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EF0 tornado in Putnam County, Tennessee

Tornado March 3, 2020 · Putnam County, Tennessee

EF0
Rating
0.2 mi
Path length
25 yd
Path width
$5K
Damage as recorded
EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 25 yards (0.01 mi) — zoom in and the swath grows to true scale. Other tornadoes recorded nearby that day are shown faint.

What EF0 means. On the Enhanced Fujita scale, EF0 is light damage: shingles and siding peeled, gutters torn, branches broken, consistent with estimated gusts of 65–85 mph. The rating comes from a survey of the worst damage after the storm, not from a wind measurement, so it says as much about what the tornado hit as about how strong it was.

What the National Weather Service wrote

A very brief and weak EF-0 tornado touched down just off of Highway 70 and Overstreet Drive southeast of Cookeville in the Goffton area. Damage was mostly to the roof of one house, a metal garage, and an outbuilding. There were also several trees with large branches broken off.

The wider storm

From the late evening hours on March 2 into the early morning hours on March 3, supercell thunderstorms developed and spawned tornadoes across southeast Missouri, southern Kentucky, Tennessee, and central Alabama. One of these supercells formed near the Mississippi River in west Tennessee, then tracked eastward across the entire length of the state just north of the Interstate 40 corridor, spawning 10 tornadoes and dropping large hail bigger than the size of baseballs. Seven of these tornadoes touched down across Middle Tennessee, resulting in widespread damage, 307 injuries and 24 fatalities. An additional fatality and 2 more injuries occurred in Benton County in west Tennessee. These tornadoes were the worst seen in Tennessee since the devastating tornadoes of April 27, 2011 across east Tennessee, as well as the Super Tuesday tornadoes of February 5-6, 2008. Total damage estimates from the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency across Middle Tennessee reached $1.6 billion.

Began near Caney Fork (36.1075, -85.4461).

Other tornadoes from the same storm system

6 more tornadoes the National Weather Service filed under this storm episode.

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 883034. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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