KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The signs of a late summer storm that devastated a Knox County community are still visible. A house off Kingston Pike still has a roof resting on top of it around two months later. Neighbors said it flew there when the tornado hit the area.
In Farragut, there are still trees broken in half and patches on roofs. Doug Carr, the head of Paideia Academy in Farragut, said the tornado arrived on Aug. 7 like an unexpected guest.
"I was having lunch and the office started talking about a tornado watch, and a thunderstorm warning. And about an hour later, it got very dark and gray," Carr said. "We had wilderness up on the road with trees and power lines down and lots of glass, lots of broken windshields."
Carr said things scattered all over the place.
"There were pieces of metal spirit into our soccer field," Carr said. "We had someone else's grill in our retention pond out front and lots of shingles."
It was a storm that left its mark, and that's why the National Weather Service said they're still studying it. Anthony Cavallucci, NWS Morristown Warning Coordination Meteorologist, explained that studying the severe weather patterns could help them prevent future events and be more accurate.
"We have been working with the staff in various weather event simulators to begin training, to see the different kinds of storm structures and tornadic development from that," Cavallucci said.
The most dangerous part of that storm, besides the strong winds and that rainfall being so heavy, was that nobody could see the tornado. The NWS relies on SKYWARN storm spotters, Cavallucci said.
"We're also evaluating, looking at maybe getting two pairs of eyes per each radar station," Cavallucci said. "That way people can bounce things off each other and talk about the storms as they're happening."
Padeia Academy said cleanup takes time, but they're grateful no one got hurt.
"We're still cleaning up the debris, that's out of the way from children, we are trying to put together a plan to have trees brought back to the campus and planted," Carr said. "I hope we never have another tornado, but if we do, I hope it went just like this one did. So everyone was safe. No one got hurt."