BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- James Spann steered his black Toyota 4Runner along a winding road, occasionally slowing down long enough to stare at the swath of destruction carved out of the Walker County countryside.

"This is my real heartbeat, these people out here in the country," he said. "There's a lot of suffering and low-income families and issues out here."

Spann, the longtime meteorologist at Birmingham's ABC 33/40, was on his way to speak at a weather safety program at Cordova Elementary School, where he also helped give away weather radios and where every child at the school received an emergency kit.

In the hallways and at the gymnasium, "Mr. James," as he sometimes calls himself, exchanged high-fives with the school kids and posed for pictures with their teachers.

Spann, a coach on his youngest son's baseball team and a children's worship leader at his church, was in his element.

"I would be a first-grade teacher if I didn't have to do the weather on television," he said.

Before the assembly, Spann had lunch with school counselor Sandra Courington and about eight staff members of Project Rebound, which helped people in Walker and surrounding counties deal with the emotional aftermath of last year's April 27 tornadoes.

In Cordova, four people were killed in the storms, including Justin Doss, who was a third-grader at the elementary school, and his 12-year-old brother, Jonathan.

"The job we did is not satisfactory," Spann told the Project Rebound staffers. "I cannot believe how many people died that day.

"We are still focused on that number, those 252 lives," he added. "These were precious people."

Two hundred, fifty-two.

Nearly a year after the state's most horrific natural disaster in his lifetime, that number still haunts Spann.

It started in the morning of April 27, 2011 and lasted all day -- a lashing string of tornadoes that tore through Alabama smashing buildings, snapping trees and ending lives. It was, in the end, among the state's worst days.

The Birmingham News continuing through April 29 is presenting ONE YEAR LATER, an anniversary series of stories reviewing some of what happened, what has been accomplished and what still lies ahead.

Today's stories:

*

Coming Wednesday:

* Alabama tornadoes: Rebuilding, redeveloping communities

Earlier:

* Recovery continues but pain lingers from Alabama's April 27 tornadoes

* Heroes of the storm



* Alabama tornadoes: April 27 anniversary event calendar

* TOM SCARRITT: In times of trouble, people are special

* Forgotten Jefferson County tornado reminds us that pain is timeless



* Tornado diaries -- final installments in the stories of Annie Muse of Walker County and of Shawn and Jamie Burchfield of Pleasant Grove

*

And as Alabama's most recognizable TV weatherman -- the person to whom more viewers have turned during recent tornado outbreaks -- Spann takes it personally.

April 27 happened on his watch.

How come more people didn't pay attention to his warnings?

What could he, should he, have done differently?

Why did all those people have to die?

"When we knew in advance of those tornadoes -- and the lead time was 30 and 40 minutes --

did we not say the right thing?" he wondered. "Did we not use the right facial expressions? Did we use terms that people didn't understand?"

By Spann's estimate, about 30 of those who died that day did not have a chance.

It's those 222 others that has driven him to question what he should do differently if it ever happens again.

"My opinion is, I've got to look at what we're doing. What did we do to create an atmosphere of complacency?"

Shirtsleeves and suspenders

When Spann joined ABC 33/40 in 1996, the station, at his request, made a commitment to break into programming whenever the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning in the station's 22-county coverage area.

Viewers know the drill.

A warning comes, and there's Spann in his suspenders and with his jacket off, crouched in front of a weather map, urging them to "respect the polygon" and explaining what those big blobs of red and yellow mean.

Those shirtsleeves and suspenders have become a Spann trademark, an image that ABC 33/40 markets in spots featuring Spann, jacket off and brow furrowed, wagging a finger at the camera and issuing the stern reminder, "Never rely on outdoor sirens for your warning!"

His Twitter followers call it "Spanning," and they sometimes tweet pictures of themselves striking the same pose.

As Spann packed up his gear following an appearance at T.S. Boyd School in Dora, custodian Polly Madison teased him about his habit of not wearing a jacket in times of crisis.

"When you take that jacket off," she said, "you know it's trouble."

Spann hears that all the time.

Truth be told, he said later, sometimes it just gets hot in the studio.

"People always say, 'Well, if he rolls up his sleeves, it's going to be real bad,'" he said. "I never rolled my sleeves up April 27. I had no time."

