15 Years Later, Mayor Walt Maddox Reflects on Tornado that Devastated Tuscaloosa

15 years after a previously unthinkable EF-4 tornado killed dozens and destroyed a large swath of the city, little about Tuscaloosa remains as it was in April 2011. One constant, though, is Mayor Walt Maddox, whose 21 years in the office make him one of the longest-serving incumbent city leaders in Alabama.

In April 2011, Maddox was early in his second term as mayor and still learning the ropes of running a city of this size. Today, the mayor is early in his sixth term, tying his predecessor, Al DuPont, for a Tuscaloosa record.

In a long interview with the Thread last week, Maddox reflected on his decision to run for elected office, plus his experience before, during and after the tornado and his thoughts on the recovery efforts 15 years after the storm.

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MADDOX BEFORE THE TORNADO

The Thread: "We're talking about the April 27th tornado 15 years ago, but let's start with young Walt Maddox, 25 years ago, deciding to run for city council. What was your call to public service, to run and get elected to what has now become 25 years in elected office?"

Mayor Walt Maddox: "It was really by accident. I never dreamed I'd be in politics. I wanted to be a college football coach. Life kind of intervened, and I found my way to the Alabama Education Association, then back home to Tuscaloosa in a way that was purely accidental. At that point in my life, I was seriously considering becoming a superintendent. I was with the city school system at the time, I was executive director for personnel, and I was going to move forward and get my doctorate and try to go on the superintendent's path.

Then I had a sewer issue in my house in Woodland Forest. And when I contacted the city, frankly, they didn't have the customer service you would expect. There wasn’t even an ounce of sympathy provided, or clarity, or understanding, and I felt like I wasn't treated with much respect. So I made a decision at that point to run for city council in my district, and if it wasn't for that sewer issue, I don't think you and I are having this conversation today."

The Thread: "Then, in 2005, Mayor Al DuPont did not seek re-election."

Mayor Walt Maddox: "Yeah. When Mayor Dupont decided to retire as the mayor of the city and its chief executive officer, I thought, why don’t I give this a shot? And I'm not trying to exaggerate, but I was the third-place candidate. You had Sammy Watson, who was seen as the heir apparent. Then you had Mark Booth, who had come within a handful of votes from being mayor in 2001. And then you had this guy, Walt Maddox, from a district out in East Tuscaloosa that most people, except some in his own council district, didn't know. So it's been a hell of a ride."

The Thread: "What was your day-to-day like from 2005 to 2011? What were you thinking about your role as mayor during those six years before the tornado?"

Mayor Walt Maddox: "There's no doubt that April 27th, 2011, is a B.C./A.D. moment for us. Even today, we still talk about before the tornado and after the tornado.

I guess my early experience was as an administrator, and the job of mayor of Tuscaloosa is just that. 90 percent of what I do would bore most people, just dealing with the day-to-day operations of a $1.5 billion entity with 1,400 employees and assets that stretch out over 71 square miles - but I enjoy that aspect.

So when I got elected, it was all about learning the organization and improving myself, because I was 32 years old and I didn’t realize how much I didn’t know. I’m sure I had a little bit of undeserved arrogance at the time. But I was learning the organization and putting through an agenda of growth. Until that time, our census data shows that we'd remained stagnant in population. Our downtown, except for spots like De Palma's and the Shirt Shop, was blighted and abandoned. Our riverfront was stalled with no riverfront trails and no development, but we had a very ambitious city council member named Lee Garrison who wanted to change that.

So I was working on all these different projects of moving them forward - downtown revitalization, the Tuscaloosa Amphitheater, the 311 call line, investing in West Tuscaloosa with our Noah's Ark initiative, where so many of our drainage issues were.I also had to hire a chief at TPD, Steve Anderson, because our long-time chief, Ken Swindle, retired.

Many things happened that changed the trajectory of the city, and because we were able to get them done in those first five years, even when 13 percent of our city was destroyed, those other things had reached a point of no return. We saw downtown revitalization continue, and Riverfront development continue. We moved those forward, and I'm very, very proud of that.

That's one of the things that's very difficult to articulate - we had to focus on rebuilding that 13% of the city and some areas of high poverty, antiquated infrastructure, and a lack of economic vibrancy. We were able to accomplish that while simultaneously keeping the rest of the city moving forward. We kept downtown revitalization moving. We kept the Riverfront moving. We kept everything else moving while rebuilding our city."

