Which is currently allowed and far too many senators and politicians use it as an escape. Question in the back . Citizens united gives rights to corporations as a person. Have they talked about mandatory sentencing . That is the flip side; they can be prosecuted. There is a provision in the federal code that if a company is convicted of a crime can be sentenced for up to twice the gain that the gain it made. So if it does terrible crimes and just has to give back . The time it gets caught it has to give back its profits. Big deal. It is rare to see that provision every used. Companies when caught and pay a fine pay a fraction of what they could be charged. And that is a winning proposition. If at the most you have to give back the profit and not fined something extra. Other people pay the fines so they are not enough. You need individuals held accountable, too. There are companies that to terrible things to people in the country and you would think they have to do more than just give back profits but that is not the case. Brandons book has a section about what it means for your first and Second Amendment rights and so forth. It is an interesting chapter. Time for a few more questions. Dr. Lewis, have you known journalist would retract statements and then set the record state or is this pie in the sky . I am not. There are occasionally corrections in the newspaper. The problem is it is often stated the mistake may be on page one and the corrections are buried and only a few sentences. The biggest scandals since the 70s with internal problems like plagiarism or stealing things. You did see some back happened apologies regarding the iraq war. The back page acknowledged it and they could have been more aggressive in their reporting or critical of the bush administrations statements. And they did it years later. But i have to say most of them didnt say anything and went with it. There are important stories that were censored before the war in iraq the papers wouldnt allow. There is not a lot of candor or accountability within the media. That is a separate issue. The number of articles in papers have been decrease. They are not sure about doing that for ego. That is why we watch john stewart. Time for one more question. Up here in the front. This is a question for mr. Garrett. I was surprised to find out corporations are considered people and in your book you tell us for the purpose of the federal code the u. S. Code, that corporations can be guilty of virtually all of the same crimes people can except rape and murder. Almost out of time. And yes corporations, as you explain in your book get rebilitative types of punish where we get punitive. How is this allowed by law . Where is the 14th amendment on this . You are right. That is why i wanted to write the book. I wish more individual people got defered prosecution and the focus was on rehabilitating and focused on recovery. There are time doing a lot of time for nonviolent crime. And to eric holders credit he has done and said good things in the last year. But there is a lot of balance that needs to be restored. We care about rehabilitating companies but not so much individual people. I think it is a terrible contrast. I think we have to stop in the interest of time. I want to say thank you. [applause] sir, please. Please. We turn the evaluation forums and please stop by afterward and talk to the authors and by book and have them signed. Thank you very much. The final panel will talk about super storms and Climate Change. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome. We will get this train rolling down the track. Wonderful to have you here as part of the virginia festival of the book 2015. We have a fine selection of panelist and wonderful authors today and hope to enlighten you with everything under the sun. Literally and figuratively. Introduce yourself. Director of the Climate Office and it is my pleasure to introduce kim cross author of that stands in a storm three days in the worst superstorm to hit the souths tornado alley. She is the awardwinning future writer and editor at large of Southern Living magazine. She has written many articles and has been an avatar for many wellknown writers. Before i turn it over to kim i would like to make a comment from my perspective, the scientific perspective, this book is incredibly wellwritten in that regard. She did a great job conveying the science of the storms conveying it correctly and in a way that the nonscientist picks up on what is going on and what is being told. Travis has something to say. Wonderful to have you here. I know you are running on little sleep. Hopefully the aadrink drikeeps you up. This book is worth reading for sure. Follow me on twitter. Vabooks vabooks2015. If you wish to follow the hash tag you can get more. This is a free of charge event and if you want to make a contribution you can go online. That is what keeps it going. This event is a big part of the book and film festival. It is very important to the culture and important we keep them going. We have evaluations as well. You can actually do those online at vabooks. Org evaluation. We encourage you to pick up one of kims book and in that i agree with jerry it is wellwritten and informative. And from a broadcast standpoint having witnessed the storms actually happening verses hearing it from friends or other peoples perspective it hit on all and i thought it was fantastic. Without further ado i give you kim cross. I have also wanted to come here and it is great to have science experts because i try to stick to the story telling when i do these things for fear of saying something wrong. I would like to start by saying in a way this isnt a book about tornados. It is a book about people. It is a book about resilience and the power of people to weather the unthinkable and lift each other up. When you go into the this keep that in mind. You will learn about tornados. If i did my job right you will learn about the science. I try to embed it into the narrative like i would sneak vegetables on to pizza for my kids. I wanted it to be interesting and informative so the characters you care about pull you through the pages and you will learn about tornados along the way but i hope is the characters embed them in your psyche so the next time the weather turns and you think of them. If you were complacent you might think to get in the closet. Most people