Weathering the storm from afar

BY ANNA DURRETT / REPORTER

Jeremiah Grider was away on a business trip for Northrop Grumman in Visalia, Calif. when the tornados of April 27 hit his home in Harvest with his wife and two dogs inside.

Grider received notifications on his cell phone about the impending storm. “I didn’t really pay attention to them,” he said. Grider grew up in Kansas, Okla., and the high frequency of tornadoes there led him to become accustomed to them.

“Then the wife calls me,” said Grider. The tornadoes turned out to be more serious than Grider had expected. During the storm his wife sent him texts with photos of fallen trees in their yard.

A total of seven trees in his yard fell, but apart from his fence and the trees themselves, nothing was damaged. One fell six inches from his truck and another fell two feet from his master bedroom. “Ten degrees to the left or right and they would have been on my truck or my house,” said Grider.

With only bits of information from home trickling in to their phones during the storm, Grider and his co-worker Rob English who was also on the trip were worried about their families, friends, co-workers and especially their wives back in Alabama.

“It was a hopeless feeling,” said English, whose home in Huntsville was wound up being completely spared from damage. “The thought of my wife sitting completely alone in the laundry room with no power was not a good one.”

Grider said he thought about leaving in the middle of his business trip, but once he knew both his wife and home were unharmed, he decided to finish his work. “He was the lead engineer for the entire project, so he pretty much couldn’t leave without bringing the project to a halt,” said English.

After Grider finished his work in Visalia, the plane ride coming back to Huntsville was unlike any other. “Just looking at the ground, it looked like there were brown clouds,” said Grider. When the plane got closer to the ground, he could tell what appeared to be brown clouds were actually the areas of land where a tornado touched down. “You could see the entire swath of every touchdown.”

In preparations for future disaster situations, Grider keeps “a pretty good stash of gasoline” and checks his generators every few weeks. “We probably haven’t done a lot above and beyond of what we used to do. We just make sure we do it now.”