I just finished reading the book “F5: Devastation Survival and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the Twentieth Century†by author Mark Levine. Levine has penned several magazine articles for publication such as The New Yorker and Outside magazine.
In F5, Levine tells the story of the April 3, 1974 tornado outbreak. Not in an encyclopedic scale that captures the enormity of the disaster, but mainly through the eyes of a few people who were caught up in that terrible night in the Tennessee Valley of Alabama.
The story is told from the experiences of the Green family that lived in Tanner in Limestone County, Bob Dunnavant, an adventurous radio reporter for Athens radio station WJMW who got caught in the second Tanner tornado at the devastated Lawson’s Trailer Park and Limestone County Sheriff Buddy Evans.
Evans’ dramatic quote in the Huntsville Times about that night still resonates with me some 33 years later. “It was like something out of the Old Testament, a pillar of clouds, black, majestic and ominous, moving across the farmlands of southern Limestone County.â€
Spencer Black, the director of the Limestone County EMA office, is also spotlighted. Levine shows how far EMA operations have come from that primitive time to the well-prepared and organized present.
Levine ties the story into fairly good explanations of how supercell storms form and produce tornadoes. He gives a little bit of tornado history. The book tells the backdrop of the turbulent times of 1974. Nixon was in trouble. Hank Aaron was ready to tie Babe Ruth’s record the following day in Cincinnati. Patty Hearst had been kidnapped by the SLA. But it misses the opportunity to capture the true frenetic nature of the larger disaster.
He captures the chaos and panic of the night, but only as it relates to Limestone County. Guin is treated as a side note. Jasper is not even mentioned. Xenia, Ohio is depicted only as a town that has seen better days and the tornado as a source for an interesting tape recording that a local young man made as the tornado destroyed his apartment building. I was disappointed to see much of the information culled from sources we all remember very well in the days after the outbreak.
In today’s world of formulaic books, I am sure that the author created a book that was designed to sell. But it left me feeling like something was missing…
