Tennessee Tornado Live Updates: Nashville Hit and 25 Killed Across State – The New York Times

NASHVILLE — A powerful storm early Tuesday spawned tornadoes that ripped through Tennessee, killing at least 25 people and creating a trail of devastation that struck Nashville and stretched across several counties in the central part of the state.

Officials said the full extent of the storm’s wrath remained impossible to grasp, as the death toll climbed and an untold number of people were unaccounted for as of Tuesday morning. At least 16 fatalities were reported in Putnam County, roughly 80 miles east of Nashville, and deaths were also reported in Davidson, Benton and Wilson Counties.

The tornadoes cut a path through the middle of Tennessee in the early morning hours on Tuesday. A line of severe storms moved through the region starting on Monday, and late in the day, the National Weather Service urged people to take cover as forecasters warned of severe thunderstorms and the potential for tornadoes.

President Trump said that he would visit the Nashville area on Friday, adding that he was working with state officials and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was already on the ground.

“Our hearts are full of sorrow for the lives that were lost,” he said, speaking at a conference for the National Association of Counties in Washington. “It’s a vicious thing, those tornadoes.”

In Nashville alone, the authorities reported that at least 48 structures had either partially or completely collapsed. “It is a massive act of nature,” John Cooper, Nashville’s mayor, said at a briefing on Tuesday morning.

Officials warned that the number of confirmed fatalities could rise, as officials were still working to get a handle on the reach of the devastation and emergency workers continued to search through the rubble of damaged buildings. Police officers were going house to house in some areas, and road crews were clearing streets and dangerous electrical debris.

“It’s not looking good right now. We still have several people missing, a lot of loved ones calling in wanting us to locate their family,” Sheriff Eddie Farris of Putnam County told a local news station, WKRN. “We certainly hope that number doesn’t go up, but it’s not looking real promising at this point.”

In Nashville, fire officials said that more than 400 emergency calls had been made in the hours since the tornado touched down. Much of the damage in the city was concentrated in the Germantown neighborhood, which is north of downtown, and in East Nashville, including considerable devastation in the popular Five Points area. Photographs and videos spread on social media showing buildings that had been shredded and streets strewn with debris.

Residents reported homes with roofs that had been stripped off and windows that had been blown out. The John C. Tune Airport, six miles west of downtown, sustained significant damage, with several hangars destroyed and power lines down, but none was reported at Nashville International Airport.

On one local television newscast, an anchor showed viewers side-by-side photographs of streets lined with popular restaurants, hangouts and murals alongside the rubble that had taken their place.

The Basement East, a popular music venue, was severely damaged, and the roof appeared to have blown off. “All staff working tonight are okay!” the venue said on its Twitter account. “Building sustained significant damage.”

Nearby, Attaboy, a bar near the Basement East that was popular with restaurant employees, was also flattened.

At the briefing on Tuesday, Mr. Cooper pointed out one auto parts store that had been decimated, which he saw as a sign of the tornado’s raw strength. “There was no stopping that,” he told reporters. “That just came out of the sky.”

Mandye Green, 29, and her 12-year-old niece were wandering the hilly streets of Double Springs Community, about an hour’s drive east of Nashville, among upended cars, massive uprooted trees and houses set down in splinters.

They were looking for Ms. Green’s grandparents’ house, a place they knew well. It felt strange to be lost. “This is not really recognizable,” Ms. Green said. “No landmarks.”

Eventually, they found the house, white with black shutters and half the roof torn off. Ms. Green’s grandmother Jean Gregory, 73, came around. She had lived in the little house with her husband for 30 years, maybe 40. She said he got a call from a family member at 2 a.m. who told him to switch on the TV. Someone on TV told him the storm was coming. “But they didn’t give no pinpoint,” she recalled. “At that point the electricity went out.”

She had been asleep. Her husband pulled her to the floor and lay on top of her — six, seven, maybe 10 minutes. “It just shook the house,” she said. “They said it moved off the foundation.”

They spent the rest of the night sitting in the cab of their pickup truck, scared and worried.

It was worse all around them. A woman was found dead outside of a trailer a few yards away, and rescue crews found her husband dead under the rubble. On the other side of Mrs. Gregory’s house, she said, the wind picked up a trailer and slammed it back down, killing a man inside.

Now the neighborhood, dotted with trailers and houses and cheap apartments, was full of rescue crews and ambulances, and sheriff’s deputies from other counties going door to door, looking for the living and the dead since sunup. Mrs. Gregory knew the future would be like this for a while: full of hard work and dispiriting realities, but also people helping. “It’s horrible,” she said. “But everybody will just come together, like they did this morning.”

