After The Tornado: We Are Okay
It is calm and beautiful today. To look out a front window at my neighborhood, you wouldn't be able to tell that less than two miles away, city, state, and county law enforcement personnel are working to keep looky-loos and looters at bay. The Red Cross, TEMA, and the National Guard set up command centers to answer the needs of those who were hit.
Have I mentioned Nashville Electric Service workers? No? They may very well got paid the usual time and a half to work around the clock to get everyone powered up again. You know something? When disaster hits and we see and hear the evidence they are out there, it is a bargain at twice the price for the people who depend upon them. I got approximately one and a half to two hours of sleep Saturday and Sunday nights. The only noise that could be heard in my very quiet neighborhood was the constant roar of the generators they used as they worked.
The frames of reference for everyone differs when it comes to tornadoes. I spent a chunk of my formative years in Lubbock, Texas. As a sixth grader walking home from school, I saw twisters form but never touch down. The natives glanced up at them and shrugged. Happened all the time. This was a few years out from a killer set of tornadoes that ripped through the city in 1970. Even though much of the city had been rebuilt by the time my family moved there, evidence of the destructive force of those F5s was still around.
Have I mentioned Nashville Electric Service workers? No? They may very well got paid the usual time and a half to work around the clock to get everyone powered up again. You know something? When disaster hits and we see and hear the evidence they are out there, it is a bargain at twice the price for the people who depend upon them. I got approximately one and a half to two hours of sleep Saturday and Sunday nights. The only noise that could be heard in my very quiet neighborhood was the constant roar of the generators they used as they worked.
The frames of reference for everyone differs when it comes to tornadoes. I spent a chunk of my formative years in Lubbock, Texas. As a sixth grader walking home from school, I saw twisters form but never touch down. The natives glanced up at them and shrugged. Happened all the time. This was a few years out from a killer set of tornadoes that ripped through the city in 1970. Even though much of the city had been rebuilt by the time my family moved there, evidence of the destructive force of those F5s was still around.
This video created by Texas Tech University presents a very well=produced oral history of the storm. You can find more videos about the Lubbock Tornado here. Some of them have the same weird retro charm of True Stories or old educational films. I recommend the Lubbock NWS documentary for its information-rich content on tornadoes and TWISTER! a sixteen-minute documentary that combines West Texas special-ness with McGraw-Hill style storytelling.
The museum at Texas Tech had an exhibit that included oddities such as coke bottles with straws driven through them, pieces of twisted rebar, and big, grainy pictures of the tornadoes that had been snapped by staff photographers at the Avalanche-Journal. The monthly bomb drills I experienced in the Southeast were replaced by tornado drills in Lubbock County ISD schools. We were taught the best places to get when the sirens went off and what we needed to do to be prepared. What 12-year-old me saw and heard never left me. That did not mean I was always prepared.
April 16, 1998, I was driving home from work. Briley Parkway offered one of my favorite views of Nashville. The close up of Cornelia Fort Airfield had the Cumberland River and downtown skyline as its backdrop. Also along the Parkway was Gaylord Music, The Opryland Hotel, and a hilariously tacky and yet endearing strip of tourist traps along Music Valley Road. As I approached the section of Briley Parkway near Cornelia Fort, I noticed cars were pulled over to the shoulder. People were standing on the side of the road and watching as angry, gray-green clouds boiled over Downtown Nashville. The storm looked like it was consuming the city.
As it headed toward the Cumberland River, I drove on to the next overpass, parked my car on the shoulder as far in and under it as I could get and climbed up and under the bridge. A family in a car behind me followed suit. I told them this was not ideal, but it was the best I could do given the time we had to get away. They agreed. Then they told me they were from Oklahoma. It was a Tornado Alley Thing that only we might have gotten at the time. Seconds later, a tornado blew through Gaylord Music. It looked and sounded like an explosion from an action movie.
Below is The Weather Channel's documentary on the 1998 Nashville Tornadoes. If you check out the search page on Youtube, you can learn more about that storm. Additional recommended links on that page are the interviews with Nashville meteorologist Lelan Statom and a conversation with Chris Clark and Ron Howse.
The museum at Texas Tech had an exhibit that included oddities such as coke bottles with straws driven through them, pieces of twisted rebar, and big, grainy pictures of the tornadoes that had been snapped by staff photographers at the Avalanche-Journal. The monthly bomb drills I experienced in the Southeast were replaced by tornado drills in Lubbock County ISD schools. We were taught the best places to get when the sirens went off and what we needed to do to be prepared. What 12-year-old me saw and heard never left me. That did not mean I was always prepared.
April 16, 1998, I was driving home from work. Briley Parkway offered one of my favorite views of Nashville. The close up of Cornelia Fort Airfield had the Cumberland River and downtown skyline as its backdrop. Also along the Parkway was Gaylord Music, The Opryland Hotel, and a hilariously tacky and yet endearing strip of tourist traps along Music Valley Road. As I approached the section of Briley Parkway near Cornelia Fort, I noticed cars were pulled over to the shoulder. People were standing on the side of the road and watching as angry, gray-green clouds boiled over Downtown Nashville. The storm looked like it was consuming the city.
As it headed toward the Cumberland River, I drove on to the next overpass, parked my car on the shoulder as far in and under it as I could get and climbed up and under the bridge. A family in a car behind me followed suit. I told them this was not ideal, but it was the best I could do given the time we had to get away. They agreed. Then they told me they were from Oklahoma. It was a Tornado Alley Thing that only we might have gotten at the time. Seconds later, a tornado blew through Gaylord Music. It looked and sounded like an explosion from an action movie.
Below is The Weather Channel's documentary on the 1998 Nashville Tornadoes. If you check out the search page on Youtube, you can learn more about that storm. Additional recommended links on that page are the interviews with Nashville meteorologist Lelan Statom and a conversation with Chris Clark and Ron Howse.
At the time, I weas the only person I knew of in Nashville who had any experience with tornadoes. Some friends who lived in East Nashville learned the hard way about surviving the aftermath of an urban twister. This was before the internet was anything like it now. There was no skype, no facetime,