![]() ![]() “There was complete darkness, power lines and trees down everywhere and the strong smell of pine pitch in the air from all the debris.” “We had 6 SMORT team members on site assisting the Lee County Coroner for ~24 hours,” recalls Hatch. ![]() He himself heard the tornado sirens and had to take shelter in Montgomery County where he was attending church.īy 4pm, he’d received a call from the State Mortuary Operations Response Team (SMORT) to bring a refrigerated trailer to Beauregard because the coroner estimated 20 deceased. Tim Hatch, Deputy Director in the Center for Emergency Preparedness at the Alabama Department of Public Health, was on standby since that Sunday morning when tornado warnings first started rolling in. The emergency responders who were on the ground that day, and many days after, were similarly overwhelmed by what they encountered. "I tried a few more times to make phone calls to emergency services the second time around with no luck, the lines were down."Ĭarol Dean, right, cries while embraced by Megan Anderson and her 18-month-old daughter Madilyn, as Dean sifts through the debris of the home she shared with her husband, David Wayne Dean, who died when a tornado destroyed the house in Beauregard, Ala. "It was so large, it looked like the entire storm base was on the ground," he continues. As I drove up to the tornado, I could hear the thunderous roar as it went by me." I knew I had to get north to be able to see it to make more reports, so I turned north on CR-29 and went a few miles north. The next thing I knew, a 'tornado emergency' was issued. A tornado warning was issued about the same time as I made my report. "This prompted me to make my first tornado report. "I saw the first signs of a developing tornado when I saw how rapid the wall cloud was rotating," explains Peake. Storm chaser, Scott Peake was on the scene, and saw it develop from a rotating cloud base to the full-fledged monster tornado it became. It left a path of destruction half a mile wide in its wake. Rated a 4 on the EF or enhanced Fujita scale, which ranks severity based on the damage caused, this tornado touched down in Beauregard and traveled through a heavily populated area with wind speeds surpassing 166mph. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |