First of all, we’re all fine. No-one in our circle of friends was hurt or is unaccounted for, although several have suffered property damage. Our house suffered a tiny bit of superficial damage (a plastic “faux shutter” was blown off, and we’ll need to screw it back in place). We didn’t even lose power (although our water is currently contaminated very badly, I don’t think it’s drinkable, even if boiled). We did lose cable TV and internet for over a day and our cell reception is still very bad (yes, I know, poor us). About a block from our house a couple of big trees were blown over.
The top photograph shows the first serious damage we encountered as we travelled into town shortly after the all clear to pick up a graduate student. (Her apartment had been spiked by a falling tree (narrowly missing her) and she was understandably a bit freaked out. I wanted to see what the damage looked like, and brought a camera, but it was pretty much dark by the time we got to 15th and McFarland (the photo above is a fair bit brighter than the scene actually looked).
(Yes I know the photos I took are crap — they were shot at 3200 ISO with 1/4s shutter speed.)
This is the intersection of 15th and McFarland. 15th is one of three major cross-streets through Tuscaloosa. There’s pretty much nothing left. The next major cross street to the north is University Boulevard, which was unscathed. (The University is resuming normal operations, except for classes and exams, next week, which is going to be interesting since it’s not easy to actually get to the university from our side of town right now.)
Finally, here’s an annotated version of a satellite image released by Google (I found it here). I’ve found it amazingly difficult to get a nice map of the damage — this image makes it really clear — the brown streak is a path of total destruction, and the arrow shows where I took that second picture and roughly the direction I was facing. The big white X under the arrow is University Mall, and the white “euro” symbol to its west is Midtown Village. The major east-west road to the north is University Boulevard where UA and DCH (Tuscaloosa’s main hospital) are located.