At least six people died Saturday after tornadoes tore through parts of Tennessee, officials said. As the sun rose across the state early Sunday morning, residents – and crews who spent a tough night digging through wreckage in search of survivors – were getting their first look at the destruction in daylight. Homes were destroyed, vehicles tossed and trees and power lines were strewn across roads.
As AccuWeather reports, nearly 50,000 people in Tennessee were left without power as of Sunday morning, according to outage tracking website, poweroutage.us.
The city of Clarksville, located in Montgomery County, where three of the fatalities were reported, underwent a“search and rescue phase” Saturday evening after nearly two dozen people were treated for injuries at a hospital, officials reported. “This is a sad day for our community,” Montgomery County Mayor Wes Golden said in a statement. “We are praying for those who are injured, lost loved ones, and lost their homes.”
“This is devastating news and our hearts are broken for the families of those who lost loved ones,” Clarksville Mayor Joe Pitts added. “The city stands ready to help them in their time of grief.”
As search and rescue crews in Clarksville looked for survivors and possibly additional victims, the mayor declared a state of emergency Saturday night and enacted a 9 p.m. curfew. “Today a storm turned the world upside down for many in our community,” said Freddie O’Connell, mayor of Nashville and Davidson County. O’Connell declared a state of emergency, allowing Metro Nashville Davidson County to obtain state and federal resources.
In a statement posted to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, the Nashville Office of Emergency Management said that the city of Madison appears to be the hardest hit. A church building with occupants reportedly collapsed and thirteen people were taken to nearby hospitals. The Nashville Fire Department continues to search structures looking for survivors who may be trapped in damaged buildings.
“Significant damage” from a tornado was also reported in the Tennessee cities of Gallatin and Hendersonville, northeast of Nashville, according to a joint statement from the communities’ mayors. Images of damage in Hendersonville, Tennessee, about an hour southwest of Clarksville, shot by storm tracker, Brett Adair, showed shredded buildings, tossed cars and downed trees and debris littering roads. People were urged to stay off the roads until the weather system had passed.
The tornado reports came as a severe weather outbreak swept through the eastern United States that affected tens of millions throughout the weekend.
The storms reminded many of the violent and deadly Winter Tornadoes that hit the midwestern states in 2021. According to Wikipedia, a deadly late-season tornado outbreak, the deadliest on record in December, produced catastrophic damage and numerous fatalities across portions of the Southern United States and Ohio Valley from the evening of December 10 to the early morning of December 11, 2021. The event developed as a trough progressed eastward across the United States, interacting with an unseasonably moist and unstable environment across the Mississippi Valley. Tornado activity began in northeastern Arkansas, before progressing into Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, and Kentucky.
The most extreme impacts resulted from two long-track supercell thunderstorms that produced families of strong tornadoes. The first of these supercells produced tornadoes spanning four Mid-South states.
The death toll from the 2021 winter tornado outbreak was 89 (with six additional non-tornadic fatalities), surpassing the Tornado outbreak sequence of December 1–6, 1953, which caused 49 fatalities, as the deadliest December tornado event ever recorded in the United States. In Kentucky alone, 74 people were killed by three separate tornadoes. In addition, at least 672 people were injured. The tornado outbreak reportedly caused at least $3.9 billion (2022 USD) in damages. The outbreak set a new record for confirmed tornadoes in the month of December, with 71, a record that only stood until December 15, when a larger outbreak produced 120 tornadoes across the Midwest.
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