To read about F's and my London trip, start here and click "newer post" to continue the story.

Friday, April 07, 2006



Colorful, huh. I think all this mess is going to slip past Memphis but Mississippi is taking a beating right now. Counties to the east of us were hit earlier today and at least two people are reported to have died in the storms. I hope the folks in Fayette County and points east and north have battened down, because here they come again.

edit 4/8/06 Eleven people died in Tennessee from the tornadoes yesterday. That brings the total to 36 since Sunday.

2 comments:

change destiny said...

Ouch , that's really bad .

Laura(southernxyl) said...

From the local paper:

Standing before the abandoned foundation of the home that had belonged to Brad and Tanya Taylor, near the community of Skullbone outside of Bradford, I could not help wondering if they had been watching the weather on TV, too. Maybe their boys, 5-year-old Tyce and 3-year-old Kyle, were hearing bedtime stories or taking a bath when their parents faced a decision.

Go to a closet? Crouch in the bathtub? Flee?

As Brad's father, Larry Taylor, said the following day, it would not have mattered what they did with the powerful tornado coming right at them. The tornado slammed into their big house with such force that pieces of it and all its contents lay scattered on a ridge 50 yards behind the foundation.

"They say go get in the bathtub, but it don't matter," said Larry, who owns the town's funeral home on Main Street. "A tornado hits you head on, you can kiss it goodnight. You are gone."

...

Gene Fisher pulled his wife into the bathroom, just before the tornado swiped the front side of their house clean.

A cousin of Brad Taylor, Tammy Austin, recounted how difficult it was to locate everyone after the storm hit. She and her daughter, Ashley, spent much of Monday in the woods behind the Taylor house, sifting through the disintegration.

She knew it might just as easily have been Brad sifting through the debris at her house.

"I will never forget that sound as long as I live," she said. "I thought it was over."

On Tuesday, in and around the Millsfield area, where the path of tornadoes seemed to begin in Tennessee, the Wilson family tried to find some humor in their situation.

Their house and everything in it had been blown across the road and shoved onto the side of a ridge, and yet they had stuck a FOR SALE sign to a wooden post at the front of their driveway, near where an aluminum fishing boat was folded from an overhead power line.

"CHEAP" someone had scrawled into the white area reserved for an asking price.