty radar picture and clear skies on a high risk day. Tornado watch 748 – a rare PDS watch – was issued at 4:35pm, but still the skies were mostly clear. I was quite worried, with a severe anxiety of storms, and the fear of storms popping up anywhere fought mentally with the hope that the skies would somehow stay clear and storms just wouldn’t occur at all. Severe storms and tornadoes were occurring in the Ohio Valley, yes, but where were the storms down south?
They would arrive – quite explosively. By the evening hours as most got ready for evening services, thunderstorms built extremely rapidly across northern Mississippi. An isolated supercell quickly took shape near Columbus, Mississippi, about the time that church-goers were heading out. My family was no different, carrying on as usual since there were no warnings in the state at the time of leaving the house. In these days before cell phones, the only effective way to receive warnings and updates on the go was by tuning into local news on a car radio or having a NOAA weather radio in the building one was intending to go to. A tornado warning was issued for Fayette county to the west at 6:29pm, but this information wouldn’t really be widely known outside Fayette county to anyone not watching the news or next to a weather radio.
The first half of evening services progressed as usual, albeit with more than a little anxiety from me. Constant peeks between the blinds offered an atmospheric fireworks show with nearly constant lightning to the west. The radar was clear upon leaving the house as per constant Weather Channel checks; seeing such a vicious looking thunderstorm approaching in the darkness of the western horizon so suddenly was very worrying. I had a severe phobia of wind and storms at this point in life. Being accidentally locked outside during a summer downburst a couple years prior had taken my weather interest – which began after hiding in the basement from Hurricane Opal’s tree shaking gusts in 1995 – and evolved it into a terror, with every black cloud potentially harboring another strong gust that took me back to that experience. I lingered in the classroom, still watching the small sliver of sky I could see between the blinds and above the trees, too distracted to hear the phone ring in the church office at 7pm. The caller was my grandfather, calling the church from Saragossa. He relayed that a tornado warning had just issued for Walker County and that Carbon Hill was in the track, suggesting the services be quickly dismissed so parishioners could take shelter; the church lacking a good place to hide. Sirens began to sound county-wide; what was Fayette county’s problems was now becoming Walker’s.
Getting told we had to dismiss and go home for a tornado warning seemed to justify the fear, the dark lightning filled mass that I’d been watching on the horizon indeed being the bearer of very bad news. By the time a warning was issued for Walker, a strong tornado had been on the ground in Fayette county for eight minutes, and the tornado entered Walker County just ten minutes after the warning was issued, crossing the line at 7:10pm southwest of Carbon Hill. The trip home was not a long one, but tonight it felt that way. Constant distant lightning drawing closer with an ominous lack of rain hung a sense of anticipation at best and impending doom at worst across the scene. Strong inflow winds tickled the tops of trees. Passing a small Coca-Cola distributor sticks in my mind as a reminder we were approaching halfway home, racing the approaching threat. I wondered if everyone else dismissing from the church would win that race.
Unloading from the vehicle and piling into the living room was unusually quick. All were eager to turn on the local news and get a picture of the unfolding situation. James Spann and Mark Prater were on air covering the storm, an angry red blotch with a menacing hook nearing the Walker County line. John Oldshue was in the field sending back a live video feed. This video feed proved to be another source of memorable anxiety – the nearly constant lightning we watched on TV matched perfectly with the lightning flashing out the living room window a few feet away. No doubt both we and the meteorologists were watching the same thing, with the same sense of urgency. When you’re well aware of your county’s geography and have access to radar, it often seems tempting to hem and haw over how close the tornado is before taking shelter; in the days of whole county warnings before polygons, this was sometimes fine, as the tornado could be many miles away in the other part of the county. But this was different – this felt far too close. One could normally derive some small comfort from the likelihood that a likely tornado would probably pass a few miles away instead of overhead, but the live feed synchronized with the lightning and storm track removed this comfort. This was too close; this would require an immediate basement trip.
My dad wasn’t much of one to fear storms as much as most, and was the only one of us to not pile downstairs and gather around the small battery TV in the basement. The thought was, once the roar of the tornado could be heard, there would be just enough time to duck into the basement. The tornado approached, scoring a direct hit on Carbon Hill. Numerous large trees were taken down across the town and several houses were destroyed, including one that caught fire and was unable to be reached by firefighters due to the wide swath of debris and emergencies elsewhere. The elementary/junior high school was also a total loss, with the roof being torn off and significant wall damage. In a cruel and bitter irony, the town’s high school had been lost in a fire only a few months prior, leaving the town without a school at all; classes were held in temporary trailers for a time to come. A witness who saw the tornado reported a funnel shape in the sky between lightning flashes, but no photos are known. Onward the tornado rolled, as the powerful funnel crossed rural terrain and neared Prospect Road. Winds rapidly increased at home, and even the most stalwart of weather-watchers retreated into the basement. It’s likely anyone who waited a little longer would have heard the nearby tornado, now only about a mile away, but would also risk strong winds on the tornado’s flank as well as falling debris. Indeed, the sign from a business in Carbon Hill was reportedly found just across the road.