Jacket on or jacket off, though, Spann now questions whether the cumulative effect of all those warnings may have helped make viewers apathetic that day.

Maybe they would have listened more when he implored them, "Get to a safe place!" Or heard the urgency in his voice when he added the exclamation point, "Now!"

"The question we've got to resolve is, did they get the warning and not do anything?" he said. "I think a lot of them just didn't do anything."

As forecasting technology has improved, the National Weather Service has become better able to detect even the weakest tornadoes -- the EF-0 twisters that Spann calls "those little-bitty spin-up tornadoes"-- driving up the number of warnings issued each year.

"The guys at the Weather Service are doing what they're told to do," Spann said. "They're told to issue a warning for every single tornado, and they are doing the best they can do. But most tornadoes last for about a minute. They are in the squall line. They are tiny . ...

"They're issuing warning after warning after warning after warning," he went on. "So that conditions people to think nothing happens, and I think a lot of people just don't do anything.

"I think the false-alarm ratio is out of control."

Too many warnings? Out of control?

As any viewer who's ever had his favorite show interrupted by one of Spann's severe-weather cut-ins might ask: Is he, too, not guilty of the same?

"I struggle with that almost every day," Spann said. "Do we change the (station) policy?

"But I'm just telling you, if the weather radio goes off and they get that tornado warning and they flip on that television and we're not there, you talk about hate mail -- that's when you'll get the hate mail.

"Even for those little tornadoes, if a tree blows into your house and kills your wife, that's your April 27th," he added. "Forget all these historic outbreaks, that becomes your tornado of record in your life."

Get a clue

Spann voiced his concern about the high frequency of tornado warnings in a blog post on his website last June, and as most things he opines about do, it generated a lot of internet traffic and debate.

"Obviously, James has in the past gotten attention at the national level for issues that involve weather," said Jim Stefkovich, meteorologist in charge of the Birmingham region's National Weather Service office in Calera.

"James is no different than any other (Birmingham meteorologist)," he added. "We think they all do a great job."

In January, after ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer reported that Alabamians had "no warning" of the vicious, early-morning tornado that left two people in Jefferson County dead, Spann fired back on his weather blog: "NO WARNING? Get a clue."

The tornado outbreak was predicted days in advance, he wrote, and his station was on the air for about eight hours non-stop that morning.

Via Twitter, he challenged Sawyer to a weather debate.

The next night, in a follow-up report, Sawyer acknowledged that forecasters had started issuing warnings as far as three days out.

"I thought what she did that day, she devalued the whole process," Spann said later. "And I really wasn't doing it for me. I was doing it for these people that work for the National Weather Service and the emergency managers that don't have a voice, that don't have all of these Twitter and Facebook people.

"And I just said, 'You know, everything that I see that's part of the problem now, I'm going to step in and see if I can fix it.'"

That includes those tornado sirens that he said most people can't hear when they're inside a building.

"Of all the stuff, I'm pretty convinced the siren mentality is the biggest problem, and I am wickedly on that case right now. I mean, I've gone from the nice guy to the bold guy.

"I get so flustered, and I've said this in public, which is not right, I've said we ought to take them down and burn $?'em. If you do that, that will force people to get a weather radio."

Wonder years

The 55-year-old Spann has had a child-like fascination with the weather since he was a little boy growing up in Greenville, where, as a first-grader, he said, his teacher caught him staring out the window during class and sent him out in the hall.

Either as punishment or encouragement -- Spann said he is still not sure which -- she made him read a book about cloud formations.

That sent him on his way.

"To this day, I will be in a station meeting, and I will be the guy staring out the window, looking at those clouds," he said. "That's never gone away."

On his daily school visits -- some days, he makes it to two schools -- Spann typically tells the story about his father walking out on him and his mother, Carolyn, when he was in the second grade.

"I am a fatherless child," he will say. "Listen, guys, if anybody in this room doesn't have a dad, you know what? It's OK. Me and my mom, we didn't have a lot, but we did fine."

Two years after his father left them, Spann and his mother moved to Tuscaloosa, where later, as a 17-year-old senior at Tuscaloosa High School, he got his start in broadcasting when radio station owner Bert Bank hired him to work the weekend shift at WTBC-AM 1230.

