Video: Alabama Remembers Deadly F5 Tornado

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GUIN, Ala. (WCBI) — It’s been 40 years since a deadly F5 tornado swept through the tiny Marion County town of Guin, Alabama destroying homes and business all across the area.

It’s being called one of the largest disasters in the history of the state of Alabama. Thursday people from that community gathered to remember and reflect.

The altar filled with candles at First Baptist Church of Guin becomes a tool used to reflect on the lives of about 25 victims of a killer tornado. That tornado that came through town, forever changed the lives of those people. Especially those who gathered to remember. One Guin resident fresh from the frontline of the War In Vietnam was not prepared for what he witnessed.

“Of course I was scared but this was, I guess, unknowing and unexpected, and never really seen one. Heard of them out west and but not here,” Guin resident Larry Harris said.

“My father and I were standing out on the back porch looking at the storm. And we saw it when it hit town. Started tearing all the buildings up,” Gary Randolph, Guin businessman, said.

On April 3, 1974 First Baptist Church became a holding place for the dead and the wounded. Of these 25 names of victims who lived in Guin, everyone seemed to have known everybody.

“In fact, I had a first cousin that died in it. James Harand, which lived, ran a shop here on the corner in town at that time,” Harris said.

“Oh it’s horrible. That’s a horrible — that’s the horriblest thing in the world that night. It was so sad you know to loose a lot of our friends you know, or anybody,” Guin resident Sarah Grace Haynes said.

One line of a printed program distributed at the memorial service sums it up by saying, “sometimes it takes a disaster to set our values right.” And, hopefully, should it happen again, those who come to remember … will somehow be prepared, when nature unleashes her fury.

That F-5 Tornado was a weather pattern meteorologist call a “Super Outbreak” that stretched from Mississippi to Kentucky killing 86 individuals in Alabama and injuring 949 individuals, and costing overall some $50 million in damages.