The fear was still palpable even once it became clear that the home above was still standing. There could still be damage lying out of sight in the darkness, and it’d take several phone calls to know if anyone had been injured or worse from the Carbon Hill area amidst the church-goers dismissed less than an hour prior. Luckily as it turned out no fatalities occurred in Carbon Hill; however, the tornado intensified as it approached Rose Hill Road not far from the Winston county line. Here the tornado caused the most severe damage in its entire track, completely destroying multiple frame homes and killing three people. These would be the first fatalities in Alabama from the night’s events, but certainly not the last. One additional death occurred in Winston county near Arley as the tornado destroyed homes amidst the fingers of Smith Lake before the tornado lifted at 7:45, having traveled more than 44 miles across three counties in just under an hour. However, while the focus was on the tornado that had just caused major damage in Carbon Hill, it wasn’t the only tornado ongoing. The Carbon Hill supercell while initially out on its own was now one of several, most of which lay behind it in Mississippi congealing into a broken line of rotating storms. At 7:31pm an F3 tornado crossed over the state line near Fernbank in Lamar County, weakening but still strong enough to destroy a home and flip cars. It dissipated a few minutes before the Carbon Hill tornado did, but the parent mesocyclone set its sights on Fayette County.
The fire and rescue radio quickly crackled to life with calls for aid once the Carbon Hill tornado passed by. The path of the tornado could be inferred from the locations of the aid requested. Hardly a mile from the house, a report was passed on of a mobile home with entrapment. Perhaps, then, trees falling onto a mobile home, or so it was hoped; anything potentially worse didn’t seem to register as it had been a while since the last truly intense tornado in this immediate area. As a volunteer firefighter, dad was obligated to respond, and took off to assist the local fire department in aid. Prospect Road, it was discovered, was covered in fallen trees, a forest now on the ground with countless trunks and branches violently toppled to the northeast. This, then, was the eastern edge of the tornado path. Much time-consuming effort was spent with chainsaws, the process of opening the road to even reach the mobile home being a struggle. However it quickly became apparent that where there was once a mobile home to respond to, no mobile home now existed. A quick check with flashlights revealed a swath of metal and insulation wrapped throughout the trees that still stood on the north side of Prospect Road, and people slowly climbing out of this debris field. What was once a mobile home was transformed into a tangled wreckage of debris as it was vaulted across the road, and the residents extremely fortunate to survive. However, even as responders and residents coped with the magnitude of the destruction from the first tornado, the tornado sirens once again sounded at 8:24pm – the night was far from over.
The strong embedded supercell leaving Lamar county had only shortly ceased producing one tornado when trees began to snap just north of Fayette at 8:15pm. Thus was born what would become the longest tracked of all the tornadoes of the Veterans Weekend Outbreak, and the deadliest in Alabama. This one like the first would start over mostly rural areas, damaging several homes before crossing into Walker County at 8:34. It was hard to tell exactly how far this was from the first, but the path was almost exactly parallel, and hardly a couple of miles to the south. The radar shot didn’t show a classic isolated supercell with a menacing hook, instead a subtle notch in a longer line now consisting of multiple supercells. However on velocity imagery, it was clear that a very large and intense tornado was probably down; very intense inflow winds and strong rear flank downdrafts were evident. John Oldshue’s instrumentation in the chase vehicle quite close to the tornado measured the strong winds that were occurring even away from the powerful tornado as it gathered intensity. The basement seemed a permanent refuge at this point and calls to grandparents and friends in the Saragossa area were hurriedly made before the phone lines began to go down. If the first tornado had been a nail biting close call to the north, this one quickly started to feel even worse, the sinking feeling of the atmosphere triggering the apocalypse over all the areas I had lived and known.
The tornado had grown to three quarters of a mile wide, and unbeknownst at the time, was quickly nearing violent intensity, in the upper echelons of the F3 range. Several structures had been damaged or destroyed across Fayette county but the worst was yet to come. The tornado crossed old US 78 and the nascent I-22 before crossing Scott Cemetery Road, destroying several homes and damaging graves in a cemetery. The tornado then neared Saragossa Road. In this area man returned to his trailer after the first warning for the Carbon Hill tornado to the north, and was not sheltered for the second one. His body was found in the yard of a nearby house on the edge of the path. This was one of seven fatalities in this very small close knit section of Walker County. The tornado crossed Redmill Saragossa Road, destroying several more homes along the railroad and snapping numerous trees. An indirect fatality occurred during the stress of an evacuation from an older frame house into a safer shelter as the tornado approached; a heart attack was the assumed cause. In the end, their house was spared. More homes were destroyed as the tornado reached peak intensity, crossing Miller Road and then leaving a severe streak of destruction along Nichols Road. Here the tornado seemed to expend its most severe fury; both small older frame homes and large brand news ones alike were completely destroyed, some swept downwind with no walls remaining. All of the fatalities associated with the tornado occurred in this short stretch but the funnel continued to produce severe tree and structural damage as it crossed SR-5 and Johnsey Bridge Road. Here, the tornado threw numerous trees into Blackwater Creek, but left a century old truss bridge undamaged. The tornado continued to cause significant damage through the Curry community before clipping the corner of Winston county and moving into Cullman county. Numerous homes were damaged or destroyed here, affecting the Smith Lake area once more. The tornado ended at 9:52pm south of Holly Pond, after tracking more than 72 miles; at the time, this was the fourth longest tornado track in recent state history.