ask how did you get started writing the book. I was a Senior Editor at Southern Living at the time based in birmingham where i live. We went to work that day. Oh you brought it. There is an extra in the march 2015 Southern Living. I highly encourage you read it. Thank you. When the storm happened we knew because of the weather man saying there was a storm coming. I dont think i remembered paying that much attention but my husband is from california and didnt grow up with tornados and paid close attention and was very worried about it. On the day of the 27th we were sent home from work. I remember sitting in my living room on my couch with my husband and our son who was three at the time. We were watching tv. We were watching james band who is maybe the only who has a bauble headed doll. People really love and trust him. He can call out the intersection and the cat fish restaurants in the path of the storm instead of saying county roads. He will say where the bbq used to be over by the walmart and people know exactly where he is warning. Anyway i was sitting there with my family watching tv and we see the df4 tornado coming through about an hour drives away where i went to undergrad, moved away, and came back for grad school. My husband lived there, too. It was like watching the twin towers falling and we were like oh my god people are dying as we are watching this. Then it started coming straight for our house and at some point it was caught in downtown birmingham and we watched that. It was huge. Even bigger. Then the power cut out and it was one of those moments where in the modern world you dont hear pure silence where the buzzing things grind down to a halt. And without tv we learn today our smart phones and tweets and warnings and we tweeted a link to the live stream coverage so we could watch it on the phone. He called out our neighborhood at one point. We got our son and put a bicycle helmet on him and we dont have a basement so we got in the laundry room at the bottom of the stairs and there is a moment if you live in storm country you think we could die. What are the things you say to your kids if it might be the last thing he ever hears. If he survives and i dont what will i want him to say. It is a horrible feeling. We were lucky it touchdown seven miles from us which isnt far. And afterwards there is this collective feeling of wow that could have been me. Why them . Why not us . Everyone in the state knew someone touched by this or knew someone one degree away from it or they were touched directly by it. It was an intensely personal storm for us. The editor of Southern Living said we need to cover this. We dont normally do news but we felt this was our 9 11 or katrina. The magazine has a four month story line so it would not be published till august. So we thought what can we say that will be interesting and people will want to read them. We sent reporters to five states quickly after the storm and started looking and gathering at what was happening and reconvened and looked for similar things. We found three buckets in how people cope would the storm. Faith, food and fellowship. People turn to their faith, immediately after they lean on their faith to make sense of things that dont make sense. Food is universal. I like to think southerners do it. There is no ill in the world that can not be cured by casserole. I thought everyone would relate to that but my favorite was fellowship. People turned to each other. They didnt wait for authorities to come in. I dont know if katrina taught us that but people turned and started biging for each other and digging and social media played an interesting role in the storm. Instead of as it was before you would give to the red cross and give the canned goods to a faceless organization. You can see a tweet about a mother who needed diapers and formula and retweet im coming. And you could gave face to face and that changed and made it more personal than it already was. You could give to another person oneonone and there was healing on both side. So we wrapped it up into a beautiful story. Rick and i teamed up and worked on this feature that got some critical words but generated a lot of reader letters and comments from people that said me also and i saw that in my neighborhood and it made be proud to be southern. This captures what our region does in times of trouble. Kim i am going to understand here, we are yankees. Its true. I guess that i had to let that mare mari skare marinate a little. I went to the literary nonfiction conference and met my agent and we were talking about book ideas and this came up as this is a nobrainer. I had a year to report and write it which really isnt a lot of time. I spent most of the year gathering information. And i feel like i am going on and on. Feel free to jump in. This event is about you. Sorry. I slept one hour. I had a deadline on a 700,000 piece today. So it was really fun and interesting. I cast a wide net. I had to start by trying to understand the event itself. I dont think even being in it i understood how complex it was. People remember the tusculusa storm. After this happened within a few weeks joplin missouri was hit very badly. It wasnt of the magnitude of this one. And then Osama Bin Laden was killed and that took over the news. I started with childrens meteorologist books. Then i got into the textbooks and face the meteorologist with a vocab. Cloudy with a chance of meat balls. Your book was a nice review because here in virginia we dont deal with a lot of tornado outbreaks. The biggest outbreaks in terms of number of tornados we had was in september of 2004. There were 40 or 43 tornados depending upon who confirmed them. Ge most of them were of 1. I think it was 153. There were no deaths. It was a very different scenario in virginia. The mountains dont make tornados impossible but we dont get the same conditions with the gulf air blowing in across the land landscape that has nothing more than a barb wire fence to stop it. 1929 was the deadliest tornado in america when a tornado hit a school house and killed 13 people. So it is nothing of the magnitude of this storm that you are talking about. I think it is hard for virginians to understand the absolute terror of touch a situation. And that is one of the things you really brought to mind. And you look at the historically larger outbreaks. The april 3rd 1974 tornado outbreak. And