A few yards away, there was a concrete block foundation that served as a mere outline. The house itself was about 25 feet away but no longer a house — just another pile of broken wood, Babybel cheese in a mesh bag, video games, clothes hangers, a pile of maps.

Joey Yow, 32, an employee of the Discovery Channel, was on the pile, picking over the belongings of his brother-in-law and his wife. His family members had been tossed by the wind, but survived with cuts and scrapes.

“Just putting the pieces back,” he said. Mr. Yow’s wife had an envelope, and was digging through the insulation and the wood scraps. She found a photograph of a man, and a prescription bottle, and a belt. They all went into the envelope.

A woman and a man who had moved to Nashville about 18 months ago were killed early Tuesday morning, moments after leaving Attaboy, the bar that was flattened by the tornado.

The Metro Nashville Police Department confirmed the deaths and identifies of the couple, Albree Elaine Sexton and her boyfriend, Michael Bolfini. Ms. Sexton and Mr. Bolfini had been living in California and planning to move to Asheville, N.C., when they stopped in East Nashville’s Five Points neighborhood.

But the couple fell in love with the area and “never left,” said Cara Graham, Ms. Sexton’s boss at the Lockeland Table, a restaurant.

Ms. Graham said the couple had been at Attaboy with other Lockeland Table employees when the tornado struck. The pair tried to run to their car, but Ms. Sexton was struck by debris and died at the scene. Mr. Bolfini was taken to the trauma center at Skyline Medical Center and died there, Ms. Graham said.

Ms. Graham said the couple had talked about opening a restaurant together. Ms. Sexton, she said, was an eager and enthusiastic learner.

“I have never had someone walk into our restaurant home and become more ingrained in our fabric,” Ms. Graham said. “She was amazing. She fit right in and was so kind.”

The police in Mount Juliet, an eastern suburb of Nashville, said on Twitter that several people in the city had been injured and several residences had been destroyed, and they urged residents to stay home.

In Benton County, about 100 miles west of Nashville, at least three fatalities had been reported and officials were out assessing the toll. “Power lines and roads down and of course electric was out but much of that cleared and restored very timely,” Brett Lashlee, the county’s mayor, said in an email. “More to come as we tour areas.”

Officials urged residents to stay home if they could, noting the dangers posed by debris and downed electrical lines. Schools in Nashville and elsewhere were closed on Tuesday. Nashville Electric Service is currently working to restore power to more than 47,000 customers.

Pat Isbey and his wife had just a few seconds before everything imploded.

“I was watching it out the window, and the front window implodes, and I realized it was getting bad real quick,” said Mr. Isbey, who co-owns Various Artists brewery and restaurant. His East Nashville home on Holly Street was built in 1893 and is just a few steps away from bars in the popular Five Points area.

“It sounded like the typical train,” he said. “I saw people running from the bars to their cars.”

Mr. Isbey and his wife headed for their basement, but the entrance was blocked by “something heavy.”

“So we grabbed our 8-year-old son and covered him in blankets,” he said. “We tried to get to the center of the house, but stuff was just coming in.”

He then tallied the damage: “I lost three out of four chimneys. Almost all of the windows are broken out, including storm windows and interior. The back porch is pulled off the house. Two trees are downed in my backyard. Both cars are damaged, one of them totaled. That’s a lot to happen in less than 40 seconds.”

Nearby, Annakate and Andrew Ross were on the upper floor of their home when they heard the tornado’s approach. As they scrambled downstairs with their daughters to a crawl space, the tremendous wind ripped off a side of their house. A neighbor’s garage apartment was knocked off its foundation, throwing the resident into the Rosses’ backyard, where the man scrambled through what remained of their back porch and into their home.

The tornado left some of its biggest messes and heartache in North Nashville and into nearby Germantown, a neighborhood of quaint cottages established in the 1850s by European immigrants. Old storefronts had been ripped apart, with big red spilling piles of bricks in heaps. A second-floor kitchen in an apartment over a storefront was exposed to the blue sky Tuesday morning, with dusty wine bottles visible near a stainless steel stove. Felled trees and snapped power poles were everywhere.

The rebuilding work had begun early in the morning. Crews and volunteers cleared debris and handed out water. Trucks carrying workers arrived. The whine of chain saws was everywhere.

With gentrification, the neighborhoods became a mash of income brackets. In a smart first-floor condo, Stephen Gill, 33, a financial analyst, and his boyfriend, Michael Overby, 35, a clinical research associate, busily swept up the debris and glass and junk that was scattered around.

