After the Tornado

When the school collapsed around the children, they rushed in to help.

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A Raging Tornado

Except for the dreary, overcast weather, last November 15 was an ordinary midweek morning in Montgomery, Alabama. Thirty-one children were doing their usual thing at the Learning Zone Day Care Center: The babies were napping, the toddlers were playing. The older kids, ages three to five, were at the indoor playground on the opposite side of the Fun Zone, the 60,000-square-foot entertainment complex that leased space to the child-care facility. On evenings and weekends, the Fun Zone was always packed. People came to roller-skate, ride bumper cars, climb the rock wall, play arcade games. That day, all was quiet but for the shouts of preschoolers bouncing in the ball pit and crawling through the junglegym maze in what workers called the soft play area.

Liberty Duke, director of the Learning Zone, was busy doing paperwork when sirens went off at about 10 a.m. She didn’t panic. Severe weather alerts are frequent that time of year and usually signal a hard, drenching rain. Figuring the pots of mums in the entryway could use a good watering, she picked them up and took them outside.

Then the power went out. As Duke stood in the dark, she heard glass shatter. Gusts of wind blasted through the broken windows, sending ceiling tiles spinning through the air. She tried to open the door, but it barely budged. Peeking out a crack, she was shocked. The Fun Zone was gone. “All you could see was the sky,” she says.

Across the parking lot, Lewis Harrison had just pulled into Car Audio Plus. He needed a new front speaker in his Chevy Blazer. Looking up, he and his buddy Bill Marcum saw a car hurtle over the roof of the post office. All of a sudden, they were in the middle of a raging tornado.

Stereo installer JJ Justiss ran to grab some equipment that had blown out of the shop. Behind him he saw the Fun Zone collapse into a mountain of metal and smoke. Grabbing his cell phone, he called 911 and took off, running so fast his Birkenstocks fell off in the driving rain.

Harrison had been to the Fun Zone many times with his six-year-old twin girls. He knew all about the kids in the day-care center. Everyone in the area did. He and Marcum ran toward the wreckage. Workers from Worth Cleaners, a few doors away, were right behind them.

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