So there is no question that the weather that has been happening in the South this week is something not like anything that has been seen  before.  An EF-5 tornado ripped through Alabama and literally left almost nothing standing.  As of right now there are over 300 innocent people have been killed by the storm and the number is only expecting to rise as more and more people are pulled from the debris. 

According to Fox News, “(this is)…the nation’s deadliest tornado disaster since the Great Depression.”  This quote is referring to Tuscaloosa, Alabama and the disasters they are seeing for the first time in such a great magnitude.  Everywhere is stocking up on water and basic items anyone would need to survive during this difficult situation.  Fox also said, “The death toll from Wednesday’s storms reached 328 across the seven states, including 238 in Alabama, making it the deadliest U.S. tornado outbreak since March 1932.”  Tuscaloosa has seen almost 1000 people injured by the storm alone: there are 6 other states that were also affected by these storms.  One resident reported to CNN News that the storm was “like a silent monster.  It was just moving at a steady rate and demolishing everything in its path.”

According to the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center, The Enhanced Fujita Scale (EF Scale) was first introduced in February of 1971 by Dr. T. Theodore Fujita.  His goal in categorizing these tornadoes was by their intensity and area and estimate a wind speed associated with the damage caused by the tornado.  The scale is an F0 is gale force winds, F1 is a weak tornado, F2 is strong, F3 is severe, F4 is devastating and F5 is incredible.   

On top of worrying about helping everyone affected by the tornado, there have been several eyes turned towards Athens, Alabama, where the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant is located.  There has been no radiation leaking into the atmosphere that the workers knew of but the plant is remaining in safe shutdown mode just to be safe and until things in life are closer to back to normal. 

Just thinking about a storm as big as what everyone has talked about it almost unreal to really expect to happen in our world today.  Far too often, we are too naïve to ever think that something like that could happen to us. We see things like this in movies but we never expect it to happen in real life.  All over the internet are stories of people who went through this storm and it’s heartbreaking to hear some of them.  No one ever expected a storm to produce so much for such amount of time.  These types of tornadoes are uncommon and in the South they are even rarer. It’s scary to think how something as fast moving as a tornado can totally change these people’s lives forever and how far too often it does change everything these poor people know.