Amid all the tsunamis, earthquakes and grave natural disasters, it's easy forget April 27, 2011, in the drumbeat of destruction. That's the day a deadly rash of 62 tornadoes tore through the Dixie Alley and zeroed in on Alabama.

At one moment, at 4:38 p.m., there were seven long-track tornadoes on the ground at once. In a typical year, meteorologists confirm only one monster EF5 tornado nationwide. Four struck on April 27, 2011, killing 324 people, including 247 in Alabama alone.

The strength of Kim Cross' new book — "What Stands in a Storm" — is how she pushes aside those grim statistics and paints an intimate mural of those who survived and others who didn't.

Writing with a taut, real-time intensity, Cross stitches together haunting details, including text and Facebook messages from college-age victims huddling together in a hallway in Tuscaloosa, where the worst of the twisters killed more than 50 people. "Once again the sirens are going off … have I mentioned that I'm so tired of these storms? But I hope everyone stays safe," 24-year-old Danielle Downs chats with her sister on Facebook. "Yeah, we're under a warning too :-/ very lame. U safe?"

Cross braids the book's three parts — the Storm, the Aftermath and the Recovery. She introduces readers to weather forecasters' dreadful sense of responsibility, tornado spotters' relentless obsession and regular folks' random head-on collisions with nature's fury and fate's randomness.

Another college-age woman, Chelsea Trash, sprawls paralyzed on a driveway after a tornado launches her from her boyfriend's one-bedroom apartment and drops her viciously. Able to reach her cellphone, she calls her mom to apologize. She hadn't wanted her mother to worry, so Trash had told her she was safe on campus.

Kim Cross

Now she can't feel her legs. Paramedics haven't arrived. But a neighbor steps in. He took a wilderness first responder course as a rock-climbing guide. Another guy grabs a kitchen table from a pile of rubble and rips off the legs and they carry Trash on the makeshift backboard to a pickup truck and eventually to a hospital.

"The tornado sucked homes right off their foundations, leaving nothing but a lonely slab with anchor bolts that once held down walls," Cross writes. "It sucked people into a hateful sky and pelted them to death with shards of the places they trusted to protect them."

Despite all the heart-wrenching carnage, Cross' narrative is surprisingly upbeat. "The same forces that destroy the walls that protect us also bring down the walls that divide us. And when everything is stripped away what stands is the truth as old as time: The things that tear our world apart reveal what holds us together."

In his foreword, Rick Bragg thanks Cross for providing "the oldest service a writer can supply. She has helped put a human face on the people inside those winds, and, maybe, etched their faces a little deeper into memory."

Curt Brown's book "So Terrible a Storm" chronicles a 1905 gale that slammed Lake Superior. His new book, "The William Marvy Company of St. Paul," tells the story of America's last barber pole makers.