If it had been an average Wednesday afternoon, Danny Stephens and his family wouldn”t have even been in Tuscaloosa.
He and his wife, Dawn Stephens, live in New Hope. He works as a locksmith at Columbus Air Force Base. She works at Golden Triangle Periodontal. Their 10-year-old granddaughter, Kayley Stephens, is a student at Annunciation Catholic School.
But April 27, 2011 will never again be remembered as an average Wednesday.
Life changed forever on that day for people across Mississippi and Alabama when a tornadic storm system, which began two days earlier reached its apex. A total of 305 tornadoes were recorded across six states between April 25-28, taking at least 337 lives. Search and recovery efforts continue in some communities, including Tuscaloosa, where an EF-4 tornado took the lives of at least 40 people, and 240 remain missing.
The Stephens had been visiting family in Huntsville when they decided to stop in Tuscaloosa for lunch at O”Charley”s on their way back to Columbus. As they ate, Danny Stephens kept a worried eye on the television screens in the restaurant.
Weather forecasters were predicting severe weather, and as Stephens looked outside at the darkening sky, he decided he didn”t want to risk being on the road in a tornado. It seemed more sensible to drive down McFarland Boulevard to Hobby Lobby — a store the whole family enjoys — and wait out the storm.
Little did he know his “safe place” was about to become the epicenter of what some have called “hell on earth.”
“The storm just seemed to follow us right into Hobby Lobby,” Stephens recalled Tuesday afternoon.
Still, they didn”t realize how bad things were about to become. For 10 minutes, they wandered around, shopping. His wife looked at knitting supplies while he shopped for macramé materials to make a necklace for her. Kayley tagged along.
Then the Hobby Lobby manager ran through the store and ushered everyone into the break room. Dawn Stephens pulled Kayley beneath a sink. Another family took refuge beneath a table. When the store manager peeked out the break room door, they realized they were in trouble.
“He looked out the door and yelled, ”Oh my God, everybody down!””
His scream was drowned out by the intense wind. Their ears popped as the air pressure dropped. Then, there was the noise.
“It sounded like bulldozers were driving through the store,” Stephens recalled. “Everything was crashing together, the ceiling tiles fell with a crash down upon us, and dust went everywhere.”
When the noise ended, the terrified group stumbled from their shelter and stepped out into a changed world. Every shelf was swept clean, the contents strewn across the floor. The ceiling grid was twisted and dangling in places.
Through the back corner of the store, they could see daylight; Big Lots and Tuesday Morning, stores that had flanked Hobby Lobby, had both been ripped away.
It was terribly, eerily quiet.
Within minutes, emergency personnel arrived, and people rushed to the other stores in the area, trying to find survivors.
Amidst the chaos, the family learned three things: Their silver 2011 Honda CR-V “was toast,” buried beneath a pile of rubble. Their cell phones could only pick up a sporadic signal at the AT&T store across the street. And they had to seek shelter again, because more storms were on the way.
Two University of Alabama students helped the family gather their belongings and drove them across the street to DCH Regional Medical Center, which was operating on generator power and trying to deal with the influx of injured, shell-shocked victims.
At first, the family stood by the emergency room entrance, but after a few minutes, Stephens said he decided to move them to the lobby. There were things his wife and grandchild shouldn”t have to see.
“The lobby was full, the front steps were full, there were just hundreds of people sitting there, not really talking, just kind of sitting there in their own little world,” Stephens said.
Since their car wasn”t drivable, he called his friends, David and Tammy Smith of Caledonia, to come and get them. It took nearly four hours for the couple to make it from Caledonia to Tuscaloosa, and it was almost midnight before they all made it back to a darkened Golden Triangle, which had lost power earlier in the afternoon.
Stephens said he”s grateful to the people in Tuscaloosa who helped his family, and he hopes they are able to recover.
“They have no home to go to,” he said. “We had a place to go.”
Even as he and his family recovers from their own terrifying ordeal, they are changed. He grew up in Texas and is accustomed to tornadoes, but he finds himself uneasy when he hears sirens. His granddaughter hasn”t wanted to sleep alone since that day.
He has decided they need a storm shelter for their home, and he wants to purchase one for other family members as well.
“It was devastating, and it woke me up,” Stephens said. “I don”t want to put my family through that again.”
Carmen K. Sisson is the former news editor at The Dispatch.
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