By Sarah Eykyn
A view of our street shortly after the storm hit.
Crisis is something that no-one likes to think about. It’s easy to believe it will never happen, or to say ‘what are the odds?’ That is, until you find yourself staring disaster in the face. At that point, it’s even easier to wish you’d done something – anything – to prepare yourself for how to deal with a worst case scenario. That was the uncomfortable position in which I found myself on April 27th, 2011, when an EF4 tornado ripped through the South and tore up our house as I huddled with my children, nanny and pets inside it.
Over the years, I have learned a lot about helping clients to prepare for crisis, and worked carefully constructed plans to help them navigate turbulent waters. I have watched Sylvia Tawse, the maestro of crisis communications, prepare painstakingly comprehensive strategies that calm the storm and rescue corporate reputations. The landscape of every disaster is different but what I now appreciate is this: having the right people to help and guide you through a crisis is critical to a positive outcome.
The wail of sirens is a fact of life for us in Alabama but after 11 years, their effect had become muted. There was a bad tornado in 2000, the year we moved here. A colleague of my husband’s lost her home, and several people died. We regularly took cover with cushions in our hall, away from windows, but the storms always seemed to miss us. Gradually we became blasé, relying on our 100-year old oaks and pines as testament to the fact that we were somehow immune. How wrong we were.
The stuff of nightmares
Something about this stormy day was different. The weather forecasters told us to take it seriously – it was going to be‘bad’. And it was certainly shaping up that way. We watched the television in horror as an EF3 touched down near Huntsville before lunch. Friends called us and asked if we had taken shelter, knowing that I usually sat resolutely in my home office. Even my husband, the most laid back of all, called twice from the University to ask where I was sheltering with the children. I still thought it would miss us, but I gathered shoes and bike helmets, and cleared out a space for the two of them and our nanny in the bottom of the linen closet, away from windows and doors. Ten minutes later, we took a direct hit.
The force of the maelstrom was unforgettable. The sound was the stuff of nightmares, the howling onslaught of a freight train bearing down on us, fast. Windows shattered, and glass flew dagger-like into walls and beds as doors buckled. The chimney collapsed. A pine tree fell through the roof, and the wind picked up my office and the dining room and spat them out as a pile of bricks, mangled electronics and collapsed ceilings. I heard myself talking to the children in a calm and almost disconnected voice: “Everything is going to be OK.” I said it over and over again, as though I believed it.
Home office, before.
The massive, shady oak behind the house made a ghastly thud as it hit the earth, a sound that I now equate with reprieve, given that it would have crushed us all had it fallen the other way. The wind suctioned me to the door I was braced against by the linen closet, lifting me up with a supernatural force as our dear nanny held fast to my wrist. An eerie, silver light full of splintered glass, insulation and dust filled the kitchen in front of me. And then, as fast as it had arrived, the tornado moved on to cut a mile-wide gash through the heart of Tuscaloosa.
We stumbled to our feet, glass
Home office, after.
crunching. I searched for a safe exit, but out of seven doors in the house, found none. Trees blocked our way, and shattered door frames were jammed shut. Eventually I shook out the glass in a screen door and held it gingerly as we clambered out with the dog, two pet rabbits and a fish, with its bowl still intact. Trees, power lines, telephone poles, crushed cars – the street was littered and it was hard to see anything in the gloom. The shout of neighbors calling out to account for each other was comforting, but the carnage resembled the aftermath of the recent tsunami in Japan. Our street was ripped apart. It looked chaotic.
It turns out, nothing really prepares you for a disaster of this scale. Your brain just can’t comprehend it.
We had no formal plan. We were not equipped with an emergency bag full of water, essential documents and a flashlight. There was no power, so I couldn’t reach my husband by phone. My car was crushed under a pine tree. All the roads were blocked so we couldn’t drive out anyway. All we could do was band together as friends and neighbors, and put one foot in front of the other.
My husband, who feared the very worst as he ran home from campus and hurdled a course of fallen limbs, found us an hour later in the street. No movie could adequately convey the bittersweet joy of that reunion. It was a miracle that no-one in our street had died, or even been injured, though many lost their lives close by.
