6 months later...

Anyone that has been a follower of my blog for awhile knows that I live in a town that was completely destroyed by the April 27, 2011 tornadoes. It's a day that I will never forget and a day no one in Alabama will ever forget. I wanna walk y'all thru my day of the storm.

I woke up at 5 am for my last day of college for that semester. I go to a college that is 45 mins away and it was already storming really bad but I had finals and knew I needed to still go. As I was driving to school the tornado sirens started going off, I called my mom and she said to pull over and lay in the floor in my backseat and to cover myself with as much stuff as I could find. I laid there for about 15 minutes until my mom called and told me it was clear but I may struggle getting to school because a tornado hit a town about 15 mins from my school but school was not cancelled or delayed yet.  Once I got there at 7 am the whole campus was already without power due to power line poles being knocked down due to the wind. About 5 mins into giving my speech final in the dark the sirens went off once again, we were sent into the hallways and then sent home. I drove yet another 45 minutes to make it home. I was caught behind a horrible wreck that killed 2 people, little did I know my day had just begun. I went to the high school to pick up my little brother and finally we were home for good that day. My mom was sent home from work and my sister, nephew and her husband came to stay with us for the day because her house isnt that stable and we were worried about the wind. We watched the news all day and kept hearing of the tornadoes all over Alabama and so far we were lucky. About 4pm, the power went out and cell phone service was completely down also. We sat in my mom's car in the garage to listen to the weather on the radio of a news station that was broadcasting. They said power was out in the whole Northern Alabama due to a tornado hitting a major power plant. About 6 pm our county received a tornado warning and the sirens went off. Me, my mom and little brother got in one bathtub and my sister, nephew and brother in law got in another and we were all covered with mattresses and blankets. We were freaking out because my dad was still not home from work. About 5 minutes into the warning my dad starts beating on the door and we open it up. Just as we did that, we saw the tornado touch down about 3 miles up the road. Even with it being that far away we could still see flying debris, and it felt like we had the wind knocked out of us. Once the warning was over we drove to my sister's house to check on it. We didn't even make it 3 minutes and we were already stopped due to power line poles laying in the road, huge 100 year old trees in the road. We saw so many houses, cars and chicken houses completely flattened. We got out and walked and noticed that my sister's road was deveasted. Luckily, the tornado stopped 3 houses down from hers and her house only suffered minor damage. This was in Fyffe. Once we saw everything was okay there we drove to Rainsville to check on some people from our church. That's where everything really sank in. Rainsville was gone, it seemed like nothing was left and all we could do was cry. We went back to my sister's house and helped people in her neighborhood clean up. Once it got dark we all went home. We still had no power and went 4 days without it. We started picking up cell phone service and I finally got to talk to Justin and he said no tornado had touched down there but he was on his way to our house in the morning to help clean up around here. We learned of over 40 deaths in my county. We are slowly but surely picking up the pieces.