MOUNT JULIET, TN (WSMV) - If there’s a neighbor that you want banging on your door in the middle of the night, it’s Lee Shand.
“I had to alert these people that they were in danger,” Shand said.
Shand calls himself a ‘Weather Geek.” It’s his love for Mother Nature that jolted him awake when a tornado alert on his phone app went off.
“We both hopped out of bed, went downstairs. Turned the TV on. And it was all over the TV that there was a tornado that started in the Nashville area," Shand said.
Shand made a split second decision -- one that could’ve cost him his life if the tornado decided to make a different turn.
“My neighbor across the Street, Arlo, has a little baby... Pretty much everyone apart from us has little kids. So I had to do something,” Shand said.
With Shand’s wife screaming at him to get back inside, video from Shand’s neighbor Arlo Daunhauer shows that he did the opposite.
"By the time I finished knocking on my second neighbor’s door, Arlo was at his front door -- ‘Dude! Why are you waking me up!’ I told him there was a tornado coming and he needed to take cover."
Shand and Daunhauer alerted other neighbors before running for safety.
“As soon as I shut the door behind me, the power went off, the lights went off. And we felt a draft under the door... We felt and heard what sounded like an airplane taking off,” Shand said.
