I just got back (Saturday evening) from TN. It was really bad there. First night, tornadoes were everywhere. (I was in Camden, for training). We went out to eat and tried to make a quick stop at the town's 24hr Walmart. We rolled-up and there was a man out front w/ a wx radio. He told us the store was closed. We protested: "hey, aint this a 24hr Walmart?" His reply was: "Yeah, but there is a tornado comin', so we closed the store..."
We decided to continue on to get food (we had been on the road all day and were really hungry). We go down the road a piece and then all of a sudden, the town's Emergency Sirens start sounding. We hurredly scrambled to find a news station on the car radio (on a Sunday night in rural TN, this is no easy feat). We know what county we were in, but, we did not know the adjacent county names. The GPS did not have that info either. We rolled up to a Pizza Hut and it was just starting to rain. We entered the store and asked if it was still open, we were told yes it was. I then asked if they had a TV or radio. They said no. I asked if they knew about the wx in the area. They said that if something bad were on it's way, a family member of one of the employee's would call on the phone. They went on to say that they had a designated safe area in-case of a storm.
We decided to dine....about 10 minutes into our stay, the wind and lightning activity really picked-up and the the rain began to come down heavily. A moment or two later, the hail began. It was first the pea-sized stuff and then quickly went to golf ball-sized. After about a minute or two, there was larger (tennis ball sized) hail mixed in with the smaller hail. At this point, I got up from the table and moved away from the windows. My buddy (he lives in NH) starts moving closer to the windows. I am asking him what is up with that! He said that it never storms like this in NH, so he wanted to get a good look at it.
After about 10 minutes, everything dies down and we continue to eat. Later, we leave and drive thru town. A lot of the trees that had leaves on them were stripped. Some cars had broken/cracked windows.
We later find out that a F0/F1tornado passed a few miles away from where we were. That night, TN had many people killed.
That bad thing was that it happened again the following Friday. As we watched the news early that morning, some of the county school systems were scheduling early dismissal for that afternoon in anticipation of the bad wx. Sure enough, that afternoon, tornadic supercells rolled thru. Our last excercise on the range was done not too long before a bad cell came thru.