The power was out, the phone lines were down, and not just every living grandparent on both sides of the family but also father were unreachable in the aftermath of a tornado that had swept through the areas they all were located. The only window to the world was the small battery powered TV with questionable reception, all still huddling in the basement wondering if the tornadoes were finally over. Remarkably, they were not – a third tornado warning was issued for Walker County at 9:15. At 9:38pm, yet another tornado would touch down on the outskirts of Dora in southern Walker County, but this one was mercifully both brief and far away from the areas that had just been ravaged by the parallel streaks of destruction over the two previous hours. It was then safe to venture upstairs as the air stabilized and the threat ended. Sleep was quite fitful in a house filled with both candles and worry, with little communication and no way to know how much of the outside world remained intact.
The morning brought both relief and scenes of immense destruction. Dad returned after the second tornado, the first responders having taken shelter at a nearby church and heavy fire trucks as the wind and rain from the second supercell passed over. Grandparents were also fine, as the tornado had passed close enough to the southeast to bring a loud roar and a steep pressure drop as felt from the basement, but the edge of the damage path was several hundred yards away. Others were far less fortunate. Family friends and acquaintances in the heart of the damage path between US 78 and SR-5 lost their homes, with some being such a total loss that there was little left to salvage. Still others lost even more, the total number of fatalities across the county at ten and statewide at twelve. At home, life went on, through a 24 hour long power outage. The day was spent contacting acquaintances and taking care of the fish aquarium, with the pumps and filter unable to work in the absence of electricity or a generator. The scope of destruction was not fully clear yet until aerial shots showed up. The need for roads being cleared and the finishing of search and rescue kept most curious onlookers on the ground at bay if only for a while. A semi cab near Saragossa was reportedly thrown and not found, among other reports that trickled in. Also a report of a church that turned away freshly homeless tornado survivors for fear of staining new carpets with mud. The veracity of these stories are not always clear. Even at home, before the power was restored, the lightest tendrils of loss managed to reach; one tropical aquarium fish was unable to survive the stress of the change in water conditions that the lack of electricity brought.
A few days after the outbreak, on a much more seasonable November morning, I went with family and friends to Nichols Road, in the most severe part of the damage path. Here the landscape was not very recognizable in places, large trees being snapped and numerous homes leveled or otherwise rendered unlivable. Possessions, in various states of damage, still were scattered across the gently rolling landscape still littered with tree limbs, plywood, and shingles. A small pond became the focus for my eleven year old mind. Here, various items floated on the surface or rested on the bottom. Parts of a mattress, a broken willow tree, chunks of plywood, cassette tapes. I grabbed a long stick and tried to fetch something, or anything, feeling helpless in the larger scheme of things and hoping to help whoever has just lost everything perhaps recover a few small remnants of the life that had just been dramatically changed. A beanie baby collection had reportedly been lost in the tornadoes. Heirlooms, collections, family photos; nothing was spared, and the magnitude of loss and the feeling of being small and fragile and subject to the whims of an angry sky left a deep and lasting impression. Beanie babies tend to sink when wet; I didn’t find these. I just managed to reach a waterlogged cassette tape, a recording of a church musical from some prior year.
For those interested in weather, a sense of perspective is essential; we are very small fleshy creatures at the mercy of a sky that sometimes turns violent. Sometimes this manifests in hopelessness, seeing the scale of loss and what little can be done to repair it. Sometimes, it’s accompanied by hope, such as those that survived in the path even when so many homes were completely lost. On Prospect Road, a church which served to shelter those caught out in the Saragossa tornado sat between two areas of downed trees from the Carbon Hill tornado and associated damage paths – an oasis amidst the ruin and a surprising spark of hope even in the eye of the storm. The school in Carbon Hill was rebuilt, and most others were able to rebuild, gradually transforming the seas of destruction into new beginnings. If you know where to look, even 21 years later there are still reminders of the tornadoes visible today. An empty and overgrown foundation here and there, a few trees weirdly bent at an angle. New forests have grown where the tornado took down large swaths of trees, a second growth forest which will blend in over the next few decades with undamaged forest around it. But those that remember the night will certainly not forget it even once those last lingering scars fade.
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