This is an opinion column.
Last weekend, I watched from afar as storms again raked their claws across Alabama, cutting gashes as they went.
This time, the weather had struck after days of warnings from the National Weather Service and TV meteorologists. As tornadoes were tearing through communities and trashing neighborhoods and, yes, trailer parks, I flicked my thumb across social media feeds to check on friends back home.
And that’s when I saw something I had not expected — people who were mad. Not folks who were upset at the disaster, but seemingly frustrated it hadn’t been worse.
Mad it wasn’t another April 27 or April 8.
Mad even though it wasn’t yet over.
Mad it wasn’t what they had expected, what they had been told it might be.
“Good call this weekend @spann,” one man tweeted at Alabama’s top meteorologist, James Spann. “Bham got a light drizzle and you acted like we were going to get f—ing nuked.”
Some folks are so hard up for excitement that they’ll root for the storm.
Winston Churchill said there’s nothing more exciting than being shot at and missed. But after 47 years in Alabama, I’m happy to spend a spring where Mother Nature doesn’t try so hard to kill me. I’ve had my share of that.
I was in eighth grade Earth Science class the first time the weather made its first attempt on my life.
The sunlight dimmed and the street lamps flickered to life. Some of my classmates began to hoop and holler as the wind rattled the windows. Our teacher, Mrs. Ethridge, said to us, “When I tell you, I want you to get under your desks …”
She didn’t finish her sentence before our principal came on the intercom to order us into the hall. I looked back over my shoulder to see something tumbling across the courtyard outside. It was sheets of aluminum and fiberglass insulation.
Was that our gym?
A small tornado had dropped without notice. The damage was light, only peeling the gymnasium roof away. Miraculously no one was seriously hurt. But I can’t help but wonder what might have happened had it been an EF-2 or 3 instead of an EF-1.
We had no warning. And that’s the thing I can’t get over now.
A warning is a good thing, people.
That was 35 years ago. Since then, tornadoes have killed hundreds of Alabamians and destroyed whole neighborhoods and towns.
But in that time, weather forecasting has gotten better and the technology more precise. Radar can pinpoint a troublesome storm to within almost a city block or a familiar landmark in the country. Airborne debris tells us a tornado is touching the ground, and meteorologists draw us polygons with ETAs for everyone in the path.
What should be news after last weekend’s weather wasn’t the forecasters missing the mark but rather hitting the bullseye. What distinguished March 16 from April 27 wasn’t the forecast, but where the tornadoes struck, mostly in rural areas and small towns rather than major cities.
And also how prepared many Alabamians were — because of the warnings.
Three people died in Alabama last weekend, but how many might have if a system like this struck when I was a kid? I will never cease to marvel at how far we’ve come.
But go ahead. Be mad.
TV weathermen tussling with online trolls isn’t new. Last year, Spann got dragged by a horde after he tried, with saint-like patience, to answer a question that never should have been a question: Where did the moon go?
Not only are some of us so bored with the reality that we’ll root for the storms but some will invent crises from whole cloth when the wind is still and the sky is clear.
Reality has a hard time competing with conspiracy theories because conspiracy theories are more interesting. And when our attention is forced back to real life, be it a tornado outbreak, a hurricane or a pandemic, a careless few will turn the real world into something more than it is. FEMA workers responding to Appalachia floods get cast as dangerous government agents from the X-Files. Epidemiologists warning us of deadly diseases become part of some globalist machination. The friendly TV weatherman becomes a mouthpiece for know-it-all experts who didn’t know as much as they thought.
Or they could be regular folks trying to do their jobs under stressful and unstable circumstances. But where’s the fun in that?
Fun.
This is where we are now — in those moments when real lives are on the line, some subset of us will look for a contact high from the chaos. And when a natural disaster doesn’t come through — they’ll demand some sort of refund for their ticket to a free show instead of thanking all those folks who are looking out for us.
I would pity those folks, or better — ignore them. Only I fear that, when too many root for our own destruction, shunning experts and demeaning the folks working to keep us safe, one day the calamity they’re rooting for will find us.
And who will warn us to look out then?
Kyle Whitmire is the Washington watchdog columnist for AL.com and winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. You can follow him on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X , Threads and Bluesky.