(CNN) — When Meg Selby and her fiancé emerged from their storm cellar, they found their first home mostly destroyed after a tornado ripped through Tennessee.
Most of the roof of their Donelson home had been ripped off, the windows were blown out and their belongings had been tossed everywhere.
“It kind of just feels like it’s all been taken from you,” Selby said. “To not really have anything to show for it now is hard, and I, retrospectively, wish I had more pictures.”
A day after the state’s deadliest tornado day in seven years, the couple and hundreds of people across the state are assessing the damage and trying to locate four people who are still unaccounted for in Putnam County.
Twenty-four people were killed and hundreds of buildings were destroyed hours before dawn on Tuesday when storms slammed across the state.
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Survey teams reported damage caused by an EF-3 tornado in East Nashville, Donelson and in Mt. Juliet, about 20 miles east of Nashville, though it’s unclear how many tornadoes touched down, said the National Weather Service, which is still surveying the damage.
The weather service has not finalized its assessment in Cookeville but said the damage was caused by at least an EF-3 tornado.
Selby and her fiance, Mac Warren, were sleeping when the storm alarms on their phones awoke them early Tuesday. They heard tornado sirens outside, so they corralled their dogs and headed to their storm cellar.
The couple, whose wedding is set for March 28 and who had just bought their home in September, thought the storm would pass, but the local meteorologist warned the twister was headed their way.
“Listening to her talk about the path … the tornado was on, it went from being kind of a precautionary thing to living through something very catastrophic,” Selby told CNN.
Added Warren, “It got quiet, and you could hear this sort of slow roar, and it just got gradually louder and louder.”
The house started shaking, he said. The temperature dropped. The pressure intensified and his ears popped, he said.
“It was terrifying,” he said.
Their wedding venue seems OK, Warren said, so the nuptials will go on as planned, but the couple say they are canceling their honeymoon to Hawaii to focus on making sure they have somewhere to live.
Where the damage stands
Officials in Putnam County, which suffered extensive damage, went door to door Tuesday and through the night into Wednesday searching 150 standing structures and hoping to find survivors in a subdivision devastated by at least one tornado.
Around 9 a.m. (10 a.m. ET) Wednesday, no additional bodies were found in Putnam, according to county Mayor Randy Porter. Davidson County officials also reported finding no more bodies.
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Of the 18 deaths in his county, five were children younger than 13, Porter said. Another 88 people were injured, the mayor said.
All the victims in Putnam were identified Wednesday, though officials don’t yet have the ages of every victim. The deceased range from a child between 2 and 3 years old to a 67-year-old woman, the county said.
Kyndel Morgan, 11, lost a classmate in the storm, she told CNN, and two friends are hospitalized. She woke up about 2 a.m. Tuesday and joined her family in rushing to their basement, the girl said.
“We weren’t even in the basement for a few seconds and the lights just started flickering and it started hailing,” she said, speaking amid Cookeville’s destruction Wednesday morning. “I was just scared. I was tired and stuff, so I didn’t really know what to do. … I’m just praying for my friends and stuff, and their safety.”
Besides Putnam, there were three deaths in Wilson County, two in Davidson County and one in Benton County, the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency reported. The Davidson County deaths came in East Nashville, where a 36-year-old employee of the Attaboy cocktail bar had just left work with his girlfriend, 33, and they were fatally struck by debris early Tuesday, Metro Nashville Police Chief Steve Anderson said.
Power out for thousands, schools closed
In East Nashville, residents had only a six-minute warning to get to safety, according to Davidson County.
“I got the warning, and in less than 10 minutes you could just feel the pressure, my ears were popping we all ran downstairs and just huddled together,” Danielle Theophile told CNN affiliate WSMV. “It went by so fast.”
Tuesday was the deadliest tornado day since May 6, 2013, when a tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma, according to the weather service.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many tornadoes struck the region, but tornadoes were reported several times along a 145-mile stretch of Middle Tennessee — from Camden, about 80 miles west of Nashville, to the Cookeville area, about 80 miles east of Music City, the weather service said.
About 40,000 customers were without power early Wednesday, most of them in Davidson and Wilson counties, TEMA said. Crews were having trouble getting to the affected areas because of downed power lines.
Classes and all activities at Metro Nashville Public Schools were canceled Wednesday and the schools will remain closed for the rest of the week, the district said.
More than a dozen schools don’t have power, the district said.
“Nashvillians have experienced a traumatic event and we know it will take time to heal,” said Adrienne Battle, the school district’s interim director. “Closing the rest of the week will allow time for that healing process, allow our staff and students to volunteer in the community, and give our district a chance to prepare our facilities for normal operation starting on Monday.”
One school will require a few days of repairs; another, up to several weeks, the district had said.
The Volunteer State
Those suffering from the damage aren’t doing so alone; strangers and neighbors have come together to help each other out.
“We’re called the Volunteer State, and there’s a reason for that — because Tennesseans have a real spirit of generosity and service to one another,” Lee told reporters. “As governor, now I get to see it happen for real.”
Theophile said both her home and her neighbor’s home lost their roofs, and her neighbors, an elderly couple, had their roof collapse on them, she said. She worked to dig them out.
Michelle Whitten was sleeping when a friend called her to say that she and her three children were in the tornado’s path. She grabbed her children and rushed to a closet, she said.
“As soon as we did that, we hear the wind howling as it’s over the house and hear something like a train over us. The house started to shake, and windows shattered. We could hear … loud boom sounds,” she told CNN. “I’ve never been so scared in my life!”
In East Nashville, a neighbor came to help board up a large window at a Crye-Leike Realtors office that was blown out.
“That’s just how East Nashville is. That’s one of the reasons we like selling over here and living over here,” said a broker with the office.
The storms fell on Super Tuesday, and many of the polling locations were in the storm’s path, which required some precincts to extend voting hours. President Donald Trump will visit Nashville to tour the damage Friday, and the federal government will be assisting in recovery efforts, the White House said.
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