According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, tragedy is "a very bad event that causes great sadness and often results in someone's death." To me, a tragedy does not necessarily involve death, but it can simply involve heavy destruction or an unbearable loss of something. The tragedy can be the loss of one's personal purpose or the fall from one's greatness. It could also be the struggle of a journey in search of happiness. However one defines tragedy, I think we can all agree that 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the April 27 tornado are all terrible tragedies. All of the tragedies mentioned above have come with a cycle of recovery, reconstruction and restoration. The cycle of each tragedy varied depending on the depth of the damage, but one thing was so sad, but I ultimately came to the conclusion that it was a warning to help people in the future. Yes, New Orleans and many other urban areas were completely devastated, but what would have happened decades later if the affected areas were more populated and no one knew the levees were faulty? Could there have been many more deaths? Should we be grateful that the error was noticed and corrected sooner rather than later? I don't know the answers to these questions, but seeing so many people killed, injured and left with nowhere to go made my heart ache. The government should have done more to help the population before and after. Perhaps if the affected areas had been evacuated earlier, more people would have survived or maybe if the government had better disaster plans, more people could have been saved afterwards. These are the questions that haunt me about the situation so I hope the government works to learn from their mistakes and create everything I was affected by the tornado and to be honest I don't I didn't know much about it until I got to university. from Alabama. I lived in the Presidential Village on campus my freshman year and there in one of the halls there was a memorial of sorts. The memorial was made of wood taken from the tornado devastation and water flowing past it. It's quite beautiful, but it's not marked, so it's often defaced because no one knows its meaning. I proposed installing a commemorative plaque there with the six students who died on that devastating day. Even though it never happened, the importance of keeping students safe during tornadoes still bothers me. At Capstone, we are proud to say that we have over 30,000 students, but what are we doing to keep them safe? Tornadoes are recurring events in our region. We must take precautions to properly shelter our students, so that they can not only be safe, but also feel like the university truly cares about their well-being. I remember in 2014 when we had a tornado in Tuscaloosa, students were not warned to leave their classes and seek shelter. Additionally, students who decided to stay on campus to shelter did not have adequate shelter or guidance on what to do and where to go. Some students were released from the "security" of the university's recreation center in just about 10 minutes.