April 27th, 2011 - The Tornado Hits

The Thread: "A lot of territory has already been tread about the day of the tornado and what that looked like for you. Was there a moment of realization when it dawned on you that this was a 'B.C./A.D.' moment? That there was an unprecedented level of damage and loss of life, and you realized that your time as mayor was going to be different going forward?"

Mayor Walt Maddox: "I was inside our Incident Command as it was happening, and the first initial reports were that the Curry Facility was gone, which I thought was an exaggeration. Then the wife of our city attorney, who was working at DCH, got him a message that 15th Street was gone. Those are the first two things I heard.

The first actual, confirmed report came when Chief Anderson notified me that there were so many bodies that police were just going to have to mark them at the scene and not transport them. Those came in the first 20 minutes, and those were three significant things that I heard and realized this is something unusual.

We drove down the university boulevard, which was very serene, with people out on the Strip, but then we hit the viaduct in Alberta and stopped there. You had people who were injured, bleeding, limping and walking towards you, then you looked to the southwest and the northeast, and it looked like the hand of God had slammed down. That's when I knew this was different. I was smart enough to know that what I could see was a fraction of the destruction - the path is going to be bigger and longer than that.

I realized even though we've gone through the training, we've done all the tabletop exercises, this was going to be vastly different, and thankfully, I had a relationship with Governor Bentley, who was from Tuscaloosa and my doctor, my parents’ doctor. I got back into the vehicle, texted him, and that's when we secured our first several hundred National Guardsmen via text right there on University Boulevard.

To Governor Bentley's credit, he said, "Whatever you need, you got it, but you run it," because he had so many issues elsewhere across Alabama. I will never forget the trust he put into us and the confidence to use those state assets as we needed them, because Major General [Charles] Gailes and the National Guard were a lifesaver for us."

The Thread: "You've talked over the years about the search-and-rescue efforts and the logistics of this recovery, but can you talk about your personal grief? What was that like for you? Did you know any of the victims? Did you ever take a moment to kind of process what this would mean for you personally?"

Mayor Walt Maddox: "Yes - you knew people who were victims, you knew people who lost their businesses, you knew people who lost their homes.

But it was so busy, and it stayed that way for months. You really never had time to process it. One of the many mistakes I made was moving so quickly into recovery. I think we hosted 36 town hall meetings during the summer months, and the team was exhausted. I was exhausted. Everyone was exhausted.

The first time it truly struck me, oddly enough,  my best friend encouraged me to go out with him to Tulsa. UAB - where I played football in college - was playing the Tulsa Hurricanes in October of 2011. I remember going out there for a good weekend to get away, and it was, and I needed it.

But when Tulsa scores, they play a siren in the stadium, a tornado siren. That was the first time I remember hearing that sound and having it emotionally hurt me. It was the first time I really felt the weight of everything, every conversation, every decision, every criticism, the weight of all of it came with that siren - what we felt, what we encountered, what we'd been through.

Even to this day, I despise the sound of it because of all of that. It was also very personal. There's no way I could not take any of this personally, because it is my hometown."

The Recovery Effort 15 Years Later

The Thread: "I remember an interview in the aftermath in which a FEMA official told you this was probably a 10- to 15-year recovery. 15 years later, how do you feel about the recovery process? Where do you think we stand?"

Mayor Walt Maddox: "I'm very gratified that we did it the right way. A couple of days after the tornado, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu called me just to encourage me and also give me some advice.

He said to build back in a way that people may be mad at you for two years, but not for a lifetime - and you do that through planning and infrastructure.

One of the criticisms we took, early on, was that this was too slow. Tuscaloosa is running slow, and Joplin, say, is running fast. There was a myth perpetuating that 85 percent of Joplin was rebuilt within a year. Which it wasn’t — but these myths take on lives of their own.

Well, we were a little bit slower because we knew the 13 percent of the city that got destroyed did not have the infrastructure to support rebuilding. There were areas within Alberta where storm drainage lines hadn’t been mapped in years, built back in the 30s and 40s, running underneath people’s private property, because that’s just how it was done.

That’s just a small example of how all of that had to be built back to a code and a standard - not only an engineering standard but a legal standard. Making certain that when ALDOT expands or does improvements on McFarland Boulevard, we have turn lanes, storm drainage, water and sewer.

When you stretch that out over 13 percent of your city, that takes time. But we made that conscious decision. We implemented building standards and material standards, and planning designs, and that was the right decision. Today, we receive nothing but praise. But those first 24 months were difficult, and I’m glad we had the fortitude to do it the right way.

There were some things we got wrong because we were forced to do something that takes three years in three months, and there were going to be ideas that did not work. We corrected those things. We never said, 'We passed that, by God, we’re living with it!' If the business community came to us and said something wasn’t going to work, we would ask, okay, how can we make it work?

