What Stands in a Storm: A True Story of Love and Resilience in the Worst Superstorm in History

What Stands in a Storm: A True Story of Love and Resilience in the Worst Superstorm in History

What Stands in a Storm: A True Story of Love and Resilience in the Worst Superstorm in History

What Stands in a Storm: A True Story of Love and Resilience in the Worst Superstorm in History

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Overview

Enter the eye of the storm in this gripping real-life thriller—A Perfect Storm on land—that chronicles America’s biggest tornado outbreak since the beginning of recorded weather: a horrific three-day superstorm with 358 separate tornadoes touching down in twenty-one states and destroying entire towns.

April 27, 2011 was the climax of a three-day superstorm that unleashed terror from Arkansas to New York. Entire communities were flattened, whole neighborhoods erased. Tornadoes left scars across the land so wide they could be seen from space. But from terrible destruction emerged everyday heroes—neighbors and strangers who rescued each other from hell on earth.

“Armchair storm chasers will find much to savor in this grippingly detailed, real-time chronicle of nature gone awry” (Kirkus Reviews) set in Alabama, the heart of Dixie Alley where there are more tornado fatalities than anywhere else in the US. With powerful emotion and captivating detail, journalist Kim Cross expertly weaves together science and heartrending human stories. For some, it’s a story of survival; for others it’s the story of their last hours.

Cross’s immersive reporting and dramatic storytelling catapult you to the center of the very worst hit areas, where thousands of ordinary people witnessed the sky falling around them. Yet from the disaster rises a redemptive message that’s just as real: in times of trouble, the things that tear our world apart reveal what holds us together.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781476763071
Publisher: Atria Books
Publication date: 03/01/2016
Pages: 320
Sales rank: 236,589
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

About The Author
Kim Cross is an editor-at-large for Southern Living and a feature writer who has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of American Travel Writers, and the Media Industry Newsletter. Her writing has appeared in Outside, Cooking Light, Bicycling, Runner’s World, The Tampa Bay Times, The Birmingham News, The Anniston Star, USA TODAY, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, and CNN.com. She lives in Alabama.

Read an Excerpt

What Stands in a Storm
3:44 P.M., WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27, 2011—SMITHVILLE, MISSISSIPPI

Patti Parker watched the dark funnel grow until it filled the whole windshield, blackening the sky. Its two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds were furious enough to blast the bark off trees, suck the nails out of a two-by-four, and peel a road right off the earth, and it was charging at sixty miles per hour toward everything she loved most in the world—her children, her husband, their home. She was racing behind the massive storm, down the seven-mile stretch of rural highway between her and the life she knew.

Smithville, Mississippi, was much smaller than Oxford, the postage-stamp of native soil that William Faulkner called home. Too tiny to appear on some maps, it was a 1.5-square-mile speck of a town about ten miles west of Alabama and twenty miles southeast of Tupelo, where Elvis was born. Set on the banks of a dammed river some locals believed tornadoes would not cross, Smithville was a place where women put on makeup before going to the Piggly Wiggly, planned dinner around choir practice, and took their families to Mel’s Diner for fried catfish and the town’s late-breaking news. It had one stoplight and five churches.

Smithville’s earsplitting tornado siren, just fifty feet from Patti’s house, had been screaming so often this spring that she found herself sleeping through the warnings. A high-pitched, lugubrious wail, it sounded just like the air-raid sirens of World War II. When people heard it, they would run into their closets and bathrooms, although many would pause first and go outside to stare up at the sky.

The sirens had interrupted Patti’s work again today in the neighboring small town of Amory, Mississippi. The executive director of the local United Way, she had been at her desk answering e-mails and reviewing disaster plans. When the sirens screamed she sighed and joined her colleagues in the stairwell, pausing by the coffeepot along the way to pour another cup.

Tornado season hovered like an unspoken question over every spring in the South. It was just part of living here. But this time, when someone opened the metal doors beneath the stairs to peek outside, Patti noticed a sinister shift in the wind. She had told her husband she would wait it out and come home when the warnings expired, but she felt the urgent need to be with her kids. If she left now, she thought, maybe she could beat this thing to Smithville. Driving on the road was quite possibly the worst place to be in a storm, aside from a mobile home. But the pull of family overcame logic.

And now here she was, caught behind a mile-wide tornado that was rushing immutably toward the center of her universe.



