Severe weather can be deadly

By Staff
Mike Self, Franklin County Times
Franklin County avoided major damage when severe weather swept across Alabama on Thursday, but other areas of the state were not as fortunate.
Storms caused a roof to collapse at Enterprise High School, trapping a number of students under debris and resulting in at least eight deaths.
Given the number of storms that impact our state over the course of a year, such tragedies like the one in Enterprise are relatively rare. State-of-the-art warning systems and advancements in weather-related technology have helped lower the number of fatalities resulting from severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.
I remember being terrified of storms as a child. Whenever the sky would darken and thunder would begin to roll, I would go to the nearest window at my house and anxiously study the sky. (As you might guess, I spent a great deal of my youth staring at the heavens. Hardly a day goes by during the spring and summer months in Alabama without a good, old-fashioned pop-up thunderstorm.)
I'm not sure how my fear of storms became so gripping. I've never known anybody personally who lost their life in a tornado. I guess my fear really boiled down to one thing: A lack of control. As much as I wanted to, I had absolutely no control over the weather. It was completely unpredictable, and that frightened me.
Eventually I outgrew my fear. I guess when you survive about a million thunderstorms (and one close call with a tornado back in 1989) unscathed, you learn to cope.
Severe weather no longer frightens me, but that doesn't mean it can't still be dangerous-even deadly.
Thursday's events in south Alabama were a stark reminder of that grim reality.