Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Tornado cellphone alert saves lives
Parts of rural Tennessee struck by swift moving tornadoes Tuesday lack a storm siren warning system.
BAXTER, Tenn. — Billy Dyer’s cellphone blared out an emergency alert, then his wife Kathy’s phone followed, giving them just enough time to get downstairs and flip on a TV to check the news.
Then the tornado hit. When the sun rose Tuesday, the Dyers emerged to find the walls around their corner bedroom gone. Their mattress was perched precariously on their bed’s headboard, with only sky all around.
“Thank God we had enough time to get downstairs to the basement or we would probably not be here,” Dyer said.
State emergency officials said 24 people were killed as fast-moving storms blew through Tennessee early Tuesday. Eighteen of them, including five preteen children, died in Putnam County, some 80 miles east of Nashville. Eighty-eight more were injured in the county.
Twenty-one people remain unaccounted for, Putnam Sheriff Eddie Farris said, and about 40% of the rubble still needs to be searched, including a 25acre field with marshy vegetation reaching 7 feet high.
People across Nashville were awakened by outdoor sirens alerting them to the tornado danger early Tuesday, and sirens also sounded in parts of Putnam County, but in the Dyers’ Double Springs community, deep in the Tennessee countryside, no such systems exist.
“If the cellphones didn’t have the emergency call, it wouldn’t have been good,” Dyer said.
The twisters that struck across Tennessee after midnight Tuesday ripped off brick facades, bent metal poles and shredded more than 140 buildings while burying people in piles of rubble and wrecked basements.
Officials are still assessing the damage.
John C. Tune Airport, a smaller airport in Nashville that generally serves corporate and private aircraft, estimated $93 million in infrastructure damage, not accounting for 90 destroyed aircraft and other damaged vehicles. Nashville International Airport emerged unscathed.
In Nashville, 33,000 customers remained without power Wednesday.
Dyer’s 34-year-old daughter, Brooke, managed to take shelter in the basement of the house he grew up in next door, and then “called me screaming and crying.”
Moments after the tornado passed, he ventured out into the darkness and freed her from the wreckage.
“Thank God my mother had a basement, a very small basement,” Dyer, 64, said. “She was standing there between the crack of the door screaming and crying, top of the house gone.”
Gov. Bill Lee declared an emergency, sent the National Guard to help with search-and-rescue efforts and ordered flags over the state Capitol to fly at halfstaff until Friday in memory of the lives lost.
President Donald Trump, who plans a Friday visit, tweeted that “The USA stands with the people of Tennessee 100%, whatever they need!”
National Weather Service survey teams indicated the damage in Nashville and Wilson County to the east was inflicted by a tornado of at least EF-3 intensity, with wind speeds up to 165 mph.