At home in Smithville, Patti’s son, Johnny Parker, one day shy of his seventeenth birthday, was leaning into his computer, peering at the radar maps. What he saw made him prickle with fear. Severe thunderstorms were popping up across the state, dotting the screen with red and yellow tie-dyed splotches marching steadily northeast. He knew some of these storms were pregnant with tornadoes. A student of the weather since the age of four, when a storm nearly crushed his house with a toppled tree, he studied the maps, searching for patterns and clues that might foretell what the sky would do. His fingers flew over the keyboard, dashing off an e-mail warning to the hundred friends who followed his weather dispatch, which he always typed, because cerebral palsy hijacked his words somewhere along the path between his mind and his mouth. Johnny could type a blue streak and you would never know, reading his forecasts, that he struggled to speak.

Johnny’s concentration was broken by the sound of his father yelling, calling him and his fourteen-year-old sister, Chloe, to come out and look at the sky. Together, they stared up at the terrible beauty: steel-colored clouds that whorled around like dishwater circling a drain. Johnny turned his head, and all he could hear was the terrible roar. He knew without looking what it was, and that it filled the Mississippi sky.

“Get inside!” yelled his father, Randy.

Johnny and Chloe raced to the innermost hallway, where a parade of tiny handprints on the wall, growing bigger through the years, marked the passing of their childhoods. They knelt and tucked themselves into balls, covering their heads with interlaced fingers, just as their teachers had taught them during tornado drills. The roar turned deafening, so large and loud they could feel it rumbling inside their chests. Their ears popped with the sudden drop in pressure as the walls of their home began to shudder. And then, in a moment most meteorologists will never experience, Johnny’s house came apart around him.



Four miles away on the two-lane highway, Patti pounded the steering wheel, stuck behind a slow-moving pickup truck. Rain and hail were sheeting down, and wind gusts were shaking her car, but this pickup was creeping down the two-lane road as if the world was not about to end. She wanted to pass, but through the curtains of rain she could see the silhouettes of falling trees, huge and ancient pecan trunks crashing across the road. The truck went around them, and she followed its blurry taillights through the sluicing rain. And then the truck stopped dead in the road, blocked by live power lines and mountains of debris.

Patti stopped the car, flung open the door, and ran to the driver’s window. An old man looked at her mutely. Her auburn hair snapped like a flag and her green eyes squinted into the wind as she heard her own voice, as if in a movie, rising in pitch with panic.

“I’ve got to get through this! I’ve got to get home!”

The old man watched her as she started running, guided by some primal compass through a splintered landscape that, stripped of all landmarks, didn’t look anything like home. She ran through the mud, hurdling limbs, dodging live wires, and finding her way through the shredded remains of homes she had passed that morning. Her heels scraped on the asphalt, her stride abbreviated by her pencil skirt, her jacket flapping like frantic wings. The storm had roared on into Alabama, leaving in its wake an eerie quiet that amplified the muffled cries emanating from broken heaps. It registered that these were the voices of friends, of neighbors, of people who desperately needed help—of people who might be dying. But her legs would not stop moving under the directive that looped through her mind:

Get home—Get home—Get home!

The house on the corner was mostly gone, but the piles of yellow brick signaled she was close to home. A neighbor crawled out of a gutted house and called out to her, and Patti yelled back, but could not stop her legs from running. As she approached the spot where her home once stood, she screamed for her husband.

“Randy!”

In her hand, her mobile phone lit up with a message from Johnny, the last thing his friends and family would read before the long silence.

Get to a safe place NOW!!

Table of Contents

Author's Note ix

Foreword Rick Bragg xi

Part I The Storm

1 Racing the Storm 3

2 Trouble on the Horizon 7

3 The Calm 12

4 The Prelude 17

5 The Opening Act 18

6 Ground Truth 29

7 Scanning the Skies 36

8 Tornado Down 46

9 Birth of a Weatherman 58

10 Red-Letter Day 68

11 Unbroken 74

12 Chasers 77

13 Safe Place 94

14 Cordova 97

15 Code Gray 100

16 Entrapment 103

17 Slouching Toward Tuscaloosa 111

18 The Train 122

Part II The Aftermath

19 The Rescue 125

20 The Silence 138

21 Under Siege 141

22 The House 144

23 Charleston Square 149

24 Beverly Heights 156

25 Twilight 162

26 The Search 170

27 The Unthinkable 183

28 Graduation Day 201

29 The Walk 205

30 Chance 215

31 The Wake 222

Part III The Recovery

32 Picking Up the Pieces 233

33 But Not Destroyed 242

34 The Wedding 246

35 Healing 250

36 One Step at a Time 256

37 The Anniversary 260

38 Remembering 263

39 The Master 273

Epilogue 279

Acknowledgments 281

In Memoriam 285

Memorial Scholarships 290

Index 291

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