This story is part of AL.com’s series “21 Alabamians who made a difference in 2021,” highlighting people who have made our state a better place to live this year. Stories in this series will publish each day from Dec. 5 to Dec. 31. Find all stories in the series as they publish here, and read about the Alabamians who made a difference in 2020 by clicking here.
You’re at work. Your house is in a tornado polygon. You learn your house just got hit, and your wife is inside. What do you do?
For James Spann, that scenario wasn’t a hypothetical on March 26.
While on the air, Spann’s home was in the path of an E-3 tornado with his wife inside.
“I texted my wife while on the air, I said, ‘shelter now’ with eight exclamation points,” ABC 33/40′s chief meteorologist recalled in an interview with AL.com. “She immediately texted back, ‘I’m there.’”
Spann’s wife, Karen Spann, had already been in the shelter the couple built for their Shelby County home that is able to withstand an E-5 tornado when her husband urged her to get to safety.
“Our home was in a polygon 20 to 25 minutes before the tornado got there. We joke about it all the time, but she respects the polygon,” Spann said, referring to his catchphrase.
But the tornado uprooted trees in the Spanns’ backyard and their home sustained shingle damage.
Once he learned his wife was not harmed, James Spann said there was virtually no debate about what he would do and kept working, informing ABC 33/40 viewers on the tornado’s path and urging them to stay safe.
“If I stop [covering the tornado], what good does it do?” Spann said, believing that his public service that day trumped how the tornado personally affected him.
“I’ve been doing this a long time and when you’re working a tornado event like that, it’s almost like being on a battlefield,” he said. “You are in the middle of an intense job that can often directly impact the safety of people and their lives.”
About 15 minutes after Spann learned what happened to his home, ABC 33/40 general manager Eric Land waved a cell phone and gave a timeout signal to the meteorologist so Spann could speak to his wife while his ABC 33/40 colleague Taylor Sarallo led the tornado coverage.
Spann said during that conversation, his wife told him the roof stayed on their home, which he was grateful for because “so many houses lost their roofs” from the tornado.
“I’ll find the guy who put the roof on our house and buy him some Chick-fil-A, it was incredible,” he said. “We were just blessed beyond my wild imagination.”
ABC 33/40′s chief meteorologist said he feared that if he went off the air March 26, viewers would lose vital photos and videos that Spann gets sent to him on social media that he shares on air.
“People respond to video, they don’t normally respond to radar,” Spann said.
As a television meteorologist, he said, “the body language that you use, the images that you show, the words that you use, it’s all important.”
Going to tend to his personal situation wasn’t an option, Spann said.
“You can’t just stop doing tornado coverage,” he said. “My concern wasn’t for us, it was for all these precious people that lost their homes.”
Meanwhile, Spann said he was grateful for Ginger Zee, chief meteorologist for ABC News in New York City, who was in Birmingham covering tornadoes and “walked a mile through debris just to go check on” his wife.
Spann said there was sheetrock dust all over his home, but he didn’t need to be displaced from the tornado while others in Shelby County lost their houses. He later said he will remain forever grateful for a prayer group that helped him and his wife start getting their lives back to normal, and the group who helped clean the debris in his neighborhood. “What they did, I can never, ever repay them,” he added. “I told them, ‘Look, next time y’all go out on a mission, I’m in.’ I’m not the best chainsaw guy, and I can’t work some of this heavy equipment, but man, I can pick stuff up and carry stuff. I just want to pay somebody back for what they did for me.”
Spann said, “It’s just another reminder that goodness tornadoes don’t always happen in Pleasant Grove and Oak Grove and Pratt City … they can happen anywhere and it doesn’t matter, we just got to get people ready.”
The silver lining of the tornado, according to Spann, is what was left after his trees were uprooted.
“Now we got an incredible view of the sunset, so you have to look at it positively,” he said.
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