This was a friend’s place, they said — he was out of town in Canada. After the tornado came, Mr. Gill and Mr. Overby, whose place was spared, walked over and saw that the windows of their friend’s place were smashed in. So they crawled through one of the windows and got to work.

“We’re just trying to get it ready,” Mr. Gill said, “so he doesn’t come home to a total disaster.”

Dawn Cornelius stood on a battered street in North Nashville, looking at Mt. Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, where she had spent many Sunday mornings as a child. The tornado had torn off much of the roof and then the rain came. It was a mess in there, she said. A handsome newer building behind the old brick church had been violently ripped open as if giant greedy hands had unwrapped a gift.

Ms. Cornelius, 47, held a shard of the old church sign. A friend came in for a hug.

“This is scary for me,” she said.

Members of her African-American family had settled in North Nashville beginning in the 1950s, as white flight was beginning. They settled in and built a community.

Churches like Mt. Bethel served as corner anchors. Many of them were ravaged now. A few years ago, as Nashville got trendy, new houses and condos went up everywhere, and a new, cool, young, and largely white contingent of neighbors came in. Developers started putting up the tall narrow space-maximizing houses on little lots that Nashvillians have taken to calling “skinnies.”

Ms. Cornelius lives in another neighborhood these days, but these streets still felt like home. In some cases, the homes had made it through with minimal damage. But many new places, some of them without the siding even on yet, and old cottages had been torn up and ripped apart. It was the old places, with the old neighbors, she worried about.

She saw it happen in 1998, she said, with the tornado that ripped up East Nashville. “It ushered in the hipster movement there,” said Ms. Cornelius, who works with the chamber of commerce. She said she had nothing against new white neighbors in places like this one. What she worried about was black families losing their toehold on the middle class dream here. “Marginalized communities are not going to be able to rebuild,” she said.

The tornado complicated many voters’ plans on Super Tuesday.

“I’ve been waiting in line an hour and a half,” said Michele Phelps, whose normal polling place at 15th Avenue Baptist Church was closed. And because of downed power lines and trees — and an influx of traffic from gawkers — it took her that long just to get to the Davidson County Election Commission’s offices in SoBro, which were functioning as a countywide polling place.

Other voters waiting in line shared similar challenges. Alena Teller had visited four other precincts to find one that was open or could help her, but she remained excited to vote in the presidential primary.

“I really want to vote,” Ms. Teller said. “It’s my civic duty.”

Tennessee was one of 14 states voting on Super Tuesday. A spokeswoman for Tre Hargett, the Tennessee secretary of state, said election officials had performed remarkably well under difficult circumstances.

“As a result, every county in Tennessee has polling locations open for their voters,” the spokeswoman, Julia Bruck, said in a statement. “Tornadoes are unpredictable and disruptive, and these election officials have risen to the occasion.”

In East Nashville, six polling locations were consolidated into one at Cleveland Park Community Center, creating long lines. Councilman Sean Parker, who had planned to spend the day campaigning for Bernie Sanders, said it took a few hours to get equipment to the site.

“This is a very contentious and engaging election, so we’ve got great turnout, which is awesome,” Mr. Parker said. “But because of the limited amount of equipment, we’ve got people waiting for an hour, two hours.”

Inside, Ian McEwen found his normal polling place moved from a smaller room into the gymnasium. It was packed with a couple of hundred voters, snaking their way through the line. “Usually, when I vote here, there might be six people,” Mr. McEwen said.

The crowds turned the un-air-conditioned gym into a bit of a sauna on a 65-degree day, but Roark Brown, a poll worker, said the intimidating size of the lines was more of a deterrent.

“A lot of people come and look inside and see this line and turn around,” Mr. Brown said. “With everything else that’s going on outside with the weather, frustrations kick in real quick.”

Downtown Nashville has the Honky Tonk Highway, a stretch of bars filled with live country music and only country music. For everyone else, East Nashville has the Basement East.

The Basement East was the largest music venue that catered to musicians making their way in the industry, the musician Andrew Leahey said. “It’s really the only place in town where you could go and have a big backstage and have a nice stage with lights and whatnot,” he said.

“And you didn’t have to play country music.”

Mr. Leahey was one of about two dozen artists who performed on Monday night at the Basement East, which opened in 2015, for an unofficial Bernie Sanders rally ahead of Super Tuesday.

The show wrapped up around 11 p.m., Mr. Leahey said. Within hours, a powerful tornado would level the venue. Mike Grimes, a co-owner of the Basement East, told Rolling Stone that everyone was safe but that the venue was pretty much a total loss.