As Spann calls them now, those were his "wonder years," and for that reason, the death toll in Tuscaloosa from last spring's tornadoes him especially hard.

"That place is real special to me," he said. "Not for football or anything else, but just because of the way they took care of us and accepted us. And watching that thing on television was just horrible."

'Weather weenie'

On his Twitter profile, Spann identifies himself as an "overall Mac geek and weather weenie."

He might add "social-networking trendsetter," too.

Long before others in Birmingham media even knew about Twitter and Facebook, he was already onboard, and on April 27, he learned how valuable that could be.

His 59,582 Twitter followers is nearly nine times that of Birmingham's three other chief meteorologists -- CBS 42's Mark Prater, Fox 6's James-Paul Dice and Alabama 13's Jerry Tracey -- combined. On Facebook, he has 97,308 likes.

At his own station, Spann said, his colleagues used to make fun of him when he first started tweeting about five years ago.

"They laughed at me -- I think they pointed while they laughed -- several years ago about Twitter. But now, everybody else is just trying to get on it to try to catch up.

"The running joke here at the station is, 'We're going to get as many followers as James Spann.' I said, 'No, you're not, because you got started too late.'"

In the days, weeks and months after the April 27 storms, Spann's Twitter feed became a conduit through which relief agencies and tornado victims were able to hook up with each other.

"This Twitter and Facebook thing, I didn't know what a big role that would play in the recovery and relief effort over the next three or four months," he said.

"They needed urgent help, and they would send me this Twitter message. I didn't know what to do. All I knew to do was hit the retweet button because 50-something thousand people would see it and maybe some human being would help 'em."

A blessing

Four days after the tornado outbreak, Spann and some of his fellow Hoover baseball dads loaded up their chainsaws and drove to Walker County, looking for somebody to help.

In Cordova, they found Gary and Heather Adams and their nine children, who rode out both the morning and afternoon tornadoes in a 7-foot-by-10-foot storm shelter. They were left without a home after their trailer was shredded.

"You see all these stories and know how widespread this is, but I've always believed that if you just adopt one family, that's what you are supposed to do," Spann said. "And I just believe we were led to that family that day.

"They kind of latched on to us and we latched on to them. It's a long-term project for me. I'm going to stay in touch with those guys for a long time."

Spann's wife, Karen, helped the Adams family clean up the Airstream trailer that became their temporary home, and Spann, using his weather blog and e-mail list, put out a request for donations, supplies and labor to build them a permanent home.

Two weeks before Christmas, the Adamses moved into their new, seven-bedroom house.

"It started with our baseball parents and it just expanded from there to other people who wanted to help," Spann said. "Before you know it, we probably had a hundred different people that were either giving money or donating supplies."

The family has since come to see him at the TV station, and on his trip to Cordova, he stopped by for a surprise visit to check on them.

"He's meant a lot to our family," Heather Adams said later. "Just for him to come out and help us and be friends with us and spend so much time with the kids, it has really been a blessing."

Dirt roads and barbecue joints

Spann has put 196,706 miles on that five-year-old 4Runner, most of those traveling the backroads to places such as Alexandria and Carbon Hill, Phil Campbell and Goodwater.

"I've often teased him that he not only knows every highway and street and dirt road in this state, but he knows where every single pothole is and he has them numbered," said J.B. Elliott, who worked at the National Weather Service for 32 years before becoming one of Spann's partners in the Weather Company, which provides forecasts for radio stations around the country.

Spann also knows all of the post offices, barber shops and barbecue joints, too -- which comes in handy when a storm approaches.

"If you can tell them it's at Jim's Pit BBQ, everybody knows where that is," he said. "But it's totally useless knowledge unless we get in a severe weather situation."

That folksy way of connecting with people in small towns has earned him their respect, Courington, the Cordova Elementary School counselor, said.

They appreciate the fact that he knows not only Cordova, but all the little communities surrounding it, too -- such as Dovertown, Bordentown and Benoit Mountain, places that few people outside the folks who live there have ever heard of, much less know where they are.

"Most of our community, when they speak about getting prepared for the weather, they say: 'Has anybody heard James Spann yet?'" Courington said. "They don't say, 'Did you watch the weather?'

"People in our town, and across the state of Alabama, just really revere him as an authority. They trust him."

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