At Least 25 People Dead After Storms Cut a Path Across Tennessee

Officials said the full extent of the storm’s wrath remained impossible to grasp, as the death toll climbed and an untold number of people were unaccounted for as of Tuesday morning. At least 16 fatalities were reported in Putnam County, roughly 80 miles east of Nashville, and deaths were also reported in Davidson, Benton and Wilson counties.

The tornadoes cut a path through the middle of Tennessee in the early morning hours on Tuesday. A line of severe storms moved through the region starting on Monday, and late in the day, the National Weather Service urged people to take cover as forecasters warned of severe thunderstorms and the potential for tornadoes.

President Donald Trump said that he would visit the Nashville area on Friday, adding that he was working with state officials and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was already on the ground.

“Our hearts are full of sorrow for the lives that were lost,” he said, speaking at a conference for the National Association of Counties in Washington. “It’s a vicious thing, those tornadoes.”

In Nashville alone, the authorities reported that at least 48 structures had either partially or completely collapsed. “It is a massive act of nature,” John Cooper, Nashville’s mayor, said at a briefing on Tuesday morning.

Officials warned that the number of confirmed fatalities could rise, as officials were still working to get a handle on the reach of the devastation and emergency workers continued to search through the rubble of damaged buildings. Police officers were going house to house in some areas, and road crews were clearing streets and dangerous electrical debris.

“It’s not looking good right now. We still have several people missing, a lot of loved ones calling in wanting us to locate their family,” Sheriff Eddie Farris of Putnam County told a local news station, WKRN. “We certainly hope that number doesn’t go up, but it’s not looking real promising at this point.”

In Nashville, fire officials said that more than 400 emergency calls had been made in the hours since the tornado touched down. Much of the damage in the city was concentrated in the Germantown neighborhood, which is north of downtown, and in East Nashville, including considerable devastation in the popular Five Points area. Photographs and videos spread on social media showing buildings that had been shredded and streets strewn with debris.

Residents reported homes with roofs that had been stripped off and windows that had been blown out. The John C. Tune Airport, six miles west of downtown, sustained significant damage, with several hangars destroyed and power lines down, but none was reported at Nashville International Airport.

On one local television newscast, an anchor showed viewers side-by-side photographs of streets lined with popular restaurants, hangouts and murals alongside the rubble that had taken their place.

At the briefing on Tuesday, Cooper pointed out one auto parts store that had been decimated, which he saw as a sign of the tornado’s raw strength. “There was no stopping that,” he told reporters. “That just came out of the sky.”

Mandye Green, 29, and her 12-year-old niece were wandering the hilly streets of Double Springs Community, about an hour’s drive east of Nashville, among upended cars, massive uprooted trees and houses set down in splinters.

They were looking for Green’s grandparents’ house, a place they knew well. It felt strange to be lost. “This is not really recognizable,” Green said. “No landmarks.”

Eventually, they found the house, white with black shutters and half the roof torn off. Green’s grandmother Jean Gregory, 73, came around. She had lived in the little house with her husband for 30 years, maybe 40. She said he got a call from a family member at 2 a.m. who told him to switch on the TV. Someone on TV told him the storm was coming. “But they didn’t give no pinpoint,” she recalled. “At that point the electricity went out.”

She had been asleep. Her husband pulled her to the floor and lay on top of her — six, seven, maybe 10 minutes. “It just shook the house,” she said. “They said it moved off the foundation.”

They spent the rest of the night sitting in the cab of their pickup truck, scared and worried.

The police in Mount Juliet, an eastern suburb of Nashville, said on Twitter that several people in the city had been injured and several residences had been destroyed, and they urged residents to stay home.

In Benton County, about 100 miles west of Nashville, at least three fatalities had been reported and officials were out assessing the toll. “Power lines and roads down and of course electric was out but much of that cleared and restored very timely,” Brett Lashlee, the county’s mayor, said in an email. “More to come as we tour areas.”

Officials urged residents to stay home if they could, noting the dangers posed by debris and downed electrical lines. Schools in Nashville and elsewhere were closed on Tuesday. Nashville Electric Service is currently working to restore power to more than 47,000 customers.

