The Tornado that hit my town, Murfreesboro TN

[28yroldgranny]

So this is my first blog since the "Good Friday" tornados, a they are calling it. Every day I seem to see more devastation, whether it is on the way home from the store , on my way to work or something I am seeing in the online local paper. It is shocking, now way around it. It came on so suddenly. Around 12 they issued one of those beeping weather alerts for some county no where near us, around 12:15 they issued a tornado warning (not a watch, straight to warning)for our county. Less then 10 min. later they actually broke in with straight coverage from news channel 4 with a very nervous weather woman shouting streets and locations at us. At this point we started to try and get the guests away from the window which was futile. Somewhere in between the warning and we they broke in I walked out onto our back dock to get something. Our back dock has no roof but does have a brick wall around it and a door to let in deliveries that stays shut for the most part. As soon as I stepped out I was stunned by the stillness in the air. I have never seen anything so still, not even a puff of air as strong as your breath. Nothing! When I was little and living in KS I asked my babysitter one time how you would know when Tornado was coming. She told me that right before there will be no air at all. All these years later I know she was right. Because it turns out this was moments from a touchdown within a mile from my store. A few minutes later the weather woman starts shouting that a tornado HAS touched down at I-24 and Old Fort Parkway (Now we know it was medical center...the road we work on). She is yelling that if you are in this are to take cover right away. We have to keep running back and forth with reports to others because the radio in the back is on but now the TV's in the bar have gone out. Some guests are actually leaving and going to their cars and others are up against the windows. The hail starts pounding and the lights are barely flickering and surprisingly stay on the whole time. A few people go out on the back dock to see the hail and had they opened the door they would have gotten to see the 1/2 mile wide EF-4 tornado that came right across the road directly behind us. The radio is still shouting out streets that are in it's path and to continue to take cover as it could produce spin-offs. It did produce one spin off that was an EF-0 in a another neighborhood. As soon as we can no longer hear the hail we start hearing the sirens. All types of sirens coming from every which way. NOW we open the back door and see tons of lights just up the road and traffic starting to back up. At this point we have no idea what is gone and what is still there. The others are torn in half. Incredibly old trees are uprooted or twisted in half. You can tell at where they are broken off the trunks are twisted and most of the time the tops are no where near the trunks. All the trees that are still standing look like skeletons with not one branch much less a leaf attached. In your mind you think that it might look something like the fall and in reality it doesn't even resemble a tree. Back at work, the cell phones come out and start going off. Hardly any calls can get through and they are asking all of us to stay off of them because it is jamming the lines for emergency calls. We continue on with our day not really knowing the severity of everything except for a few shots of a demolished house and what the traffic camera hit that are floating across the TV next to the radar since the storm is still producing tornados in other parts of town and possibly south of our county. The demolished house that was slid off it's foundation and half collapsed was the only shot I saw before I got home. I found out Sunday that, that house was 2 blocks from the kids schools and in the same neighborhood of someone I know. In my photos that house is labeled "Near the kids schools". I went through the national park to get home as it is the only road open to get to my house. Again, battlefield era trees are twisted and tossed every which way and phone and electric poles are snapped in half. You can see its path that ripped through the woods and across the road and then where it jumped over to railroad tracks to take out a shell station before moving across the main road. This was my first view of what actually happened and I don't even have the words for what my mind was thinking. I think on Sunday it really hit me how close it was to my work AND my home in several different spots. Less then 1-2 miles from each of them. We were so lucky...so lucky. Some of these pictures don't even show what it looks like. I am still stunned every day on my way to work when I see the space where the trees USED to be. It is one of those things that you barely notice until it's gone.

I am having a surprisingly hard time with this considering I didn't get hit.  I feel like everytime I walk outside I look at the sky...like I don't trust it. I have never felt like this before and it is really strange to me.  Not just the sky thing but just seeing all these things on my way to work or home from the store or whatever.  I feel like I can understand how people often need couseling after something like this, even if it didn't hit them.  I just don't feel "right" since it happened. 

If anyone wants to check it out you can see more at  http://www.dnj.com   The video footage is incredible.  I can't beleive how big it was.

[yaffamommy]

Apr. 15, 2009 at 11:01 AM

Hi I live in Nashville. I didn't see anything too crazy where I live but it was horrible and I agree its like every other day we are having tornado weather. We live in a trailer so it really sucks.