Six dead after severe storms, tornadoes hit Tennessee

Severe storms that tore through central Tennessee killed six people Saturday and sent at least 60 others to area hospitals, as homes and businesses were damaged in multiple cities.

Almost 40,000 electricity customers were still without power across Tennessee on Sunday morning, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us.

Three people, including a child, were killed after a tornado struck Montgomery County north of Nashville near the Kentucky state line, county officials said in a news release. And the Nashville Emergency Operation Center said in a post on a social media account that another three people were killed by severe storms there. Montgomery County officials said 62 people were treated for injuries at hospitals overnight. Nine of the injured were transferred from area hospitals to Vanderbilt Medical Center.

Jimmy Edwards, chief of Montgomery County Emergency Services, described their conditions as ‘critical’ and ‘unstable’.

Officials in the city of Clarksville, which is about 50 miles northwest of Nashville and where a 9.00 pm curfew was in effect Sunday for the second night in a row, confirmed three deaths linked to the storm at a news conference. At the time, Clarksville Fire Chief Freddie Montgomery said teams, including special operations crews, were still carrying out secondary searches in the area.

Fire officials responded to one structure fire Sunday morning and received “a lot of other medical calls and calls related to that,” Montgomery told reporters. Different parts of the city sustained different levels of damage, Edwards added. He said homes in some areas were “totally destroyed,” while the damage in other areas ranged from ‘slight’ to ‘heavy’.

Earlier, Nashville police identified three of the victims killed as the storm hit a mobile home community in Madison, a neighborhood in the northeastern part of the city. They were identified as 37-year-old Joseph Dalton, 31-year-old Floridema Gabriel Perez and her son, two-year-old Anthony Elmer Mendez.

Police said in a news release that Dalton was inside his mobile home “when the strength of the storm rolled it on top of Perez’s residence.” Two other children, Perez’s seven-year-old son and Dalton’s 10-year-old son, were also inside their respective homes when the storm hit. The two kids were transported to a pediatric hospital with injuries that are not considered life-threatening, according to police.

A building collapse at a Nashville church sent 13 people to local hospitals, the Nashville Office of Emergency Management reported late Saturday night. The patients were all in stable condition. The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office noted it was “still in the search and rescue phase of this disaster.” “We’ve been hit very hard by a tornado here in Clarksville and Montgomery County,” Montgomery County Mayor Wes Golden said in a video posted on social media Saturday evening.

Photos posted by the Clarksville fire department on social media showed damaged houses with debris strewn on the lawns, a tractor trailer flipped on its side on a highway and insulation ripped out of building walls. “We still have a lot of power lines down, there are a lot of areas that are unsafe,” Golden said. Residents were asked to stay at home while first responders evaluated the situation. “We know there’s extensive damage throughout the community, so we need to take care of families who are desperately in need of help,” Clarksville Mayor Joe Pitts said in the video. (CBS)

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