Alabama tornado spared a scarf-draped cross as it devastated a Birmingham neighborhood

Dena Cook lost her roof when a tornado ripped through her Birmingham, Alabama, neighborhood on Thursday, but her faith is stronger than ever after seeing that the scarf-draped cross in her backyard was spared by the storm.

“It’s just God,” Cook told CNN on Friday.

Cook and her husband rode out the tornado in a closet in their two-story home in the Eagle Point neighborhood of Birmingham. They could see the storm clouds above them when the roof gave way.

Cook said that after the storm passed she wanted to save as many of her photographs as she could from her damaged home.

Later, she noticed the cross was still standing in her backyard and the purple cloth hadn’t blown away.

“It’s still there and my cross is still there because God was with all these people, and us,” Cook said.

Her husband had built the cross last year at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and she had draped it with the purple cloth for Lent — the 40-day season of repentance that leads up to Easter. Cook said she has rearranged the cloth since the storm so it would be like the one at her church.

She plans to replace the cloth with a white one on Easter Sunday.

“This is what God is all about,” Cook said pointing to the cross. “Lent is a sorrowful time but then on that Easter Sunday, it will be beautiful all again.”

The National Weather Service said there were at least 14 tornadoes across Alabama (seven), Georgia (one), Tennessee (three) and Kentucky (three) from Thursday into Friday morning.

The tornadoes killed at least five people in Calhoun County, Alabama, and one person in Coweta County, Georgia, which is south of Atlanta.

A tornado caused extensive damage in Cook’s neighborhood, snapping trees and reducing brick-sided homes to piles of rubble.

“Tornadoes have been known to indiscriminately damage some homes and property and not another,” said CNN Meteorologist Derek Van Dam. “In this case, it appears the tornado lifted and dropped several different times before leaving the cross and scarf in place but destroying the roof of the nearby home.”

The drone of chain saws could be heard around the neighborhood on Friday as people worked to clear the debris and spread blue tarps over damaged homes.