At a small Alabama church last spring, the parishioners learned an enduring lesson about themselves and the grace of God
Condensed from CHRISTIAN HERALD
By Allen Rankin
At sundown last May 27, people in the little lumber town of Brent, Ala. (pop. 2500), listened with only half an ear to the tornado warnings being broadcast for neighboring parts of the state. For although more than 900 tornadoes career across the United States every year, few Americans ever see one of these most sudden and terrible of storms, and even fewer suspect that they will ever be hit by one. Tornadoes happen to somebody else. And so, though the people of Brent kept an uneasy eye on the brooding, oppressively still dusk that day, they continued about their normal Sunday-evening activities.
At the Brent Baptist Church, a red-brick complex in the heart of town, about 150 men, women and children were gathering. Tonight, Arthur Walker, acting pastor for the past two months, was to deliver his final sermon before returning to Birmingham’s Samford University, where he was a professor of religion and a vice president.
In honor of the graduating seniors in the congregation, the scholarly, 47-year-old Walker had chosen the topic “Be Thou an Example,” based on the text from Paul’s exhortation to the young Timothy: “Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers . . . in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.”
The Gathering Storm. At 7:20, ten minutes before church time, Walker stepped outside his study for a breath of air. There he found a group of Youth Choir members, ex-claiming over the extreme blackness of the sky to the southwest. He had no more than joined them when an ominous, growing rumble set in. It soon sounded, as someone later said, “like a hundred freight trains.” It was the first hint of the tornado which, a minute or so later, would topple the church, demolish 95 per-cent of Brent’s downtown sector, destroy 127 of its 700 houses, damage all the rest and, in sum, inflict what National Weather Service officials were to describe as possibly the most concentrated property damage in the state’s history.
It was also the instant in which people who had always thought of themselves as quite ordinary began to respond with a quick and instinctive rightness of action—and, in most cases, with a valor and selflessness—that later, upon reflection, astonished them. Rushing into the sanctuary, Walker calmly announced to the 50 older persons already seated, “There’s an awful roaring approaching. Let’s move immediately to the basement.”
Outside, Jerry Pow, a 23-year-old service-station manager who was also chief of Brent’s volunteer fire department, began herding dozens of young people into the basement of the education building at the rear of the church. “Open the windows!” he shouted, remembering that the airless vacuum in the center of a tornado often causes closed buildings (containing heavier air) to explode. He then sprinted to the front of the church where, spotting three bewildered small children, he yelled to the two adults closest to them, “Get them inside!” The grownups scooped up the little ones and carried them into the church.
As the tornado approached, Walker, with a strength he had not known he possessed, held the church’s rear door open against the rising wind, enabling many people to enter who otherwise would have been shut out. Moreover, when the lights went out, the open door illuminated the way to the basement for the adults who had been in the sanctuary and for those who had been meeting on the second floor of the education building.
Rumbling and Crumbling. Then, with a blackness like night and a roar like a continuous thunderclap, the great storm struck, tearing the door from Walker’s hands, banging it shut and plunging the church into total darkness. Not everyone had reached the basement. Elderly Andrew Mitchell, nearly blind, took a wrong turn when he became separated from his wife, and got lost in the sanctuary. On the second floor of the education building, middle-aged Mary Krout and her good friend Faye Dowdle, holding back to keep from crowding those ahead of them, were caught at the head of the stairway. John Oden, a 61-year-old retiree, had time only to throw himself down in the sanctuary be-tween two pews when the church began to disintegrate.
Maness Cottingham, a 51-year-old electrician, who had snatched up a small boy in the churchyard, had run only a few strides up the church aisle when he heard a booming like cannon shots. Looking up, he saw the rear and side walls of the church crumbling. Shoving the boy under a pew, he dropped protectively on top of him. John Meigs, jr., 19, who had grabbed up two small girls, did the same for them. From under the pew, Meigs didn’t see the roof go off; nor, in the incredible din, did he hear the walls come crashing down.
Jerry Pow made it inside only as far as the front vestibule. There he felt a knife-like pain in his ears (from the decompression) and a mighty lifting that seemed about to haul him out of his shoes. He was still there, pressed against a wall, when the havoc subsided as suddenly ls it had begun. It had lasted, Pow figured, about half a minute. As the air cleared, he saw with numb shock that only the front wall of the church and the steeple under which he had taken refuge were still standing. Behind him the once handsome sanctuary lay in roofless, gutted rubble. In the surrounding area, trees, buildings and homes had either vanished entirely or been blasted into unrecognizable shapes. About a minute, Pow thought dazedly, and the old town’s gone! Then: My God! Hundreds of people must be hurt or dead!
At the rear of the church, Meigs and Cottingham crawled from beneath the pews where they had leaped. They pulled forth, un-scratched, the three children they had saved. Gratefully, Meigs looked up and saw the steel-reinforced balcony that had kept the falling roof from burying them all.
