Your Cafe editors reside in Huntsville, Alabama, which as many of you may know, was in the path of a very large and vicious storm that swept through North Alabama last Wednesday. The storm birthed a series of tornados that devastated many communities and left approximately a million residents of the state without power. The main distribution line to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) nuclear plant that provides electrical power to most of the region was severed and over 30 substations shut down. The power outage continues as I write and is expected to last at least another two or three days. Virtually all businesses in several Northern Alabama counties have been shuttered during the outage and there is no auto gas available. A dusk to dawn curfew has been imposed in the absence of traffic lights and to discourage looting. As I write, the death toll in Alabama has risen to ~340. Although this section of the Southeastern U.S. has weathered many episodes of severe weather, this storm is unprecedented by any measure.

As you can imagine, we have been unable in the aftermath of the storm to provide the kind of up-to-date coverage of the worldwide soaring scene that is our primary mission at the Soaring Cafe. We expect to resume our normal operations very soon and we hope you will bear with us in the next few days as we wait for the resumption of life as usual.

Fortunately, neither of us nor any of our editorial staff suffered direct losses during the storm, and for that we are very thankful. We do however, extend our thoughts and prayers to those who were not so lucky.

Rand and Bill