Dixie Alley: The November Storm

Huntsville sits in a region that meteorologists call Dixie Alley, an area of the American South where long-track, violent tornadoes occur more frequently than almost anywhere else in the country. The threat is different from the Great Plains version, where open land and long sightlines give some warning time. Here the trees are dense, the terrain irregular, and the storms often arrive at night.

On November fifteenth, nineteen eighty-nine, a tornado moved through the southeastern edge of Huntsville in the early afternoon. It killed twenty-one people and injured more than four hundred and sixty. The storm cut through residential neighborhoods and the Monte Sano area, and it remains one of the deadliest tornadoes in Alabama history. Huntsville had not seen anything like it in modern memory.

Twenty-two years later, in April of twenty-eleven, came something larger than the nineteen eighty-nine storm in any measure. On April twenty-seventh, twenty-eleven, the single worst day of the largest tornado outbreak in recorded American history, fifty nine tornadoes struck Alabama alone. An EF-Five tornado tracked a hundred and two miles across northern Alabama, killing seventy-one people. It approached within two miles of the Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant west of Huntsville before lifting. Nine people died in Madison County. The storm destroyed transmission towers and left most of northern Alabama without power for days.

The National Weather Service office in Huntsville issued ninety-two tornado warnings that day. The staff who staffed those radars and telephones and transmitters were, by most accounts, the reason the death toll was not higher. They knew the ground they were watching.