Watching the news Sunday about the tornado tearing through Hattiesburg took me back to Wednesday afternoon, April 27, 2011. I had left work in the Birmingham suburbs a little early that day when we shut down the office before 5 for the severe weather.

I stopped once to squeeze my car under a convenience store awning as quarter-size hail started pelting my windshield. When the hailstones finally came to an end, I, along with the other drivers, pulled back out onto the road, hoping we could make it home before something worse dropped out of the skies.

With storm sirens blasting my way home, I finally I got inside and turned on the TV in the den.

All the Birmingham channels were broadcasting pretty much the same scene – a mile-wide tornado barreling toward downtown Tuscaloosa.

Thanks to the wonders of technology and interstate traffic cams, I could watch live video of the giant twister plowing through the place I used to call home while working toward getting a University of Alabama diploma for my wall.

Fast forward from April 27, 2011, to Sunday, and I was again sitting in my den, this time in Brookhaven, as I watched images of another big tornado tracking through a university town.

Although reports are putting the injured at anywhere between 60 and 80 people, and the property damage has been heavy on the University of Southern Mississippi campus and around town, no one was killed in Sunday’s tornado in Hattiesburg, as far as we know now.

The storm hit on the Sunday before Mardi Gras, and the campus was less populated than usual, officials say. Later in the evening I got an email from a friend of mine. She wrote that she was at USM earlier that day to see her niece perform in the All-South high school honor band.

The officials in charge of the concert moved up that event up from 1 p.m. to 10 a.m., allowing the performers and their families and friends to get away before the twister struck. To quote my friend, “I am so thankful they made that call!”

Despite the damage and the injuries, Hattiesburg and USM were luckier than Tuscaloosa and my alma mater.

There, the storm struck on a Wednesday afternoon. Tuscaloosa’s storm was one of more than 50 tornadoes that hit Alabama that day, killing 238 people, according to a Reuters news service story posted online May 26, 2011. The Alabama twisters were part of a much larger system that caused a damage and death toll topped only by Hurricane Katrina, when it comes to U.S. natural disasters.

The helplessness I felt watching both storms unfold put me in mind of a familiar quotation, one that has been attributed to Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, an editor who first published the saying, which he labeled as the words of a famous writer.

The most familiar paraphrasing of the quote is ” Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”

And while, yes, it’s true that we can’t do anything to stop these deadly storms, we can do our best to be prepared for them.

For one thing, storm sirens alerted the residents of Hattiesburg and Tuscaloosa – and the Birmingham neighborhoods, too, for that matter.

An online news report from SunHerald.com said Hattiesburg’s sirens began sounding anywhere from 18 to 30 minutes before the tornado hit. That’s time enough for people to find a safe place to take shelter.

To date, Brookhaven and Lincoln County do not have weather sirens. But there has been some official action toward securing some. The city has obtained $100,000 in grant money to use toward purchasing a warning system, and aldermen hope to be looking at accepting bids on sirens soon.

Let’s hope the city moves quickly and the county will take similar action in the near future, because, unfortunately, in these southern states we love, tornados are “as certain as death and taxes,” with apologies to Ben Franklin.

Rachel Eide is editor/general manager of The Daily Leader. Contact her at reide@dailyleader.com.