Skip to main content

50 Years Ago, Tornadoes Spun His Career Around

January 21, 2025 | Reading Time: 2 minutes
, ,
Mike West is a 50-year HH Health employee

Mike West may be the only person you’ll ever meet who owes his career to a tornado outbreak.

Rewind to April 3, 1974 – one of the most infamous weather events in U.S. history. A powerful storm system roared across the country that day, spawning nearly 150 twisters that killed 319 people.

Limestone County’s Tanner community sustained direct hits from two monster F5 tornadoes in the span of a few hours.

Mike, then a 19-year-old patient care aide, found himself smack in the middle of the disaster response after the Limestone County nursing home where he worked sent most of its clinical team to volunteer in the Athens-Limestone Hospital Emergency Department.

“The ER was just inundated with injured people,” Mike recalled. “I didn’t have much medical training, but I knew how to take vital signs and apply bandages, so that’s what I did for the next 12 hours.”

His efforts that day caught the eye of Jerry Story, then-director of Athens Emergency Medical Services.

“He said, ‘You’re pretty good at this, why don’t you come work for me as an ambulance driver?’” Mike said.

Half a century later, Mike is still going strong as a critical care transport nurse at Huntsville Hospital. He was recognized in December for 50 years of service to HH Health System.

The April 1974 tornadoes narrowly missed Mike’s boyhood home and left the small Tanner community in ruins. At the time, he was studying police science at Calhoun Community College with the goal of becoming a police officer in Athens like his father, Elmer “Buster” West.

But the storms put him on a different path, and Mike rose quickly through the ranks at Athens Emergency Medical Services. He became a licensed paramedic in 1979; a year later, he was promoted to director.

He added oversight of Athens-Limestone Hospital’s Emergency Department to his job duties in 1992.

Mike is now part of Huntsville Hospital’s critical care transport nursing team, caring for patients who are too frail to be driven to and from the hospital by normal ambulance. He also teaches future first responders in the Emergency Medical Technician training program at Calhoun Community College.

Mike’s identical twin brother, Eddie West, also holds dual health care roles as a Huntsville Hospital Emergency Department RN and flight medic with Survival Flight Inc. in Ardmore, Tenn.

Mike said it’s hard to grasp how much has changed during his 50-year career. When he started out, there were only three ambulances serving all of Limestone County; first responders with limited medical knowledge could only pray that seriously injured patients would survive in route to the hospital.

Thanks to improved training for ambulance crews and advances in mobile lifesaving technology, he said, those scary situations are now easier to manage with much better outcomes. “It’s unreal when you think about it,” Mike said.

Asked if he ever thinks about retiring, Mike pauses for a moment: “I imagine I’ll keep working as long as my health holds out. When you’re doing something you really like, time flies.”

Most Recent Stories