Residents of Tennessee are cleaning up after severe weekend storms.
Central Tennessee residents and emergency workers cleaned up Sunday from severe weekend storms and tornadoes that killed six people and sent more to the hospital while damaging buildings, turning over vehicles and knocking out power to tens of thousands.
Officials confirmed that three people, including a toddler, died after a tornado struck Montgomery County 80 kilometers northwest of Nashville near the Kentucky state line on Saturday afternoon. Some 23 people were treated for injuries at hospitals in the county, officials said in a news release.
In a neighborhood just north of downtown Nashville, three people were killed Saturday as a result of tornadoes, the city’s Emergency Operation Center said in a social media post.
National Weather Service meteorologists said in a posting on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, said the destructive tornadoes were spawned in the Clarksville and Nashville areas.
In Nashville, the roof of a church north of downtown collapsed during the storm, resulting in 13 people being treated at hospitals, Nashville emergency officials said in a news release. They were later listed in stable condition.
Photos posted by the Clarksville fire department on social media showed damaged houses with debris strewn in the lawns, a tractor-trailer flipped on its side on a highway and insulation ripped out of building walls. Video footage from the Tennessee storms showed a ball of fire rising from behind a row of homes into the sky.
A curfew was in effect both Saturday night and Sunday night in Clarksville, where officials on Sunday urged motorists to keep away from the damaged areas so as not to impede the work of first responders and utility crews.
“We are praying for those who are injured, lost loved ones, and lost their homes,” Montgomery County Mayor Wes Golden said in a news release. “This community pulls together like no other and we will be here until the end.”
Residents in the region are familiar with severe weather in late fall. Saturday’s storm came nearly two years to the day after the National Weather Service recorded 41 tornadoes through a handful of states, including 16 in Tennessee and eight in Kentucky. A total of 81 people died in Kentucky alone.