many fatalities and financial damage. And other out breaks like the wheat land tornado outbreak may 31 31 31 and the moore tornado one. The things she is talking about will be talked about for a long time and you highlighted on this but the event wasnt just one tornado and one long line of towns going from point a to point b. This who system affected much of the central and eastern u. S. From mississippi and working southeast through the course of 26, 27 28 with the 27th being the most impactful. This was a long lived thing. And one of the triumps was he had so much lead time and colleagues and gene span, another person mentioned in the book is jason simpson. I know him and josh johnson. Very good friends with him. And hearing not only the preparation and just the mentality in the days going ahead and following on social media what happened during and also what happened afterward and the personal perspective was amazing and you tie all of that together corresponding with what i had and didnt have. Putting something that significant on paper in the grand scheme of weather was great. It is hard to wrap your head around it. In the three day outbreak there were tornados in 21 states from texas to canada. 1100 miles of tornado tracks. 252 people died just in alabama. 62 tornados in my state alone. And it is almost unfathomable. There were times when there were six or seven on the ground at once. Tornados are rare and occur in a small percentage of storms and big ones are really rare. Usually one or two a year. It is a lot like soup. It is one of the cases where too much salt can spoil the soup. Everything has to be in the right amount to form. You can have weak and strong ones. If you get a big outbreak as april 27th is very rare. In that context, i want to say that is just the stage for this. You learn the mechanisms as the tornado form and you see the event. The event is almost a character in itself. The tornados become characters. But what you are doing is living this through the people who it was in its path and the people trying to keep it safe. The meteorologist are the ones who allow you i thought about my zoophiles myself as a director. You know when you lose yourself in a story on the couch and look up and the record scratches the thing and you are back in your room . I wanted it to be like that. So i wrote in such a way that you only know what character in that seen knows at that moment in time. It is almost like the camera is on a character and you see them and hear what they are thinking and saying but you dont know the big picture. Then the camera flash do is a meteorologist who allows us to pan out and see the big picture of where this person is in this huge monster day. As you are reading you will follow the characters and it will go from character to character but you are there in the room with them. If i could ask you talk about how you chose the characters you did for the story. You focused on several College Students a few families talk about how they came to light and a part of the story. Sure. I think first i had to focus on which tornados of the 62 to focus on. I chose tusculusa and cordova because the first one affected the crimson tide and affect ad lot of people. The small cordova one got overlooked. They have a Volunteer Fire Department and are tiny and cant afford more than a few trucks. They represent the vast responders in the country; most firefighters are volunteers. I thought it was important to show. And i realize it is impossible to tell the story of one tornado without the other. James band was showing the people getting live video of the tusculusa tornado. The reason they were chasing wasnt for glory or to be like this is cool. It was because showing viewers or pictures of a tornado makes them act. You can stand in front of a radar screen and say vortex or velocity all day and people will sit there. But if you show them a picture of the tornado they will run for the bathroom. I remember watching the video james span put up and watching online. The one going through downtown. Your jaw is on the floor. It is amazing. It is almost like watching a movie but you are not. They got it on film twice. There is a cam on buildings downtown. By the time you see it though it was into rural area and folks had a lot of warning to get cover. The cordova was 150 miles. So it had a long track. And cordova was hit twice. There were three rounds of tornados in alabama. There was an Early Morning predawn that came through and knocked out the power and messed up the mainstream and that was a blessing because the afternoon would have been full of people. People would have been in the bank and the piggly wiggly. There were responders there and it was claire cleared out. In the afternoon an ef4 hit and james span had another chase team on that storm and they were able to call in with live audio. And in the heat of the chase they parked their car on the highway and the camera was mounted on the dashboard and pointed the car the wrong way. They later were like oh no. But james span had this moment where he is like okay. Just a second. I have brian in cordova with audio and you with video. And he puts them on the screen at the same time and everyone is like what is happening. That shows how complicated the day was. He felt like we he was playing whack a mole. It was an intense day for him and he did an amazing job and saved so many lives. To go back to your question, i narrowed down the towns and in cordova i wanted to focus on the responders. But more died in the other city. Six students died. There are three colleges and this particular gosh, i dont want to give the ending of the book away because in the book you dont know who makes it and who doesnt and that keeps you turning the pages. But there is a house where each of the three colleges there is one and their families really responded when i reached out to them. I didnt know if i would get one family of the three to talk to me and you really needed all three. And there was another house that had four people in it and three survived. I was looking at that house but things fell into place at this house and i followed the open doors. A lot had to do with the families and how they responded. It ended up being the perfect situation. Another point to tell you how much i appreciate the terms you used. I had several verifications of that. When i was reading your book