"We didn't know it was coming."

April Taylor heard that again and again, and she didn't understand it.

Taylor, a social scientist, was working on trauma recovery in DeKalb County in northeast Alabama following the April 27, 2011, tornado super outbreak.

One of those tornadoes, an EF-5, the most powerful tornado category on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, ripped right through DeKalb County, killing 25 people and leaving many others in shock.

A weather enthusiast, Taylor had watched the storms roll across Alabama on that day in 2011. She knew every county west of DeKalb had a tornado warning issued for it at some point.

One look at the map that day said it all. Storms were on their way, and they were going to be bad.

How did anyone NOT know it was coming?

'OK, we've got something here'

That spawned the idea for an experiment.

"I pulled together a map and a group of people with college degrees," she said. "It was seven people. And I passed out a map of the northern half of Alabama with the major highways listed. And I asked them: Label your home county, label the surrounding counties. Put a dot where your hometown is and if you can where your school and your church and all that is."

April Taylor

The results astonished her.

"Seven people. All with college degrees. Only three people could label their home county. Only three. Only one was able to label surrounding counties," she said.

"And I thought, 'OK. We've got something here.'"

What was once a little experiment got bigger. It became something of a pet project for Taylor, who would bring out her maps whenever she got a group of people together to test her theory.

And she kept getting the same results: Many Alabamians struggled to find their locations on a map.

"Percentage-wise, 60 to 65 percent can not. And this is all levels," she said. "Because I work in mental health I will even do the assessments on the severely mentally ill. We've tested those with intellectual deficits. ... I got the same numbers as I did with the college degrees. It's just baffling me how it's just across the board."

Taylor took her results to Kevin Laws at the National Weather Service in Birmingham.

"When I went to Kevin with the information, at our first meeting I said, 'I want PSAs, I've got a theme song picked out," Taylor said with a laugh.

Laws was not unfamiliar with the problem but was surprised by Taylor's results.

"Isn't it incredible?" he said. "It crosses every demographic. I think that's what is shocking."

Then they got to work to figure out what to do with it.

"The biggest counter that you can have to severe weather is situational awareness," Laws said. "And part of situational awareness is knowing it's coming.

"And that's what she (Williams) uncovered," Laws continued. "She said, 'They didn't know it was coming.' You have to know it, whether it's five days in advance, an hour in advance or 10 minutes in advance. You have to know it's coming."

A large part of that is simply knowing where you are -- and it turns out not enough people can say that with certainty when just looking at a map.

"If we are issuing graphics, polygons, forecasts, whatever, and you don't know where you are on that map, you have no situational awareness. That's the key here. That's the critical component that holds all of this together in my opinion."

'They can't find themselves'

It's a problem not limited to the weather service. Broadcast meteorologists hear it all the time. It can be both frustrating and horrifying.

Take a look at this map and see if you can identify your home county -- and the counties adjacent to it.

"What happens is, I'll post a map -- and you see it most often on winter-storm events -- but you'll post a map that has potential accumulation," said ABC 33/40 Chief Meteorologist James Spann, whose broadcast territory includes much of central Alabama.

"You work really hard on these maps and graphics, really hard. The minute you post it, the first 10 comments are 'What about Cullman?' 'What about Jasper?' 'What about Dora?' 'What about Eastaboga?' 'what about Hanceville?' 'What about Clanton?'

"And I'm thinking, I don't understand this. What it is, is that people can't find themselves on a map. They honestly can't help it. They can't find themselves."

Part of the problem could be simply the maps themselves, according to Dr. Laura Myers, a senior research scientist and the director the Center for Advanced Public Safety at the University of Alabama who has also been studying the issue.

"When you look at a map, a lot of times they just throw up a map with the county borders on it, so there's no county name, there's rarely a city name, there are no roadways on the map. And people are not really familiar with that kind of map," she said.

Laura Myers

"They have no reference point. And they look at it -- and they don't even get to look at it for very long if it's on TV -- that map's being thrown up and then it's gone -- and so they just have a couple of seconds to really adjust to it. But if they're looking at it on social media they're looking at a pretty distorted map. They're trying to figure out -- OK, where's my reference point, where's my county in reference to a city or in reference to an interstate highway? And you just can't do that without those reference points."

Another issue is simply this: People just don't use maps the same way they used to.

"You look at college kids today, and I study them, because I've got to reach them," Spann said. "They pull out their maps app all the time, but they use the directions coming off that maps app that tells you what to do. It tells you to turn here and turn here, and they really don't even look at the map, they just follow the directions."

Flash back to life before smartphones, when many relied on a road atlas to get around.

"I think back in the day we used to use maps more," Myers said. "We used to use atlases when we traveled. We had better awareness. And as technology developed and everybody got used to using GPS and apps and everything, they let those things tell them where to go and where they are. And we let the technology tell us as opposed to us doing the work."

A wide-ranging pop quiz

Now there are plans to look at the problem on a wider level.

Myers will be leading a study, set to begin this spring and lasting through the fall, on this very issue.

Myers said that researchers plan to fan out across Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi -- and they're going to bring maps along.

Volunteers will be tested on their situational awareness.

"They're going to indicate on a basic county map where they live. And they'll drop a point on there, and we'll have their address," Myers said.

"And so we'll know how far from their actual address that they indicated on that map that they live. ... And so that technology will measure the distance from where they think they live to where they actually live."

Researchers will take that information and use it to recommend how maps can be made more readily understandable.

"What we're going to do is we're going to recommend how maps should be constructed," she said. "So, if it turns out that major city names, or if it's the roadways or both of those things or the colors of the maps -- we'll be looking at colors, we'll be looking at different things -- whatever comes out will be the best factors for helping people, then we're going to recommend that maps be used."

'Potentially life-saving information'

And then there's how to best communicate that information.

"So what we have to do, No. 1, is not get frustrated when people ask these questions," Spann said. "We have to figure out a way to answer them. And No. 2, we have to reinvent the whole wheel when it comes to making people aware of the danger."

"What we have to do is come up with a system where people can find themselves on a map and teach them how to do that. And then begin to reinvent these graphics. So this study will be very important and will be a total game-changer in the way we handle big events and leading up to them.

"And I think that study is going to be right on the money. Right on it."

The goal of a warning is to take action, Laws said.

"So if that's our goal, and people aren't doing that because they don't know where they are, how do we solve that? That's were we are," he said.

"There's a presumption that people know where they are. Wrong. That's false. We've got to change that theory."

And the sooner the better.

"Because by the time you get to that direct moment and you don't know where you are, it's over," Laws said. "That's the killer, right there."

People don't know what they don't know, Taylor said.

"I know this is a big deal because another thing I see across the board is embarrassment and anxiety when they realize, 'OK, this is basic information. This is potentially life-saving information that I should know and I don't.'

"It really is a big deal and that's why we've got to bring this to their attention."

[BELOW: VINTAGE PHOTOS OF ALABAMA TORNADO DAMAGE]