Epiphany Mama: The tornado that crossed the road

This is a photo of the tornado that crossed the road and prevented my visit to the doctor on Friday, April 10.

What we saw did not look that big. That part of it was up in the clouds, swirling.

We left our house in Rockvale a little after noon that day. We planned on dropping Quincy at my parent's and heading to the doctor. That^^^^ threw a wrench in our plans.

As we travelled up Memorial Blvd., which is one of the main roads in Murfreesboro, we noticed that it was raining kind of hard and traffic was bad. It did not seem like a big deal so we kept on going. We passed over Northfield and began to approach the road to my parent's house, when I began to notice cars turning around in driveways and making u-turn's and stuff. I commented that the sky actually looked green over the subdivision that is behind my parent's. Weird.

About that time, all the cars in front of us stopped. WE did, too. In front of us, not more than three car lengths ahead, a very small tornado crossed the road. We saw it drop garbage, but it did not seem to do any damage. My husband later remarked that it did not stop at the red light. Ha!

Traffic got going again and we turned onto Irongate, which is where my parents live. We noticed that the power was out. When we got to the house, my mom said that she had heard a loud noise after the power went out but did not know what it was. She had also forgotten to replace the batteries in the weather radio. My father was out driving around with my sister. It turns out that he was just a few blocks from where that picture at the top of the page was taken. My other sister was home and saw this picture below on her tv before she hid.

Once the storm had passed, my sister tried to call my mom, but all the phones lines were jammed. It took us a while to get my dad on the cell phone. He was on the way home and fine. He turned right on Broad Street. If he had turned left, he would have been driving into the path of the tornado.

Meanwhile, we're sitting at the house and don't know what has happened. After my dad and sister got home, we decided to drive up and see if anything had power on the main road. It did not. So my husband and I drove back along a different route. We went up Haynes Drive toward my parent's house. We had heard a lot of sirens and wondered why. We saw police blocking the road. We had to turn left. Right before we turned, I pointed out the power lines that were on the ground on Haynes. The poles were snapped in half and touching the ground. The police had Sulphur Springs blocked off also. My parents live at the corner of the two roads.

It took driving back to our house, where there was power, to realize what had really happened.

To put it into perspective, this is near the corner of Haynes Drive and Sulphur Springs Road, literally 1/2 mile from my parent's house.