When tornadoes battered North Alabama on April 27, 2011, Cullman Police officers Intae Suh and Clint Sanford were still relatively new on the job. The city’s police department honored both officers for passing the 10-year mark on the force last week, which means their local careers began back in 2010 — not long before the storms came along.

Suh and Sanford, both Cullman natives, remember what it was like for law enforcement in the tornado’s aftermath. It’s one of those epochal moments for many people: If you were living in Cullman back then, you tend to recall where you were and what you were doing when the storm hit.

But for Suh especially, the tornado left a lasting memory he’s destined never to shake. It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s how he ended up meeting Brandi Martin (now Brandi Suh) — the woman he’d eventually end up marrying in 2013.

“I tell people we met in jail,” jokes Brandi, who now works investigations for the Cullman County Sheriff’s Office. “And then they have to ask me what I did to end up there.” The joke is that Brandi wasn’t at the jail as an inmate…but she was technically there, working at the time as a sheriff’s office booking deputy.

Intae, now a Cullman Police Sergeant assigned to Investigations, met Brandi after the tornado seriously messed with his work schedule. Had the storm not put all law enforcement officers on a marathon daily grind that drew most of them back to work, day in and day out, for more than two weeks straight, the couple might never have met at all — or at least not like this.

“She was a detention deputy, and I would bring suspects in for booking at the detention center,” he recalls. “We were on opposite shifts before the tornado, so I’d never met her even with all my running back and forth to the jail. But after the tornado, the days I was working were also the days she was working — and that’s how we ended up meeting and started talking.

“There are so many great stories that have come from the ‘We met in jail’ line,” he jokes. “But it’s definitely been a case of something good arising from the aftermath of something bad.”

Like other officers, deputies, first responders, utilities workers, road crews, fire fighters, and anyone else who provided critical services in the storm’s immediate wake, both Suh and Sanford didn’t get a day off work until long, long after the rain had stopped falling.

“It was really just a dark blur for about two weeks,” recalls Sanford. “I worked; a lot of us worked, for 16 days straight. It was surreal, and it was probably a once-in-a-career thing. It certainly has been the biggest thing I’ve experienced up to this point — including what everyone’s dealing with now [with the COVID-19 pandemic]. I hope nothing like that ever happens here again.”

Sanford’s recollection of April 27 remains vivid. “I remember that day very well,” he says. “I was with one of my relatives, who is also a police officer. We watched the footage live on TV — I think we were watching James Spann — and we saw the tower behind First Baptist church fall. When we saw that, nobody had to call us in to work. We knew, and we just went.”

When Sanford says the days that would follow were surreal, he’s not just being casual. “Since we worked night shift, it was pitch black dark. The power was down in the city, and sometimes you wouldn’t even know where you were, because the landmarks in some places were just gone. You would just see blue lights flashing in the dark, and for several nights it was hard at times to always get your bearings.”

One thing both officers agree on: the storms brought out the best in everyone; not just those whose jobs took them to the front lines of the cleanup effort, but even those private citizens whose lives had momentarily been thrown into chaos.

“Out of something so bad, you would see these great things in people,” says Suh. “The main thing I’ll always remember is how, with anything that happens in Cullman, the city just comes together. I was working night shift, and I would drive the neighborhoods. People would be grilling out — because what else was there to do? — and they would wave us down and feed us.

“The community came together during a really stressful time, and was so gracious to all of us in law enforcement. When things that are tragic happen, a lot of times something good will eventually emerge, and that’s definitely what I began to see with the people in Cullman. I’ll always remember it.”

If Suh ever does forget, all he has to do is call his wife. After all, she was there too…in the jail.