The Tuscaloosa News
Monday, May 28, 1973
By: Charles Land
News Managing Editor
The woman and her husband and children poked through the tangled mass of metal, wood, furniture and clothing that had been their mobile home, salvaging what they could.
That wasn’t much. There simply wasn’t much left of the Prentice Trailer Court after a devastating tornado swirled through it early Sunday evening.
“Y’all all right?” a friend asked softly. “You finding anything?”
The woman tried to manage a smile, but the effort faltered into tears.
“I don’t know,” she said forlornly, “I just don’t know.” Then she resumed her search.
That was the way it was in what little remained of Prentice Trailer court as a cool breeze sifted through it and the sun tried to fight its way through gray and strangely brown clouds early this morning.
A young woman gently swung a baby. A young man piled up what clothing he could retrieve.
An automobile rested on its top, a motorcycle upright nearby.
The destruction was awesome. There had been 22 mobile homes. In a sudden savage instant, they had been shattered—flattened, twisted, crumpled, battered and exploded into the fierce winds.
The ground was covered with wires, pieces of furniture, sodden mattresses, shattered glass, splintered paneling, grotesquely twisted metal. Bits of wood and cloth dangled from splintered, broken trees.
Somehow it was difficult to believe that amid all that destruction, no one had died. Surely it was a miracle.
Down by the road, an old man and woman wrestled with a flat tire. Somehow it didn’t seem important.