Six months later, it is impossible to ignore the physical and psychological scars left in the wake of the tornadoes that swept through the region on April 27. The loss of life was too high, the damage was too devastating, the suffering too widespread and the aftermath too stressful to do otherwise. There are many signs of recovery in the area, but the beating delivered to the region and its residents by numerous tornados that day is still too fresh to forget. Indeed, it is likely that those who lived through that stormy day will never forget it.
How could they? Forty-seven tornado tracks, moving from southwest to northeast crisscrossed, marched across Chattanooga and surrounding area that day. The twisters and associated storms directly or indirectly caused 81 deaths in the region, left many more injured and caused billions in damage. And that’s only part of the picture.
The storms here were part of a much larger system that spawned other twisters that killed and injured many more people and cause billions in additional property damage. It was, a senior forecaster for the National Weather Service, says, “the big event of our generation — it’s the big event of recorded history.”
That might seem, at first hearing, to be an exaggeration. Experts concur that it is not.
Meteorologists call the April 27 storms a super tornado outbreak, a completely appropriate description of a series of events that produced 345 tornados in a short period of time. The number was more than double the previous record outbreak which occurred in 1974. The result, as area residents know to their sorrow, was catastrophic.