Nearby, John Oden staggered to his feet. When tons of brick and stone had thundered down toward him, the debris had struck the two pews he had thrown himself between, folded them together and formed a sheltering wooden tent above him. Although he had suffered smashed ribs and a broken collarbone, he was amazed just to be alive. Mary Krout, though buried to the waist in concrete blocks, was only slightly hurt. Faye Dowdle, however, was covered with blocks and bleeding from a critically mangled leg. And Andrew Mitchell lay by the organ, fatally crushed beneath a fallen wall.
Helping Hands. All over Brent, which stretched for more than a mile along State Highway 25, other people caught in the path of the grinding, funnel-shaped cloud were now beginning to stir from similar ruins. A cold torrential rain slashed down, bringing premature night. Children cried out for missing parents, parents for missing children. Except for a few glimmering flashlights, there was no light. All communications had been severed; downed telephone and power lines lay, with their snapped poles, in hopeless and potentially deadly snarls. Virtually all cars and trucks were battered out of commission or hemmed in by debris.
In the church basement, the more than 100 people there began to get up — all except Pauline Hunt. A sweet-faced woman in her 50s, she had felt a slight ping in the back of one leg as windows exploded and glass flew. Now, in the semi-darkness, she felt blood spreading around her, and discovered that the calf of her leg was dangling from the bone. She slipped off a stocking and twisted it into a tourniquet above her knee. The blood still spurted, and she realized that unless medical help came quickly, she wouldn’t live very long.
Soon she heard the voice of Linda Hammitt, the pretty R.N. who was director of nursing for the Bibb County Hospital. Linda hadn’t been at evening church services for two months; she had been caring for her new baby. But here she was now, inspecting the tourniquet and saying gently, “That won’t do. Let’s try this.” And she applied pressure on the artery above the wound. Realizing that several other people were in critical condition, she said to some of the men, “We’ve got to get these people to a hospital. Please find a way.”
Out of the Ruins. Several men who had run to the church after the storm struck decided that the quickest way to clear the roads to surrounding hospitals would be to commandeer some of the heavy equipment at the highway shop and the lumberyard. Twenty-two-year-old Phil Cottingham, an automobile salesman, spotted a forklift. He knew nothing about forklifts, and had never dreamed of trying to operate one—especially at night in a blinding rain. His uneasiness grew as he noted that the lift was wrapped in a tangle of downed power lines that might well be “hot.” This may kill me, he thought, but I’ve got to take the chance.
He mounted the contraption. No shock—emergency circuit breakers had cut off the juice in the lines. After fumbling with some levers, he found he could make it go. In the meantime, district road commissioner Bob Elam had located a front-end loader, and a third man (unidentified) had found another machine. Together, the three soon cleared a path through the trees, power poles, portions of houses and masses of brick and debris that blocked a 600-yard stretch of highway near the church. Minutes later, Phil Cottingham and his brother Steve, whose cars had survived intact, were speeding the injured to the hospital at Marion, 27 miles away. For Mrs. Hunt and Mrs. Dowdle their arrival was none too soon. They had hardly any pulse at all, and were probably saved by quickly administered blood transfusions.
Local power- and telephone-company men set to work almost immediately, and by midnight, National Guard units, the Salvation Army and civilian-rescue groups began to arrive from neighboring towns. Floodlights powered by portable generators peered into the ruins. Rescuers soon pulled from the wreckage in various parts of town five dead or dying persons and about 5o injured, some seriously. But before long it became clear that the hundreds of bodies the searchers had expected to find in such terrible destruction simply were not there! Instead, mostly unhurt townsmen emerged from the ruins. They had been spared, they told each other incredulously, by fantastic luck and the grace of God. What would have happened, those in the church wondered, if the storm had come five minutes later, when all 150 people would have been in the sanctuary listening to the sermon?
As more and more families were reunited, a mood of blessed thanksgiving enveloped the shattered town. People who had lost practically everything they owned stood in the wreckage and wept for joy. Many neighbors who had hardly spoken for years hugged each other on sight. Those still lucky enough to have houses with roofs threw open their doors to less fortunate relatives and friends. As the night wore on, others found their way to improvised dormitories being set up in adjoining Centreville.
The Finest Present. About mid-night, Arthur Walker went to the home of a church member to change into dry clothes. He was drenched and blood-spattered from his efforts to help the injured. In an inside pocket he carried an envelope given to him by Dot Mitchell, the church training director, minutes after the tornado had struck. In tears she had thrust it at him, saying, “I wish we could have given you a better send-off. We intended to give you a surprise gift. Here it is!” The envelope contained a check.
In dry clothing, Walker walked back to the church through the devastated town, thinking of the concern shown for him by people who had lost homes and businesses. Struggling with his own emotions, he thought, You people have given me the finest present, the greatest experience a minister could have—the strength, the courage, the faith, the concern for others that I saw enacted here tonight. My sermon, “Be Thou an Example”-I didn’t need to preach it at all.