1998 Nashville Tornados

[Renew Deal]

I was watching Storm Stories on the Weather Channel last night. They showed the tornados in Nashville. It was insane. These things just steamrolled that city. Did anyone here survive that? What was it like?

[short bus president]

1. I was there,

about 5 miles outside the downtown area, where we had some gusty winds and a lot of rain. Went into downtown about a week later and it looked like someone had swallowed it and shit it out.

[TNDemo]

2. I was there.

It happened on my daughter's birthday. Luckily only one person died. My son had just left his school on the bus when it was hit. Then he had just passed by Centennial Park (where the tree fell on the Vanderbilt student that later died) seconds before it was struck. My SIL was at her school and they had to stay for several hours (with the kids) and every window of every car in the parking lot was gone except for her great big van windows that should have been a great target. There was not actually much damage out my way but I remember a week or two later driving toward town and getting off the interstate and thinking people sure were nasty around there with all that garbage all over and then I remembered this was one of the places hit. I would drive by and one place would be gone and then the place next to it would be there with landscaping intact. There were big air conditioning units that fell from the top of the skyscrapers downtown and yet did not hit anyone. We knew kids on the buses downtown that had the windows blown out and one person was seen hanging onto a stop sign and horizontal in the wind. All in all it was a miracle there were not mass casualties downtown.

I sometimes feel responsible for it since I had been remarking to my husband that tornadoes never seem to hit a downtown area - it's always somebody's trailer in the sticks and then it happened.

[Wcross]

3. The whole area had weather that day

I was about 20 miles south, it was a wild day in the whole area. I remember being stuck behind an old farmer in a wicked hail storm with green clouds overhead. We have tornados every year around here.

[Lars39]

4. The edge of our subdivision got hit.

Several homes and businesses destroyed. Our kids had just left on the bus. Had no way of knowing if they were OK. Scary times. If husband had left a few minutes earlier he would have been in it. He went to work downtown Nashville and had to weather it out there. His building received a lot of damage. Definitely not a day I want repeated.

[HamstersFromHell]

5. I was 35 miles west...

...in Dickson, and the one that did the most of the damage pretty much followed Hwy 70 from Dickson right into Nashville. We heard it, it was pretty darn close (maybe 1/2 mile north) when it passed through there.

What amazed me was one of the other tornados that storm spawned hit just south of I-40 in Dickson. Almost totally levelled a small block building while not even touching a trailer less than 30 feet from it. Amazing how "picky" those things can be in their destruction.