Shocked, Devistated, Heartbroken

Those are three words that can describe how I feel right now. First of all, we are fine. We are EXTREMELY blessed and lucky! One of the tornadoes appears to have went around our neighborhood, but there is a ton of destruction around us. Lots of people in our little community have lost everything. We haven't heard of any deaths in our particular area, although Harvest which is right next to us had a few. A friend of ours that Wes works with lost everything. The only thing that was left of his house was the closet that him, his wife, and his two daughters were taking cover in. They lived less than two miles from us.

Here is a picture of the wall cloud that was above our house from the morning storms. The damage to our area was done in the afternoon tornadoes, but I managed to get this picture with my Nikon before heading to our hallway bath for the first storm of many of the day(the sirens went off 7 times on Wednesday).



Here are a couple of pictures that Wes took with his phone. We tried to be respectful and not get people, because to me that is just rude and disrespectful to get people who are trying to pick up what's left of their lives. It doesn't even begin to tell of the destruction of our area, or other areas in the state.






Never in my 30 years have I seen such destruction (well in person.) And we weren't even the worst hit of the state. My mom said it reminded her of the storms that hit in 1974, but that was before my time. I realize that part of living in Alabama, well in the South in general, is tornadoes. I have never thought a whole lot about it. It always seemed when I was growing up, it always missed our area. The closest I even remember to a bad situation was in 1989, Jones Valley, in Huntsville. I was 9 years old then and I don't remember a whole lot about it. But this has really opened my eyes, made me realize just how fast it can happen. Next time we will be better prepared. In the meantime, I am praying for those affected.