The Basement East, an expansion of the original Basement venue, was a physical gathering place for the rockers, the hipsters, “anyone who is sort of a struggling artist,” said Sarah Potenza, another musician who performed at the Basement East on Monday night.

“This is an area where all the artists who are not making mainstream country music congregate, so it’s really going to affect our community in a lot of ways,” she said.

After the show, Mr. Leahey and several other artists packed up their gear and walked down the street to get pizza. As he drove home to Germantown, lightning strikes began to illuminate the sky. He made it home just as the power went out and the wind started picking up debris outside.

The Basement East began canceling and relocating this week’s shows on Tuesday. Upcoming performances at most other Nashville venues, including the Grand Ole Opry, the Ryman Auditorium and the Bluebird Cafe, will go on as scheduled.

They were shared on social media by stunned residents, weather forecasters and local news reporters.

Sam Shamburger, the lead forecaster at National Weather Service Nashville, shared a video of the tornado passing near the downtown area, stirring up debris amid bursts of lightning.

After sunrise, the scale of the tornado’s devastation became clearer, and the police shared aerial pictures of homes and businesses utterly demolished by the storm.

The John C. Tune Airport had debris scattered on the runways and surrounding fields. The former Tennessee State Prison, a 122-year-old building that is no longer used to incarcerate people and was a filming location for “The Green Mile,” was also damaged.

Scientists have been able to show a link between climate change and many kinds of extreme weather, including hurricanes, flooding, heat waves and drought. Tornadoes, however, have been harder to connect to the effects of a warming world, at least so far.

A connection makes intuitive sense: Tornadoes are produced by heavy storms, and the most recent edition of the National Climate Assessment, reflecting the work of scientists in 13 government agencies, found “observed and projected increases in the frequency of organized clusters of thunderstorms and the amount of precipitation associated with them.”

Still, part of the problem of finding a link between tornadoes and climate change is that data on tornadoes is fairly spotty compared to other weather phenomena like temperature records. With tornadoes, on the other hand, the 1990s tornado data was based largely on observations on the ground; many were missed.

Modern Doppler radar means more tornadoes are seen today, but long-term trends are hard to build from a shorter time record. Some research is suggesting that the data is starting to show patterns, however. A 2016 study found that the frequency of outbreaks that generate many tornadoes is increasing, and a study last year found that “Tornado Alley,” the stretch of the central and southern Great Plains, has begun to shift eastward Midwest and Southeast.

The fact that a link is hard to establish today is little comfort, however, since more frequent tornadoes are predicted by most climate models as global temperatures rise.

Tennessee has been struck by tornadoes during this time of the year again and again going back decades.

One of the deadliest came on March 14, 1933, when 11 people were killed and parts of East Nashville were virtually leveled by the tornado.

And on April 16, 1998, an outbreak of about a dozen tornadoes swept through Middle Tennessee. It was an extraordinary event, according to meteorologists, as it included multiple powerful and violent tornadoes that traveled considerable distances and because the spree stretched on for nearly an entire day. In all, the tornadoes then killed four people and injured nearly 100; it also hit Downtown Nashville, blowing out windows from skyscrapers and knocking down some older buildings.

The storm devastated East Nashville, damaging or destroying many homes. The event was widely regarded as a spark in the revitalization in the area. It became one of Nashville’s hipper neighborhoods, with new development and trendy restaurants and hangouts, including those seriously damaged by the most recent tornadoes.

On Tuesday, Bo Mitchell, a state legislator, walked through the damage created by the most recent storm carrying a gas can. Mr. Mitchell’s Nashville district in the General Assembly does not include the neighborhood, but he was there helping a friend wielding a chain saw.

Mr. Mitchell, a Democrat, said he remembered one of the previous outbreaks vividly. “I met my wife in the ’98 storm,” he said.

And in 2008, 55 people were killed by an outbreak of tornadoes that swept through five southern states, including Tennessee, where 31 people died. The outbreak, on Feb. 7, 2008, also coincided with the Super Tuesday primaries during that presidential election year.

“The wrath of God is the only way I can describe it,” Phil Bredesen, the governor of Tennessee at the time, said just after he surveyed the toll from a helicopter. “I’m used to seeing roofs off houses, houses blown over. These houses were down to their foundations, stripped clean.”

Richard Fausset and Steve Cavendish reported from Nashville, and Rick Rojas from Atlanta. Elian Peltier contributed reporting from London, and John Schwartz, Maria Cramer, Johnny Diaz, Jacey Fortin and Nancy Coleman from New York.