Nashville Struck

Power outages, especially if your half way through cooking a roast dinner. It goes from a roast dinner to a tin of baked beans. Must stay humble and be grateful for that tin of cold baked beans. Or could have a tuna sandwich.

JohnDB said:

Last night a tornado tore a path of destruction through Nashville TN.
I'm currently sitting here waiting for power...but dry.

I live in a large apartment complex surrounded by other apartments and across the street from a hospital near the interstate....so us being without power is a huge thing.
Most of East Nashville on into the next county was destroyed.

I just watched pictures and listened to reports that many places I've built in the past are gone.

If I can get power I'll try to get to work later this morning. But I'm not sure if I will be working alone or not.
The weather is warm enough...but the rain is still falling and I want a cup of coffee.
No morning coffee makes me sad and sleepy. I went looking for my butane stove and can't find it. (Got a stovetop percolator...found it)
*Sigh*

Click to expand...

By the time the tornado got to Cookeville it was an EF-4. It missed us by 1-1/2 miles as it tore along the Hwy 70 N. corridor toward town, right along the section of road I go out to and take to work everyday.

I had gone to bed early that night because I was coming down with the flu or something. I woke up around 1 AM or so and realized a storm was rolling in. When I looked out the kitchen window toward the west the sky was literally a non stop show of lightning in all directions. I said, 'oh, wow, this is a bad storm coming!' My family was still up and we started scrambling to grab stuff and hit the basement.

When it seemed safe my daughter and I came out of the basement and could see during the bright lightning flashes that it was passing to the side of us, not over us. After it passed there was a non-stop chorus of emergency vehicles for at least two hours. I told my daughter this had to have been really bad, and that apparently it had hit at the end of our street.

I flagged down a truck to ask what they knew about the damage. They said it was bad and rattled off some places that had been hit. So I listened to the local radio for a while as they relayed reports of damage that local residents had called in. As far as I could tell my work place was probably gone because the market just a couple of blocks away from there was completely destroyed. As it turned out the storm veered away from the main road enough to destroy houses right behind where I work, sparing the shop.

Needless to say it was really, really bad. Many familiar houses and businesses were completely wiped away or very badly damaged and torn down later. The old 1960's brick faced houses fared the best. They were damaged but not wiped out. You would have survived in one of those. But the newer stick houses built in the last 10 years or so were completely leveled with people asleep inside and who only had a minute or so of warning before getting hit. 19 people died. The reason people did not have enough advance warning (our phone alerts didn't go off until a minute before it hit) was because the storm had taken out the cell towers in Nashville.

Even though I was not hit directly, it hit the world I live in during the day. Besides familiar buildings not being there that used to be there the most startling thing was the way all the trees had been ripped out. I started taking the back way to work to avoid the stress of taking this all in everyday. It was beginning to wear on me. It's amazing how much debris had to be gathered up and hauled away. It took weeks.

The zone of devastation is still there. The demolition seems to be complete now. And at least one new house is being built. But the scars will be here for years.

No more fried mushrooms for lunch for a while:





The canopy over the pumps was found 1.2 miles down the road.
(That's a Corona beer truck in the top picture, lol)