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Pat Isbey and his wife had just a few seconds before everything imploded.

“I was watching it out the window, and the front window implodes, and I realized it was getting bad real quick,” said Isbey, who co-owns Various Artists brewery and restaurant. His East Nashville home on Holly Street was built in 1893 and is just a few steps away from bars in the popular Five Points area.

“It sounded like the typical train,” he said. “I saw people running from the bars to their cars.”

Isbey and his wife headed for their basement, but the entrance was blocked by “something heavy.”

“So we grabbed our 8-year-old son and covered him in blankets,” he said. “We tried to get to the center of the house, but stuff was just coming in.”

He then tallied the damage: “I lost three out of four chimneys. Almost all of the windows are broken out, including storm windows and interior. The back porch is pulled off the house. Two trees are downed in my backyard. Both cars are damaged, one of them totaled. That’s a lot to happen in less than 40 seconds.”

Nearby, Annakate and Andrew Ross were on the upper floor of their home when they heard the tornado’s approach. As they scrambled downstairs with their daughters to a crawl space, the tremendous wind ripped off a side of their house. A neighbor’s garage apartment was knocked off its foundation, throwing the resident into the Rosses’ backyard, where the man scrambled through what remained of their back porch and into their home.

The tornado left some of its biggest messes and heartache in North Nashville and into nearby Germantown, a neighborhood of quaint cottages established in the 1850s by European immigrants. Old storefronts had been ripped apart, with big red spilling piles of bricks in heaps. A second-floor kitchen in an apartment over a storefront was exposed to the blue sky Tuesday morning, with dusty wine bottles visible near a stainless steel stove. Felled trees and snapped power poles were everywhere.

The rebuilding work had begun early in the morning. Crews and volunteers cleared debris and handed out water. Trucks carrying workers arrived. The whine of chain saws was everywhere.

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The tornado complicated many voters’ plans on Super Tuesday.

“I’ve been waiting in line an hour and a half,” said Michele Phelps, whose normal polling place at 15th Avenue Baptist Church was closed. And because of downed power lines and trees — and an influx of traffic from gawkers — it took her that long just to get to the Davidson County Election Commission’s offices in SoBro, which were functioning as a countywide polling place.

Other voters waiting in line shared similar challenges. Alena Teller had visited four other precincts to find one that was open or could help her, but she remained excited to vote in the presidential primary.

“I really want to vote,” Teller said. “It’s my civic duty.”

Tennessee was one of 14 states voting on Super Tuesday. Early in the morning, Tennessee’s secretary of state, Tre Hargett, said on Twitter that he was “working with election officials around the state to ensure polls in affected counties are open for the required 10 hours today.”

In East Nashville, six polling locations were consolidated into one at Cleveland Park Community Center, creating long lines. Councilman Sean Parker, who had planned to spend the day campaigning for Bernie Sanders, said it took a few hours to get equipment to the site.

“This is a very contentious and engaging election, so we’ve got great turnout, which is awesome,” Parker said. “But because of the limited amount of equipment, we’ve got people waiting for an hour, two hours.”

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Inside, Ian McEwen found his normal polling place moved from a smaller room into the gymnasium. It was packed with a couple of hundred voters, snaking their way through the line. “Usually, when I vote here, there might be six people,” McEwen said.

The crowds turned the un-air-conditioned gym into a bit of a sauna on a 65-degree day, but Roark Brown, a poll worker, said the intimidating size of the lines was more of a deterrent.

“A lot of people come and look inside and see this line and turn around,” Brown said. “With everything else that’s going on outside with the weather, frustrations kick in real quick.”

Videos and photos on social media showed the power of the storms. They were shared on social media by stunned residents, weather forecasters and local news reporters.

Sam Shamburger, the lead forecaster at National Weather Service Nashville, shared a video of the tornado passing near the downtown area, stirring up debris amid bursts of lightning.

After sunrise, the scale of the tornado’s devastation became clearer, and the police shared aerial pictures of homes and businesses utterly demolished by the storm.

The John C. Tune Airport had debris scattered on the runways and surrounding fields. The former Tennessee State Prison, a 122-year-old building that is no longer used to incarcerate people and was a filming location for “The Green Mile,” was also damaged.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .