April Twenty-Seventh, Twenty Eleven

April twenty-seventh, twenty eleven. A mile-and-a-half-wide tornado entered Tuscaloosa from the southwest at mid-afternoon, on the ground and moving northeast at roughly sixty miles an hour. The National Weather Service rated it an EF-four, with top winds estimated at one hundred ninety miles per hour.

It tracked across the city for a distance of roughly eighty miles before finally lifting near Birmingham. The destruction in Tuscaloosa was concentrated in a corridor running northeast through the city's residential neighborhoods and commercial districts. Forty-four people died in Tuscaloosa alone.

The total death toll along the full track, including the Birmingham suburbs, reached sixty-four. More than fifteen hundred people were injured. DCH Regional Medical Center reported treating more than a thousand injured people in the tornado's immediate aftermath.

Officials noted dozens of unaccompanied children being admitted for treatment, their parents unreachable or missing. The April twenty-seventh storm came within twelve days of another tornado, an EF-three, that had already struck Tuscaloosa on April fifteenth. The April twenty-seventh event was part of the twenty eleven Super Outbreak, the largest tornado outbreak in recorded history, which produced three hundred and sixty-eight confirmed tornadoes across twenty-one states over four days.

The recovery took years. Entire neighborhoods were rebuilt. The university sustained damage to buildings and infrastructure.

The storm became a reference point for the city in the way that major disasters become reference points: there is the way things were before, and the way things were after, and the date in April that divides them. Tuscaloosa sits in the heart of Dixie Alley, the part of the American South where geography and climate converge to produce some of the country's most dangerous tornado conditions. The city had taken hits before twenty eleven, including an F-four in December two thousand that killed eleven people.

It will take more. The storms are not unusual here. The scale of the twenty eleven one was.