On April 28th, 2014, storms came through north Alabama and dropped a few tornadoes. We were waiting on the tornado coming into Hazel Green. Our radar went down and we were going on visual only. Visually, we noticed the line was coming in a bit further south than our last radar indication and quickly moved south. We only made it a few blocks before the tornado was on top of us. Luckily, we were on the south wall and able to position the car so that any debris would hit the back of the vehicle and not our side. Unfortunately, the video from inside the tornado does not exist. I thought that in our scramble to get in the car and get to a safe area, we knocked the power cable out of the dashcam, but upon reviewing the video, it is clear that I knocked the power cable out when I was re-positioning the dashcam to look forward again. I was excited about having video from inside the tornado only to be greatly disappointed when I got home and realized my mistake. The video stopped didn’t start back up again until after Fire & Rescue were on scene for the damaged buildings.
The building we were parked in front of originally had been destroyed. Had we remained where we were at, bricks and chairs and other debris would have been thrown into our car and we would have been at clearly what was the worst winds of the tornado. The tornado took down trees and did minor damage to the houses we were in front of, destroyed the building we were initially in front of and continued to do damage across the northern Hazel Green area and into Tennessee.
I finally got around to editing the video from the day, so here it is:
Here are some pics from the chase (you can click on the smaller image to see the full-size image):
Heading north into New Market, AL to chase the oncoming system.
Gorgeous!
Close call!
Stunning!
This is the building we were parked in front of before we realized we were too far north:
We continued to drive south and took a few more shots of lightning:
Blair Scott: Synthentral 