With his roommate and a dog named Ted, Brett Hamock ’07 narrowly survived the tornado that devastated Alabama
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With his roommate and a dog named Ted, Brett Hamock ’07 narrowly survived the tornado that devastated Alabama
Twenty-six-year-old ILR grad Brett Hamock ’07 was at home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on the afternoon of April 27 when the college town was struck by a massive tornado. He shared a second-floor apartment on the south side—an area popular with grad students and lower-income families— with Cooper Ellenberg, a classmate from the University of Alabama law school, and a Wheaten terrier named Ted. Partners in a small law practice focused on indigent criminal defense, Hamock and Ellenberg had spent the day in court; they were working in their home office when the tornado hit.
A week later, with the storm’s aftermath displaced from the news by the killing of Osama bin Laden, Hamock called the CAM offices seeking to raise awareness about the disaster and the devastated communities it left behind. Temporarily living with friends in Birmingham and commuting to Tuscaloosa in a borrowed 1990 Plymouth Voyager—his BMW was totaled in the storm—Hamock recalled the tornado.
I was sitting at my computer and we were watching the news on television. There was a tower cam on a building in Tuscaloosa; you could see the tornado barreling toward the city. When it dropped, the storm tracker said, “If you live between 15th and 39th streets, you have five minutes to evacuate because this thing is coming right toward you.” We lived on 27th Street, right in the middle of the storm path; we didn’t have time to go anywhere. Then the power went out. We heard people outside screaming. At this point the tornado was a mile wide.
I knew it was a horrible idea to go out there because of the debris that would be flying around. Cooper and Ted and I took refuge in a bathroom that had no windows. I knew I was going to die. I thought, I can’t believe I went to school for seven years and worked so hard, and I’m dying right now. There are so many things I want to do, things I would have handled differently that now I won’t get a chance to fix.
They say it sounds like a freight train, and maybe it was the adrenaline, but we didn’t hear anything. All we heard was the wind pick up and debris hitting the building. But we could feel it pick the apartment complex up off the foundation and set it back down. I heard a snap and that’s when the roof came off. It was probably only twenty or thirty seconds but it felt like forever. I had my iPhone, and got on Facebook and posted my status: “Hey, I just got hit by a tornado. Somebody tell me when it’s OK to come out.”
Then it was dead silent outside. It smelled like Pine-Sol, and I was like, “Oh God, I bet there are pine trees in our house.” And we opened the bathroom door and it was like being outside. The whole apartment was exposed. The living room was gone, the kitchen was gone, my bedroom was gone. The rubble and debris were everywhere.
As soon as we crawled out, we were told we had thirty minutes to evacuate because another tornado was coming. We grabbed what few things we could but I couldn’t find my car keys. We got out to the parking lot and there was debris everywhere. I had just filled up my car with gas and his was on empty, so we were running a cost-benefit analysis. Is it better for me to try to find my keys, or do we take his car and pray we don’t run out of gas before we get hit by another tornado? We decided he would run upstairs and try to grab a few things, and I started moving the debris from around his car—pieces of the roof, a fence, a light pole—so we could drive out. All the car windows were destroyed from the air pressure; there was six inches of debris and dirt inside and safety glass everywhere.
Driving around, it was crazy. The south side of Tuscaloosa was like a Third World country. The traffic was chaos. People had grabbed their guns to fend off looters. There was a guy walking down the road with an assault rifle in one hand and a baby in the other. None of these people knew there was another storm coming; they were just happy they had survived the first one. But the second storm actually changed track and hit another town.
We’d been mostly working from home, and our home office had all our files in it. They got blown away and there’s no telling where they are; a sign from a Tuscaloosa restaurant was found 120 miles away. We can’t find some of our clients, and we’re worried because a lot of them live in the hard-hit areas. There are hundreds of people dead from an event that lasted a few minutes. I’m fine, but there are so many people living like refugees who have nowhere to go.
When we went back to the apartment to see what we could salvage, I found my Cornell diploma, intact in the frame, with a picture of McGraw Tower overlooking Cayuga Lake. I’m going to hang it in my next office, the sole survivor.
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Totaled: After the storm, Hamock used his iPhone to snap photos of the devastation, including (top) the remains of his apartment complex, home office (bottom left), and car.
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Caption: The Tuscaloosa Twister (1:03)