When Zaylin McAnelly first heard about the April 27, 2011, storms, she didn’t have a good understanding of what a tornado was.
“I just knew that it was some twisty thing, like from The Wizard of Oz, like knowing that Dorothy got picked up by a tornado,” she said. “I guess I knew what that was, but I never really knew how tornadoes were caused or the science behind it.”
Zaylin is one of the youngest survivors of the storm system that struck Alabama 15 years ago, spawning a record-setting 62 tornadoes on a single day. The tornado outbreak took 252 lives and forever changed many more.
Zaylin can’t remember that day, but she has been deeply shaped by it. She said she didn’t fully comprehend what her family went through until a gathering at her house when she was in fourth grade.
“I was like, ‘What's going on?’” she recalled. “And my mom was like, ‘It's the anniversary of the tornado that hit us.’ And they pulled up some clips of people tornado chasing it, I guess, or watching it. And I was like, ‘Wow, that thing is huge. That hit us? That's crazy.’”
Zaylin has heard all her life about how her mother, grandmother and uncle huddled under a mattress with her – then a 2-month-old baby – as a more than mile-wide tornado struck their Tuscaloosa home.
Zaylin’s mom, Michelle McAnelly, remembered the day well. Her brother, Nikki, was on the front porch and saw the tornado coming toward them.
“We all got in the hallway and pulled the futon mattress over us, and kind of linked arms, and Zaylin – we put her in her car seat. And Nikki and I linked arms around the car seat,” McAnelly said. “And then it hit.
“I was just like, ‘Oh, this is it? This is messed up to just bring a life into this world and it’s going to end so soon.’ Right before the windows busted out, she actually cried a little bit. I think it was probably because of the pressure. And I remember her crying and then the explosion of the glass.”
The wind ripped away the roof, attic and ceilings.
“We could hear it being pulled up board by board,” McAnelly said.
The family felt an updraft lifting them, she said. When the air settled and the sounds faded, they pushed the mattress away and saw only sky overhead.
McAnelly said she always thinks about the tornado on April 27 and is still surprised her family survived.
“I'm grateful that I still have my life and also my family members,” she said. “I know a lot of people didn't make it out of there.”
Zaylin said she knows that, too. And even though she doesn’t remember the storm that destroyed her family’s home, her life still bears its trauma – and its lessons. When storms develop now, she’s afraid.
“I get kind of scared only because I think about how everyone was scared that they were going to die,” she said.
She said she’s channeled her fear into learning as much as she can.
“There's different types of tornadoes, like the EF1s, EF2s, like all of those,” she said. “Getting tornado warnings and stuff here in Alabama – I ask questions a lot. And I'm like, ‘What does that mean?’”
Zaylin is very weather-aware.
“Whenever there's a storm or anything, we always go to the bathroom and we're like, ‘Come on, get in here. Fast, put the news on and just try to take cover,’” she said. “We have safety kits. We have stashes of freeze-dried food. We put helmets on. We have pillows. We put our shoes on.”
She also educates others about what to do.
“I try to tell my friends, ‘Be safe, like, something might happen. You never know,’” she said. “I always try to tell everybody that I love them, because if something does happen, I'd rather them know that I love them.”
Zaylin said that despite having no conscious memory of the April 27 storms, they might have shaped her in other ways, too. She said she’s cautious about a lot of things – not just the weather.
Even though her life has been profoundly influenced by a tornado, her perspective on them isn’t completely negative.
“I think that they're cool,” she said. “Like, all the science behind it. It's just I would never want to go through that again.”
