Narrative journalism can make some sense of humanity's senseless disasters

F5: Devastation, Survival, and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the Twentieth Century
By Mark Levine
Hyperion, 2007, 307 pp., $25.95

We know storms, we Southerners. Violent weather writes large in family Bibles.
Hurricane Gustav bears down on Breaux Bridge, La. as I write these words. We wait word our son’s family is safe there.
Our storm child once lived through the worst tornado outbreak in memory. He was 18 months old on that date, April 3, 1974 – in Hillsboro, Ala. for his doting grandmother’s birthday.
Today we’re swapping text messages to stay in touch. But 34 years ago I have to wait hours to learn the safety of my child and his mother, visiting the Lawrence County farmhouse she grew up in.
I suffer separation guilt even now, stuck as I was in Washington, D.C. as a correspondent. Finally I learn Granddaddy covers my little family with mattresses and pillows and stands watch as tornadoes dance their deadly hoedown.
Before the twisted ballet finishes 17 hours later, 148 funnels click their heels in 13 states and a province of Canada. Their paths add up to 2,584 miles. The dead number 335 souls, the injured 6,000 people and the damaged property $600 million for 25,000 families.
It all starts over my own family. But the most devastated Alabama region lies just to their north, across the Tennessee River, in Limestone County.
Mark Levine describes the devastation like a novelist. Or with the quality of Sebastian Junger’s Perfect Storm. Or Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. Narrative journalism makes sense of disaster, roughly a Greek derivation for “losing your lucky star,” Levine writes.
He pursues his story of the “superoutbreak” through the memories of survivors: In a moment your life changes. It’s that sudden…You don’t know why it happened to you and not someone else. And since it happened to you, why did you survive it? Others didn’t.
The Alabamians who fill his book are people you know. They are people you care about. They are people of the whole family of humankind, more subject to disaster than we care to think about.
The science of severe weather grounds the narrative, told through the quirky tale of a Japanese physicist, Tatsuya Fujita. As an immigrant to the young science of meteorology in America, “Mr. Tornado” creates our “Richter Scale” for storms. So “F5” means winds above 261 miles per hour on “The Fujita Scale” of intensity.
Fujita determines Limestone suffered “incredible” winds up to 318 mph.
The year 1974, Levine reminds us, produces streaking at the Oscars when The Sting wins. Evel Knievel plans a rocket ride across a mile-wide canyon in Idaho. A French daredevil crosses twin towers of the new World Trade Center on a cable.
It’s odd the author omits the context of legislation the storm system inspires. Since I covered Kentucky issues for The Courier-Journal, I stand in the Oval Office when the also star-crossed President Nixon signs the Disaster Relief Act of 1974.
Louisville took terrible hits from nature’s April 4 attack, backgrounding my story.
My own family stories of storm survival still ground me as a Southerner. As an American. As a human.