Officials in Tennessee are facing questions after tornado sirens allegedly failed to sound to alert residents to the storm that killed six people.
Tornadoes and severe thunderstorms tore through Tennessee on Saturday, destroying homes, overturning trucks and uprooting trees, leaving an estimated 35,000 people without power and many families homeless.
Three people died in Clarksville, while another three people died in Madison, including a father and his two-year-old son when a mobile home rolled onto their house, the Metro Nashville Police Department said.
A further 23 people were injured in the extreme weather.
As residents and officials assess the damage, questions are being raised as to why the tornado warning sirens did not go off as the storm approached.
Tornado warning sirens are used across Tennessee and other parts of the US to give people an early warning to oncoming severe weather events.
Debris covers the area around homes destroyed in the West Creek Farms neighbourhood of Clarksville, Tennessee on Sunday— (AP)
Since 2003, such sirens have been used in the state to alert residents to imminent danger from tornadoes.
In 2013, a $2m grant was provided to the Nashville county to upgrade the system with new siren equipment to emit an easier-to-hear warning signal, according to the Nashville and Davidson County website.
The system was then upgraded in 2020 to bring the total number of sirens in the state from 93 to 113, it states.
However, the sirens did not go off over the weekend until after the storm had passed through Nashville.
Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell said he could not explain why this was the case, while Jimmy Edwards, chief of Montgomery County Emergency Services, admitted he “couldn’t respond as to why the warning sirens didn’t go off until after the fact”.
It’s not the first time the state’s tornado siren system hasn’t worked properly. In 2019, a drop in radio signal caused Nashville’s tornado warning system to repeat a siren cycle.
Meanwhile, an investigation by Scripps News earlier this year found a number of tornado siren systems across the US are outdated or failing, leaving millions of people vulnerable during extreme weather events.
This weekend’s tornado had a devastating impact on Tennessee.
Clarksville Mayor Joe Pitts declared a state of emergency in the city on Saturday night and imposed a curfew.
A resident examines the debris from a friend’s destroyed house in the West Creek Farms neighbourhood on Sunday, Dec. 10, 2023, Clarksville, Tenn.— (AP)
Footage posted to social media showed a huge fireball erupting south of the city of Goodlettsville as a tornado swept through the area.
In the aftermath, rescue teams searched for survivors and surveyed damage on Sunday morning, the Nashville Office of Emergency Management said on X.
“This is devastating news and our hearts are broken for the families of those who lost loved ones,” Mayor Pitts said in a statement.
“The city stands ready to help them in their time of grief.”
The tornado also left thousands without power. PowerOutage.us, a tracking website, has logged over 35,000 reports of power cuts across the state. A spokesperson for Nashville Electric Service said that while it had managed to restore power to 18,000 customers, there was no estimated time for full restoration due to the significant damage at substations in Hendersonville and North Nashville.
A car is buried under rubble on Main Street after a tornado hit Hendersonville, Tennessee, 9 December2023— (via REUTERS)
According to CNN, it could take several days for the worst-hit areas to get their electricity back.
Meanwhile, two water companies in Sumner County are running on generator power, the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency said.
Two dozen more tornado reports were received across five states on Saturday, sparked by a sprawling weather system that brought storms to a large swathe of the eastern US, the National Weather Service said.
It came nearly two years to the day after 41 tornadoes were recorded through a handful of heartland states, including 16 in Tennessee and eight in Kentucky. A total of 81 people died in Kentucky alone during that extreme weather event.
