The month of March has been interesting in middle Tennessee. For the second time in a month we've had to seek shelter in our basement during the middle of the night. About three weeks ago, Tennessee had a cluster of tornadoes, one of which touched down about 10 miles north of us and did minor damage. It was the same series of storms that did damage in Nashville, and killed 18 people in Cookeville.
Last evening, the weather radio alarm went off about 2:00 a.m. with a tornado watch for our County. Since I was wide awake at that point, I decided to get dressed and check the weather radar. We had already prepped certain items that would accompany us in the event we had to seek shelter. The weather radar didn't look good. As a commercially licensed pilot, I've gotten good at interpreting radar screens, and it didn't look good at all. The only thing I was lacking was direction and rate of travel of the storm front. The weather service was somewhat helpful, as their weather warnings indicated that the storm was traveling at 80 mph.
Shortly thereafter our tornado alert device began to alarm, for the first time since I've had it in over two years. Weather net reports on our local repeater indicated the storm was approaching our vicinity. I awakened my spouse and she got herself prepared. The lightning show was very impressive, with almost constant flashes. We leashed the dog and then sought shelter down in the basement, which necessitates going out on a deck and then descending some stairs.
We made it into the basement and maybe 30 seconds to a minute later we could hear heavy hail, and just lots of noise. I had left the weather radio going upstairs on full volume, but the storm noises drowned out the weather radio audio. The lights flickered, but never went out. The signal from the local repeater was significantly diminished, probably from the intensity of precipitation.
We remained in the basement for 30-45 minutes, listening to reports on the VHF radio(Yaesu FT-3DR). There were calls for all available firemen and rescue personnel, and then a report that an 18 wheeler had been flipped over. Once the frontal passage occurred we went back upstairs. We noted many small branches and limbs now littered our deck. We went to bed, and another less intensive thunderstorm passed through maybe 30 minutes later.
When we got up this morning, it was to a deep blue cloudless sky, with a brilliant sun. We ended up getting some siding blown off the house and some broken limbs in the yard. Later in the morning we went out for a ride to see what was happening. Some of our nearby neighbors had trees blown down on their building, and many large limbs broken. In town, Walmarts was severely damaged and was closed, Lowes had their demo sheds and buildings blown away or destroyed, a factory was destroyed, and other buildings were severely damaged. Luckily, there were no reports of serious injuries. In the town of Sparta, to our southwest, a train was blown off the tracks. In our County there were over 7500 without electricity.
We were actually well prepared, as we had pre-positioned gear before we went to bed, covered our photovoltaic panels with moving blankets, and we had a plan. Also, incredibly, we have one of the few homes locally with a basement. I really don't like night time tornadoes, not that I like day time tornadoes. But night time tornadoes add an extra sense of unpredictability, since you can't see it coming, and if you don't have warning devices, you don't know they're there until it's too late. We actually have two weather radios, plus the tornado alert device which apparently use lightning discharge intensities to determine the strength of storms. A number of folks were killed earlier this month by savage tornadoes as they slept in their beds.
