HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - The numbers, even 25 years later, are raw and numbing looking back at the EF-4 tornado that struck south Huntsville on Nov. 15, 1989:

21 people killed

463 people injured

259 homes destroyed, another 278 damaged.

The storm tracked 18.5 miles to the northeast from Redstone Arsenal, down Airport Road, up and down Monte Sano and past Brownsboro before lifting about five miles north of Gurley with max estimated wind speed close to 200 mph.

The severe weather was no secret as the Storm Prediction Center began sending out alerts two days earlier, according to Tim Troutman, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Huntsville.

"The Storm Prediction Center highlighted this event as being at a high risk for severe weather with the potential for long-track tornadoes," Troutman said. "This event was definitely forecast in advance."

Still, it was 1989 and Memorial Parkway was busy, as usual, at 4:30 p.m. when the twister touched down on Redstone Arsenal and began its menacing march to the east. Of the 21 people killed, 12 were in their cars.

"This was one of the most destructive and killer tornadoes to hit the Huntsville area," Troutman said.

Those 21 tragedies, however, may well have taken the place of even more tragedies.

Track of the Nov. 15, 1989 tornado that struck Airport Road and Jones Valley in Huntsville. (National Weather Service-Huntsville graphic)

As the tornado thundered over Garth Mountain, it struck Jones Valley Elementary School and the building was destroyed. Inside the school - which had been dismissed for the day but still had after-school care programs - were 37 children and all survived along with the handful of teachers, custodians and painters still there that day.

"If the tornado would have occurred about an hour earlier, when it hit the school, it would have been a very serious situation," Troutman said.

Serious, perhaps, was a softened code for deadly.

"The time of the day it hit was, in one way, better for the school in Jones Valley," Troutman said. "But in another way, it was really bad for the folks who were caught in it on the Parkway."

It's the worst storm to hit the city of Huntsville since the weather service began keeping modern records in 1950.

From a statewide perspective, sadly, the number of fatalities from the 1989 tornado blends in with other tornado outbreaks.

The worst, of course, was the 2011 outbreak that killed 254 people statewide, according to the Alabama Emergency Management Agency.

In 1974, according to weather service data, the April 3 outbreak that affected seven states produced three tornadoes that killed 28, 28 and 16 people in Alabama.

In both the 1974 and 2011, Madison County sustained enormous death and destruction, though no one was killed within the Huntsville City limits. Nine people died in the northwest Madison County communities of Harvest, Monrovia and Toney in 2011, and 21 people died in Harvest and Hazel Green in 1974.

The 1998 tornado, an EF-5 that first touched down in the eastern part of Tuscaloosa County, tracked to within about two miles of the Birmingham high-rises and killed 32 people.

A 1956 tornado in Jefferson County left 25 dead while a 1977 tornado in the same area killed 22 people.

And the Palm Sunday tornado in 1994 left 22 dead in St. Clair, Calhoun and Cherokee counties. In that storm, 20 of the deaths occurred in Goshen United Methodist Church during Sunday morning services in Cherokee County.

Prior to 1950, a tornado is attributed to 38 deaths in 1932 that first touched down in Lacey's Spring and crossed briefly into Madison County before continuing northeast into Jackson County.

And in 1928, a tornado that started two miles south of Lily Flagg Road in what's now a heavily-populated area of Huntsville is blamed for 27 deaths.

Earlier this year, two people were killed in Limestone County by a tornado - the first tornado deaths in north Alabama since the 2011 outbreak. Troutman said the weather service and its partners - in technology research as well as emergency management agencies and the media - are striving to even further reduce tornado deaths.

"Our hope," he said, "is that we can get better to limit this loss of life when it does happen."

Updated at 9:35 a.m. to reflect that Madison County sustained numerous deaths and destruction in the 1974 tornado outbreak, but no one died within the Huntsville city limits.