ALABAMA – Former longtime Huntsville television meteorologist Gary Dobbs was on his Lawrence County front porch on April 27, 2011, holding his cellphone and telling his region-wide audience what he was seeing in the stormy skies to his southwest.
What could have been Dobbs’ last words on that call – “I gotta go” – came seconds before he tried to outrun an EF-5 tornado heading straight for his house.
“I’m going, ‘well, the pecan trees out front are blowing sideways,’” Dobbs remembered this week from his retirement home in Fort Walton, Fla. “There’s a lot of hail falling. It’s just solid hail practically. And where hail is not hitting the ground, lightning is. There’s lightning all around me so I can’t get off the porch to get a better view around these trees.”
Dobbs really wanted to see the tornado, but it was “rain-wrapped” in a wall of water moving his way. And then it wasn’t a wall, anymore.
“There was the tornado right in front of me,” Dobbs said. “You now had no time to go sideways, much less forward or backward.”
There was a shelter behind the house – Dobbs’ wife Belinda had insisted they build one before she’d move into to what was her family’s old home – and three young workers from an Oh Bryans steakhouse next door were already taking shelter there. They’d come over from the empty restaurant a few minutes earlier.
Dobbs threw down his phone – one of his regrets because he never saw it again – and ran inside making for the shelter on the other side of the house.
“When I first got into the house, I got hit by the first brick of the day,” Dobbs said. He was “literally running a race with a tornado” in a house that was flying apart around him.
Dobbs has told this story before. People remember and ask about it “all the time,” he said, and he’s learned how to leaven the horror of that day with those bits of absurd humor that appear in so many tornado stories – if you live to tell them.
For example, Dobbs ran for a closet in the northeastern corner of the house where he “had about 50 sport coats” stored. “I think I came out with a red sport coat over my head,” he said.
Here is where longtime Dobbs’ fans smile remembering his on-air wardrobe. “A red sport coat.” Absolutely. Definitely wasn’t “the” red sport coat, we are certain.
Dobbs picked the closet over the bathroom for his dive to relative safety, and it was another good call. “They found that bathtub two miles away,” he said.
“I jumped in the closet and got down on my knees – for more reasons than one – and put my hands behind my neck,” Dobbs said, “which I think actually saved some of my neck because I had a big gash in my fingers.”
Dobbs could hear and feel the tornado now, he said. “Everything was vibrating,” he said.
The tornado hit the closet and dropped Dobbs into the crawlspace under the house. “Then it picked me back up about the height of the house and blew me into the back yard and sat me down,” he said. “It didn’t throw me down; it sat me down.”
The washer and dryer were in the next room and he was hit first by the washer and then the dryer. “If anyone ever asks your opinion on would it be better to be hit by a washer or a dryer, just go ahead and tell them you know,” he said. “The washer is the killer. It’s about three times heavier.”
The tornado and the house passed over Dobbs and landed “where the barn was.” It was also destroyed. “The thought of how much roofing tin was flying around me and how much those two by fours with 12-inch nails were flying around me just kind of makes me stop thinking about it.”
Dobbs knows that, as he said, “a million things could have happened” but he ended up with puncture wounds from nails and part of the skin of both arms “stripped off.”
That was a piece of tin that stripped the skin from his arms, Dobbs thought, and then he thought one of the dozens of what if’s that follow escapes like his. “If one of those pieces of tin had hit me at the right angle at the right spot,” he said, “they may never have found my head.”
“When I heard the shaking stop, I heard the jet engine , Dobbs said emphasizing the last three words before adding, “Don’t let anybody tell you it sounds like a train. The jet engine.”
Dobbs dug himself out of the debris, including a 150-year-old oak tree, and he saw “nothing left.” Nothing of his house, nothing of the restaurant where the servers had fled. His car was tossed on what had been the roof. Nothing was left of his neighbor’s house but the slab.
The neighbor had tied her dog to a big oak tree before she left for work, Dobbs said. The tree blew over but the dog was saved in the arc of the fallen tree.
Dobbs has a storyteller’s eye and ear for the strange moments of storms like these – the closet full of sport coats, the dog behind the tree – and he’s told the story publicly before.
As a professional weather forecaster, he knows he was lucky. The truth is that none of the neighbors around him who were home survived the storm. He thinks about that “about every day,” he says now. Sometimes a moment becomes clearer. “It didn’t happen that way, it happened this way,” he said.
Dobbs still keeps up with the weather where he lives – more hurricane watches than tornado watches – and the weather in the Tennessee Valley.
He is twice a survivor, having received a kidney transplant that is the reason he and wife Belinda live in Fort Walton Beach. Dobbs had waited for a kidney unsuccessfully in Huntsville and Nashville and heard through friends that Sacred Heart Hospital in Pensacola was opening a kidney transplant program.
“The minute they had it up and running, I ran over there and put my name on their list,” Dobbs said. The seven years he’d already been waiting transferred to the new center, and he ended up at the top of its list. He had to wait another year. He had the transplant on Halloween of 2020, Dobbs said, and the doctor says “the kidney is operating perfectly.”
