Stories from the April 16, 1998 Tornado

We purchased our home (1504 Stratton Ave.) in December 1996, and my wife has a picture looking down Stratton toward Gallatin Road in the Fall of 1997, all the trees still there in full fall color and leaves on the street. It was beautiful.

My mother-in-law was staying with us at the time of the tornado and was at our house. On April 16, 1998, at approximately 3:30 p.m. I was at the MacAuthority store near the Wedgewood exit off I-65, as I was leaving the store I could see a cobalt blue/black mass (I'd say cloud but it really was just an undifferentiated mass) approach downtown Nashville, and being so dense it obliterated the skyscrapers. I was listening to WPLN when it went off the air, I then switched to WTN, and it too soon went off the air.

I took I-65 North, crossed the Silliman Evans Bridge over the Cumberland and noticed that the cranes working inside the Coliseum were down. I got off at Shelby, and traffic was already beginning to back up, but I was able to weave my way past downed trees, utility poles, and other debris to get to Woodland and 16th and that was as close as I could get by vehicle, so I parked there. Trees, power lines, and utility poles were down everywhere. Debris of various types, trees, shrubs, leaves, branches, insulation, siding, shingles, you name it were everywhere. At Forrest Ave. & 16th Street was a FedEx delivery truck, together with driver, right smack-dab in the middle of the intersection. He was trapped by either fallen trees or utility poles. He said he sat there the entire time and saw all of this take place, and that it was not 1 big tornado but a few small funnel clouds, that would snake down from the sky and reign destruction.

I finally made it our house and discovered that a hackberry tree behind our house had been sheared off at the top and had fallen across the power lines leading from the alley utility pole to our house, severing our power supply. The three circular attic vents had all been sucked off the roof never to be seen again. One of the pair of plum trees in our back yard had been ripped nearly out of the ground (roots remained in the ground). But the strangest sight was the sugar maple that we shared with our neighbor's drive.

This maple was right up against the curb that divided their driveway and had grown under it (but apparently no roots had grown under the driveway). When the tornado came it pushed this tree, like all the others on Stratton, toward Eastland (to the north) and 16th (to the east), but unlike nearly all the other sugar maples on Stratton, this one did not uproot. Rather, it came out from under the neighbor's curb (breaking the curb in the process) and then simply sat back down on their curb, where it remains to this day.

We were luckily that our damages were limited to some minor roof damage, the aforementioned damage to the electricity leading to the house, and our privacy fence being blown over. My mother-in-law was able to gather up the cat and go down into the root cellar until the tornado passed. Of course, we did not have power restored for about 2-weeks, and did not get cable of phone service back for a month.

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