Nashville Tornado
Saga of the Big Noisy Wind
Hello from ground zero
A sort of a first person account of the Nashville Tornado
After the tornado as you will soon learn my neighborhood didn’t have any electricity
Which meant that my phone which is an answering machine didn’t work
Plus CNN and a couple of other media honchos reported that the building I work in the TPAC/Polk
building had suffered a lot of damage to put it mildly
Which resulted in a lot of my friends panicing because they couldn’t reach me.
Luckily a friend carried me to her house on Saturday so I could check my e mail , which was full of messages.
So below are a series of e mail messages that I sent out after the tornado
Dispatch One
Saturday April 18th
Below is a quick account of what happened last Thursday( April 16)
when Nashville had a big bag of wind come visiting.
There will be a more detailed account in the next newsletter.
( I am also the editor of the Middle Tennessee Science Fiction Society
the newsletter is Kronos)
Please feel free to forward any part of it.
By the way the Parthecon hotel wasn’t affected at all.
( Parthecon was A SF convention scheduled to take place about two weeks after the BNW
The hotel was located near Briley Parkway and I40)
Most of the fans of Nashville were not in the storm,
except for those that worked downtown or lived in a part of
west Nashville or East Nashville.
I believe Charlie Williams has a large tree leaning on his house.
SF Fan and author, had several short stories published including one in the Thieves World anthologies
Charlie's house is still damaged. )
Some lost electricity and a couple of us still don’t have power.
My building the Polk office tower, which sits atop TPAC, took
a direct hit
but the tornado was just shifting from f2 to f3
we lost a lot of windows but the building stood.
I will be posting stuff at the con including a photo of our
Building.
Tennessee Performing Arts Center/ Polk Office Building
we saw it forming but it didn't look like a normal tornado
just a very big black cloud traveling on the ground,
no elephant
trunk shaped funnel..if anything there was a swirling brown
pattern inside...
even if we had headed downstairs when we first saw it
we would not have made it...
(learned later that the door to one of the emergency stairwells popped open
allowing in a torrent of wind and dust within the stairwell)
for a couple of minutes we looked at it in disbelieve
the deer in headlights syndrome..
asking each other was this
for real and are you seeing what I am seeing..
my windows ( one of only two on the NW corner which survived)( this I later learned was a mistake, it was based on a photo which because of the way shadows were cast caused the illusion that the windows were shattered))
gave us a birds eye view...
then it clipped Baptist hospital and has it swept in it blew
transformers and the light flew upward..
we grabbed our purses and run to the core...
one older lady was afraid to get her purse so I went and got it
second before it hit,
I grabbed her we made it to the core just as we lost power..
our alarm did not go on until after this.
Our building is built on a similar principal to the Golden Gate Bridge
it has suspension cables going upward through the walls and
exposed on top.
we could hear the building going..pop, pop, along with the roar of the
tornado..
some people speculated that the building had permanent damage
but Swan Lake is premiering in Jackson hall in tpac tonight..
( it was later canceled.. the only show to be canceled due to the storm)
I didn't see much of the damage because just as I made my way down
all the stairs a mta West End bus came by and I hopped on it
because I couldn't a phone call through to my mom and I
saw our neighborhood get hit ( just before we were hit I called her
to warn her to take cover)
The neighborhood had a lot of downed trees but our house and my
mom were ok
..my mom saw a glimpse outside just
as she was taking cover and she said she saw the trees
being corkscrewed around and around...
We only lost pieces of our trees, but a lot of our neighborhoods
old shade trees are gone..
we still do not have electricity..Sherry is nice enough
to let me come over so I could do e mail...
I also owe a lot of thanks to Anita and Tome Feller whom
took me to run errands and loaned us a portable tv
and to Dan Caldwell
And to all the friends who checked on us
Several neighbors were real lucky..
The house across the street diagonal to us was missed by inches
by a very large tree yanked out by it's roots.
The dinky little yellow house next door had one of its oaks
on it but it didn't injure the house..one of the best and most
professional tree cutting crews I have ever seen came
in at 1:30 am secured the tree and slowly removed bit, by bit.
Up the street one tree took half of the front yard when
it was yanked out of the ground.
East Nashville is the hardest it..
the tornado was a f3 possibly
going to f4 when it them..
But amazingly the only people killed
were because they didn't treat
a non-working traffic light as a four way stops
(( later the traffic deaths were ruled not related to the tornado, a Vanderbilt student was our only casualty0
despite all the flying glass cascading off of the skyscrapers
only 100 people from downtown went to the hospitals and
Non-of them were critically injured.
I have heard people from the towers went running into the street
and to parked cars to bring people in.
All in all Nashville is real
lucky.
Especially considering what happened in Alabama
last week
and other parts of the state ( like Wayne County was hit by an f4
tornado)(( the Lawrence - Wayne County tornado was later upgraded to F5))
And we have a lot of heroes..
neighbors helping each other, the Nashville Electric service crews
( NES itself took a hit) all the Metro Davidson police,
firemen,
the MTA bus drivers who weaved around all the fallen debris
to
get people home, the TEMA people including our own Tom Norris
who is putting in 12 - 16 hour shifts,
with just enough time to
sleep ( they wouldn’t even let him off long enough to take Sherry
to the Chieftains for her birthday today)
Looking forward to seeing you at the con
Deb.
Dispatch Two
Tuesday after the tornado
Hello
We are still putting ourselves back together..
but it is happening rather quickly..
NES now has restored power to almost all of the people affected by
the storm.
Last Thursday over 75,000 did not have it.
It is now down to less than 4,000.
All of the schools will be reopened except for two by tomorrow.
Downtown is defiantly open for business.
I wish all of the tour groups would stop canceling.
Sometime soon I will send a list of how you can help.
Charlie Williams and Dave Shockley are both ok .
But their houses are a little worse off.
Both of their houses were hit by trees and sustained some
damage.
See you at the con
Bem Scribe from the much patched but open James K Polk building.
Dispatch 3
From the online version of the May Kronos
Yep we are still here, thou a little worse than wear from the events of the past month.
As most of the known world knows April 16th Nashville made the national news ( including CNN and the BBC) when two tornadoes plowed through the city. There is a whole lot more about this at the end of the newsletter, but I would like to say some of the coverage was a little exagerated.
The downtown office buildings were not "blown apart" something I actually read on a CNN page. But rather they were blown through. .( This I Believe is the page: http://cnn.com/WEATHER/9804/17/storm.aftermath/index.html)
We were back at work in the Polk/ TPAC building by Monday.
We only had one casualty, a Vanderbilt/ROTC senior who was crushed by a tree in Centennial Park, who died this week of massive internal injuries. There is another man in critical condition at Baptist Hospital.
Most of the over 100 injuries were minor to slightly serious and were treated and released at local hospitals.
Parts of west , north and downtown were damaged, but the most severe damage was in East Nashville.
NES had power restored to the majority of it’s customers within a couple of days to a week.
They were able to restore power to most of downtown by Thursday night despite having their headquaters hit.
While several fen work downtown and where in the tornadoes path we are all ok.
The tow fen affected the most by the tornado were Charlie Williams and Dave Shockley.
Both of their houses in East Nashville were severally damaged by falling trees and the wind.
Charlie Williams can be reached at:
Dave Shockley can be reached at:
At this time I would like to thank all of the people who e mailed or called to see how we were.
And special thanks to Anita and Tom Feller, Dan Caldwell and Tom and Sherry who helped me out personally in the aftermath when my mother and I didn’t have power for several days.
I want to especially thank Anita for loaning out the little portable tv and Sherry for taking me to their apartment were Tom let me use his computer to answer all the e mails and let everyone know we were all right and Nashville had not been blown to Oz.
We need to remember that is not just Nashville that has suffered in this season of the Tornado.
Kentucky and other parts of Tennesse were hit both by tornadoes and devasting hail on the same day the tornado hit Nashville. Kerry Gilley told me several of his barns were damaged. People were killed and
Western Kentucky University actually closed awhile due to hail damage to the student center and several dorms.