Annakate Ross stands in her front yard about nine hours after the March 3 tornado ripped off the side of her Holly Street home in East Nashville. Her husband Andrew stacks books against the wall — or where a wall should have been, anyway. From the side yard, you can see the neighbor’s garage apartment, which has been knocked off of its foundation. The force of the storm threw their neighbor Thomas into the Rosses’ backyard and sent him scrambling through their battered back porch for safety.
Only minutes before the tornado struck, the couple grabbed their two daughters and headed downstairs in a rush, barely making it into a kitchen closet for safety as the imploding windows blew glass into the room and a living room wall was sheared off.
When the tornado sirens went off, the couple did what they always do — they checked their favorite Twitter feed to see if the warnings were real, or if it was just another countywide blast that wouldn’t affect them.
“@NashSevereWx saved our lives,” Annakate says. “We saw a video clip on their feed and a warning to take shelter.”
Will Minkoff, 41, is one of the three guys on the other side of that Twitter account, along with David Drobny, 44, and Andrew Leeper, 36. Minkoff is somewhat uncomfortable with the stories from Ross and others, which have filled their replies in the week following the storm. The always-amiable Drobny didn’t want to talk on the record about being called a “hero,” a term all three have shunned. It’s fair to say they have had a hard time processing the admiration shown to them.
“I guess what I’d say is I’m happy we were able to serve our community,” Minkoff says. “I’m happy that people listened to what we said, and that we were regarded as a valid source of information. And if they want to keep praise on us, I will deflect as much of that as I can to the [National] Weather Service, because nothing we do would be possible without those people dedicating themselves to a life of public service. These are top-notch scientists, experts in their field. And they’re the ones that are doing the science and the math and the physics that make what we do possible. We’re just a vessel to communicate that information.”
With almost 175,000 Twitter followers, @NashSevereWX has an enormous footprint in Davidson and Williamson, the two counties that the account covers. The crew is just as likely to post a funny GIF as a radar image, and most of their followers take notice when the feed turns serious. Ross and several other Holly Street residents told the Scene that when words like “confirmed” or “serious” started popping into tweets, they knew to take cover and pay attention.
Minkoff says that’s intentional.
“We start choosing words on Twitter like ‘confirmed,’ like ‘significant’ — we start using words that mirror the words that are in the tornado warning,” he says. “Then we start calling out waypoints or landmarks on a map.”
It’s something the group practices for, even running through simulations of older storms, including the 1998 tornado that ripped up East Nashville. Just a few hours before last week’s tornadoes spun up in Davidson and the surrounding counties, Drobny had been jokingly comparing weather models to contestants on The Bachelor. According to the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., the storm system didn’t have a ton of potential when the agency’s “convective outlook” was issued. The SPC gave it only a 2 percent chance of producing a tornado or large hail.
But after 11 p.m., Drobny noticed a supercell developing west of Nashville near Waverly. He messaged Minkoff and Leeper to get ready to go. Drobny takes the lead on the Twitter feed in situations like these, while Minkoff backs him up reading models and communicating with the National Weather Service. Leeper is the broadcaster on the trio’s YouTube Live feed. At 11:27, the Storm Prediction Center’s probability for an EF2-plus tornado jumped to 20 percent. By this time, they were monitoring the #tSpotter hashtag for evidence of the storm posted by anyone in its path.
“We call it ground truth,” Minkoff says. “Their radar can only see down so low. And everything between the bottom of that radar beam and the ground is an assumption for [the National Weather Service] unless they can get a report.” What was showing up was troubling — large hail that would be much more at home in the plains states than Tennessee.
As the supercell tracked east, the tweets became more serious: “Storm passing near Waverly, ETA to west Nashville 12:15 AM, downtown/East Nashville 12:30 AM, has a hook signature where a tornado is possible.” The storm sped along as the crew passed on NWS warnings, ways to stay safe during a tornado and radar imagery.
By 12:45, the feed was using all-caps.
“This is a confirmed tornado in Metro Nashville. It’s in East Nashville now that passed Five Pts moving east into East Nashville. Shelby Bottoms, East Nashville, Briley Parkway, Hermitage, take cover now. This is a LEGIT TORNADO. TAKE COVER IMMEDIATELY.”
The crew followed the cyclone’s path into Wilson County before looking back to track the rain and lightning, which followed the tornado across Davidson County. At the height of the YouTube feed, almost 10,000 people were watching, while thousands more liked and retweeted the Twitter dispatches. By 5 a.m., with the weather clear, Drobny and Leeper crashed into sleep while the cleanup began across the county. A bleary Minkoff took his kids to school.
“I had a guy get out of his car in the [dropoff] line,” Minkoff says. “He walked up to my car, tapped on the window, and I rolled it down. The guy leaned into my window to give me a handshake and a heart-to-heart that we were incredible last night.” Minkoff relays the story not as a boast. He’s a little sheepish telling it, but does so after a question about the reaction the group received.
“That’s just not really what we’re in it for,” he says.
Drobny calls the Scene on Friday afternoon as he’s walking through East Nashville, surveying the aftermath to understand the impact of the tornado. He wanted to know what could be done to give people more warning. He wanted to understand how the couple had been killed outside Attaboy.
And he wanted to know what they could do better next time.
