Woman Says Truck Drivers Saved Her From Alabama Tornado

 Jan Wesner Childs

Published: February 6, 2021

Big rigs surround Melinda Maynard's vehicle on Interstate 65 in Fultondale, Alabama, on Monday, Jan. 25, 2021.

Melinda Maynard left Gulf Shores, Alabama, the night of Monday, Jan. 25, for what she thought would be an easy trip six hours north to her home near Huntsville.

Traffic was light when Maynard hit Interstate 65. She settled in with a line of semitrailers and set the cruise control on her Hyundai Tucson.

As a woman traveling alone, the convoy made her feel safer.

Her instincts were spot on. Maynard says those truckers saved her from a tornado.

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Maynard was on the interstate in Fultondale, just north of Birmingham, when the line of trucks started to move in a strange way.

"All of a sudden the one that was kind of in the front, he cuts over and cuts me off," Maynard told weather.com in a phone interview Thursday. "The one around the backside of me cuts me off on the left side and then I see them come up on the backside and right side and I’m like 'What is happening?'"

The whole group of them came to stop, Maynard surrounded by about eight big rigs. It was storming and pouring rain. She began to panic and cry, and frantically tried to call her mom and her kids. But there was no cell service.

Then one of the drivers told her what was going on.

“There was a guy that jumped out and said 'It’s a tornado, we’ve got you blocked,'” Maynard recounted. "If they hadn’t have been there, I would have drove right into a tornado coming across the interstate."

A photo Maynard took during the hour she sat in her car surrounded by the semitrailers shows an exit sign for Walker Chapel Road. The National Weather Service tracked a tornado moving directly across that exit at about the time Maynard said the truckers stopped.

The tornado damaged or destroyed dozens of nearby homes and buildings. A 14-year-old boy was killed about 2 miles away.

"The NWS damage survey found EF2 damage only about 1,000 feet east of I-65 just off Walker Chapel Road, with estimated winds of 115 mph," weather.com senior digital meteorologist Jonathan Erdman said Thursday. "EF2 wind speeds are certainly capable of blowing over semis. If those winds had occurred over I-65, it could have been a much different story."

If they were there right at the time the tornado went through, Erdman says, Maynard and the truck drivers were "very lucky" that didn't happen.

Maynard's not sure if the truck drivers made a strategic move to surround her, or if it was by accident.

But she doesn't care.

“Whether they all did it on purpose or not, they all saved my life," she said.

Maynard said it didn't occur to her to check the weather before she set out on her trip. Her boyfriend, who was at their home in Madison, mentioned there might be some bad weather but she expected it would just be rain.

Erdman noted in a post-storm article that while there was a tornado watch issued earlier that evening, the tornado happened on a night of otherwise unspectacular weather.

This week, Maynard and her boyfriend are on a road trip to Indianapolis. This time, they're keeping a close eye on the forecast.

"We knew the weather the whole way here. Everything. The snow, what we were going to do if it started snowing," she said. "We had it planned out."

The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.

The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.