To this day, the sound of chainsaws is what I best remember in the aftermath. Within minutes, those who owned one – and it turns out, most do – grabbed power tools and started to clear our tree-lined street until it was passable on foot.
After two hours we had figured a way to evacuate our children out of town to our neighbor’s parents. We walked a mile to get to the nearest open road, through the worst hit area of town, past rubble piled on top of dead bodies, and the quiet masses of people who were trying to find their own path out with small bags of whatever they could salvage. It looked like a war zone. Gas leaks, the threat of another tornado (there were over 350 that day) and looting added to the undercurrent of pure, naked fear.
We handed the children to a police officer, who walked them to a barricade and delivered them to a waiting car. We all choked back tears with brave smiles.
Organic leadership
The days after the tornado are a bit of a blur. We took stock. We found someone to take in the animals. We camped in friends’ houses by candlelight and drank a lot of wine. Generators appeared. Roofs were tarped. An army of friends and professors – colleagues of my husband and their families – helped us to pack up our house and move boxes into storage. The Red Cross and Target handed out supplies. My husband disappeared for hours on end each day with a band of neighborhood men who went from house to house with their tools, doing whatever needed to be done to staunch the blow. We saw leadership emerge organically, each doing what they did best without being asked.
Our street in happier times with pets, Pushkin (left), who escaped the storm under the house and Ollie (right).
Complete strangers arrived with yet more chainsaws, backhoes and front loaders to tear up trees, bushes and shattered walls, and move them into massive piles on the side of the street. FEMA would eventually take them away, but not before the rotting contents of freezers and fridges had tainted the air with unspeakable smells, and the trees limbs had turned
from spring green to decaying brown in the scorching sun.
Layer by layer, branch by branch, the bones of our fractured house were revealed. Insurance agents came and went. Our contractors assessed the damage and helped us formulate a plan to rebuild. Church volunteers, from every denomination, brought meals and water and a constant stream of comforting words, not one of them evangelical. I have never before experienced such an outpouring of genuine concern – from all over the United States, and around the world.
Cut off as we were by an electronic blackout, we did not realize that we were front page news. We almost usurped the Royal Wedding, and even President Obama flew in to survey the damage. As some cell phones came back on line, sporadically, I dictated hasty Facebook postings to my sister in England to let everyone know we were OK. I appreciated like never before my reliance on my iphone, continuing to carry it up and down the street as though it might miraculously spring back to life.
After a week, we focused on our children, getting them ‘home’, and then back to school. We kept busy by finding hats and costumes for them to perform in the “Wizard of Oz’, which had ironically been in production before the storm hit. (For more on this, read Rick Bragg’s article here in Southern Living). The school enlisted a counselor to help the children of over 35 affected families come to terms with the changes they faced.
Slowly, I was able to refocus. FIG surprised me with a laptop so that I could enjoy feeling connected again (oh, how I had missed that!). Current clients overwhelmed me with their generosity and understanding. Past clients, colleagues and media friends called and emailed to check on my family. I relished the distraction of ‘normality’.
It is three months since the storm hit us and it has taken me all that time to fully appreciate what helped us to weather it. I realize that while we were technically unprepared for this particular event, I instinctively drew upon the strategies that we employ in crisis communications:
- Stay calm, breathe.
- Account for yourself and your ‘family’ – take care of their immediate needs and concerns.
- Accept the assistance and expertise of others.
- Assess the situation and prioritize next steps.
- Work through those next steps.
- Continue to take stock, and reprioritize as necessary.
- Keep lines of communication open so that everyone knows what is going on.
I feel that I am now at stage 8. which would be noting the things that I will do differently, and adding them to the plan. For one, we are building a storm shelter and will keep an emergency bag of provisions on hand, including our most important documents. I will also take my laptop into the shelter, and will back files up to two separate external drives (or use cloud storage).
Having a plan is important, but the tornado made one thing very clear to me: it’s the people who get you through a crisis. And I wouldn’t swap my ‘people’ for anything.
[For more on the story of my street, read here: http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/07/25/what.stands.in.storm/index.html?iref=allsearch]