So, I can’t say enough about our business community, who engaged with us from the very beginning, and said they wanted to rebuild the right way, and we wanted to do it the right way. So we started a dialogue that still continues today with the mayor’s business advisory council.”

The Thread: “What does the legacy of the ‘Tuscaloosa Forward’ recovery plan look like now?"

Mayor Walt Maddox: "Its elements are seen today in Framework Tuscaloosa. I think you can see its legacy in all we learned when we were forced into this expedited process. We learned, but we also developed core concepts that you see in Framework today.

The community wanted to rebuild, so we had to move things quickly. Our team was exhausted, and the same people who were responding to the tornado were now leading the recovery.

I’m impressed we got so much right, because we had some really tired souls. Robin Edgeworth, who was our incident commander and is now the mayor of Gordo, doesn't get the credit she deserves. I get way too much credit. Robin and her team made me look damn good, and they did a really good job.

But I’ve never wanted to put a "Mission Accomplished!" banner on the recovery. First of all, we still have parcels that have not been built back since the tornado, still vacant lots. That’s due to the profit sector. People whose property was worth $20,000 per acre on April 26th woke up on April 28th believing it was now worth $500,000 per acre. There's nothing that the government can do about that. If someone is not willing to sell, develop or consolidate their properties, vacancies will happen.

But the real reason why I don’t want to ever declare “Mission Accomplished” is because if I lost a child or a loved one, or if I lost my business, or lost my home, there’s no recovery from that."

The Thread: “We talked earlier about your government philosophy in the few years in office before the tornado. Now, looking back, how did that change during these last 15 years?”

Mayor Walt Maddox: “I don’t think my philosophy really changed. I think during the first five years, I was able to really work on the art of knowing where government plays a role in encouraging economic development and growth with the Riverfront, Downtown and Noah’s Ark in West Tuscaloosa. Those principles we really worked on prior to April 27th came into full force afterward.

We felt like infrastructure was where we needed to put our money, our investments. That worked with the Riverfront Downtown in West Tuscaloosa, and we felt it would work in the recovery zone. When you look at where we spent the $130 million dollars of total funding we got, $99 million of that went into infrastructure because I felt like that’s how you help a business come back. That’s how you help a neighborhood come back. That’s how you help the community come back. If you have good roads, water, sewer and stormwater, you can build on top of them.”

The Thread: “College students now were toddlers at the time of the tornado, and more and more people who move here don’t know much about it. What would you have people know about the storm?”

Mayor Walt Maddox: “I think we should celebrate that people who come to our community with no history of it do not visually see the signs of the tornado! That tells us we did a good job in rebuilding our city.

But what I would share with individuals is this. There was nothing magical that the city of Tuscaloosa did in the, you know, minutes following April 27th, 2011, at 5:13 p.m. It was the citizens who were the first out doing triage and transporting the injured. It was our citizens who were out creating aid stations in places like Alberta and Rosedale, which the city then built around. And it was our citizens who frankly demanded that we rebuild the city in a way that honors all those who lost so much.

To me, that resilience is the story we should share - it’s really not always the case. That event propelled me into crisis management and emergency management and into an opportunity to become a senior fellow at the Kennedy School of Government. So, I’ve heard from many experts in the field and read a lot of the work and science behind disaster recovery. When what happened in Tuscaloosa happens in other communities, it can shut those communities down or stall them out. From a growth, financial or political standpoint, we held it all together. That’s something to be really proud of as a community, because a lot of the time these things can tear people asunder."

The Thread: “As we near the end of time together, are there any other points you want to make? Open mic.”

Mayor Walt Maddox: “Something I think probably doesn’t get enough credit is the fact that we rebuilt our city, but continued to provide services to 87.5% of the other part of our city that wasn’t in the path.

During the tornado, we lost our logistics building and our heavy fleet, and we lost 17 percent of our police assets. Afterward, we had to cash-flow nearly $60 million. Not once did the city fail to keep its promises financially, in infrastructure, or in providing services. I’m proud we were able to do that, and it took a lot of work from many people. I’m so proud to be part of that team.

One thing that I probably don’t do a good enough job of talking about is the professionalism of our senior staff. Every time we have a department head meeting, I am the least intelligent person in the room, and that is a great benefit because I am surrounded by people who are so intelligent, so organized, that they make this a great city, and I get to be part of that team."

We thank Mayor Maddox for his generosity with his time to discuss such an impactful event in the city's history.

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