Re: [Leica] Nashville's exciting day

["Harrison McClary" <hmcclary@earthlink.net>]

Alfred Breull wrote:

> Harrison, I saw the pictures, and they said in tv late night news, that
> the tornado returned yesterday afternoon - are you (and your daughter)
> safe ?


Yes we are all safe with no damage to our property. Nashville was 
VERY lucky in that no one was killed as a direct result of the 
tornado. I think someone may have been killed in a car accident, but 
it may have been caused by other factors.

I think what the media was trying to say was that on Thursday 2 
tornados actually hit Nashville. The first one hit downtown at appx 
3:30pm.  I narrowly missed this one as I had left my daughters day 
care at appx 3:20pm.  Some of the shots of the damage on CNN were 
made at the front door of her day care so I consider it lucky that 
all of the children there were safe.  A second tornado hit around 
5:30 and went through East Nashville and knocked down what appeared 
to be hundreds of trees, blew down several churches and put power out 
to almost that entire side of town.  Once again no one was killed.

I spent all day yesterday walking over Nashville photographing the 
destruction for Black Star.  It was not the worst damage I have seen 
from a tornado, but it was bad enough.  The odd thing about this one 
is that it hit a downtown area of a city.  This one was one of the 
smallest tornados with winds in the 100mph range.  The one that hit 
Lawrenceburg south of here was an F4 and had winds in the 300mph 
range.  If something like that had hit Nashville I hate to think of 
the destruction.  The one that hit Alabama a few weeks ago was an F5 
with winds in the 400-500 mph range. That one killed 30-40 people or 
more and left a path 100's of yards wide and miles long.  We were 
very lucky up here.

The damage was mostly blown out windows in the downtown area and 
knocked over trees.  I have seen these things take a house and 
scatter it like so many match sticks across thousands of yards of 
land.  Nothing like that here.

Thanks for your concern.
Harrison McClary
http://people.delphi.com/hmphoto