Residents escape injury in Fairview tornado
FAIRVIEW — At least seven homes sustained damage but all occupants escaped injury in a tornado that touched down here Friday evening.
The storm, which came late in a day of severe weather, struck at around 6 p.m. Friday evening. The National Weather Service had issued a tornado warning for the storm — which had earlier produced a reported tornado in Allardt.
The funnel cloud first touched down near Baker Highway, leaving damage along Jeffers Road, Creekwood Lane, Fairview Road and Nelson Lane.
“The fury of that thing was awesome,” said Lonnie Russell, a retired school teacher who resides on Creekwood Lane, just off Jeffers Road. Russell’s home sustained significant damage, as did the nearby home of his daughter and son-in-law.
The tornado was initially reported by a Scott County Sheriff’s Department deputy patrolling in the area. Other law enforcement units, the East 63 Fire Department, Paint Rock Fire Department and Scott County Rescue Squad were all dispatched to the area, along with the Scott County Road Department and Plateau Electric Cooperative. The Scott County Emergency Management Agency coordinated the response effort from a command center at Straight Fork Baptist Church.
As Road Department crews cut through downed trees, emergency personnel were able to ascertain that no persons in the path of the storm had been injured. The efforts quickly turned to clean-up, as roads were cleared and homes sustaining roof damage were temporarily patched to prevent additional water damage. PEC crews were able to restore power to many of the more than 2,000 customers left without electricity by late Friday evening, though some in the hardest-hit areas remained without power until Saturday.
Russell — who said he sent his family to the basement but “cheated” by looking at the window and seeing the funnel cloud coming in from the west before heading for the basement himself — said he did not actually hear the tornado approaching until the funnel cloud was almost onto his property. After the storm had passed, the family left the basement to survey the damage.
“Everything that had been in front of the house was now in back of the house, and everything that was at the back of the house was in front of the house,” he said. “It just twisted everything around.”
Among the damage was a wrap-around porch ripped off the home, shingles pulled from the roof and an outbuilding ripped from its foundation and moved a short distance away, where it was still sitting upright, but without its roof.
“Both the porch and the building were anchored well,” Russell said. “I didn’t think anything would take that building down.”
A number of trees were downed as well (including a 50-year-old walnut tree that Russell said he remembered planting as a child). Matt Lewis, Russell’s son-in-law, said another large tree had fallen onto a dog house near the side of the house, where he had to dig through limbs and debris to find his dog . . . which was alive and well.
A storm team from the NWS’s Morristown office surveyed the area Saturday afternoon, confirming the tornado and classifying it as an EF2 on the NWS’s Enhanced Fujita tornado intensity scale, which ranks tornadoes from zero to five based on wind speeds.
The EF2 classification made the tornado the strongest to touch down in Scott County since April 3, 1974, when a pair of F3 tornadoes injured 26 people in Scott County during the infamous “super outbreak” that spawned 148 tornadoes and killed 319 people in the eastern U.S., including 26 in Tennessee.
According to the NWS’s storm survey, the tornado initially touched down as an EF1 tornado, with a width of 100 yards and maximum winds of 90 mph. A short distance later, however, the tornado had doubled in width to 200 yards and had winds of 135 mph, making it an EF2 storm.
The damage might have been much worse had the tornado not touched down in a sparsely populated area. According to the NWS, the tornado was on the ground for 4.2 miles before dissipating at the base of Gray Mountain.
The tornado was the first to touch down in Scott County since Nov. 10, 2002, when a pair of F1 tornadoes were confirmed, including one that touched down in the same area as Saturday’s storm.
The day had begun with Scott County Schools opting to delay the start of classes by one hour after the NWS had issued severe thunderstorm warnings for the entire county.
More coverage in this week's print edition: Long-lived supercell spawned at least five tornadoes, including the one in Scott County, and a quick look at Scott County tornadoes since 1950.