Welcome to The Weather Scene segment! Each week here on Geek Alabama, The Weather Scene will feature weather related content. Editor / publisher Nathan Young loves weather related content. And this segment will feature something about the weather every week.

On April 27, 2011, the deadliest tornado of the entire Super Outbreak wasn’t the one on live television. It was 132 miles north, in two towns most people have never heard of.

While cameras followed a mile-wide EF4 through Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, an EF5 tore through Hackleburg and Phil Campbell, Alabama at around 210 mph. It killed 72 people, making it the deadliest single tornado of the outbreak and the deadliest in Alabama’s recorded history. Tuscaloosa’s tornado killed between 64 and 66. This one killed more, and almost nobody outside those hills remembers it.

This is the story of the EF5 history skipped, and the brutal distinction at the center of it: a warning that is issued is not the same as a warning that is received.

Every person who died that day was inside a tornado watch and under a tornado warning, with more than 20 minutes of average lead time. The forecasting was nearly flawless. So why did so many die? Because a first round of storms that morning had already gone down the alerting chain with bolt cutters. In Marion County, the single NOAA Weather Radio transmitter at Winfield went dead at 8:23 AM and didn’t come back until 5:50 PM. The tornado hit Hackleburg at 3:25. The one machine whose entire job was to wake up the county’s weather radios was silent for the whole thing.

We also cover the choices that ran the other direction: the superintendent who cancelled school so three destroyed buildings sat empty, and plant manager Wade Hagedorn, who cancelled the Wrangler second shift for the first time in his career on a bad feeling, leaving 14 people in the office instead of a full shift change.

A note on the record: The official toll is 72. A 2022 peer-reviewed reanalysis concluded it was 71, finding one victim had been counted in two towns. We use the official number and flag the other, because that’s what taking a count seriously looks like. That same reanalysis also disputes the path length (roughly 100 miles vs. the original 132-mile survey into Tennessee). Both are noted in the video.

The Weather Scene: Insane Up Close Tornado Right In Front Of Them In Clarksville, TN The Weather Scene: TWISTEX Chased Multiple Tornadoes in Nebraska, This One Was Insane The Weather Scene: Extreme Oklahoma Tornado Chase – We Caught TWINS!