NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — A lot of us say it; I can't believe this weather we're having in Tennessee!
Of course, this is something we get here. So, I spent the day in the NewsChannel 5 archive, partly to keep myself from having to be outside, and partly to pull a few dates of major winter weather events of Tennessee's past.
With that, a lot of us are going to think 1994. It was February. Schools were being let out. Earlier that same week, temperatures were in the 70s only for this to hit.
"I'm doing the moonwalk right now," said a man walking across the ice in 1994 before a tumble.
"People are trying to drive 50 and 60 on it like it's a sunny day, and they're losing control," a driver told NewsChannel 5. "It's just real bad!"
A lot of neighborhoods were buried under ice and limbs of trees.
"We just clean up a mess for these people," a worker said in 1994, surrounded by the sounds of chainsaws. "Get it out of their way!"
Restoring the power to homes was a major effort.
"Thousands of individual trees are on the line," an NES worker said in 1994.
Tennessee has plenty of other major winter weather days like a major snowstorm in January 1918.
January 21, 1985, gave us Nashville's coldest day on record, -17 degrees. February 1998 also had a snowstorm. On the advice of Lelan Statom, we tracked down January 2003.
As much snow as we had on Monday, January 15 of this year, Lelan said January 16 of 2003 actually had more. 7 inches of it. Some kids got stuck at school that day, waiting on parents to pick them up.
"Yeah, we all stranded," a student said in 2003. "I'm ready to go home!"
"This is my momma aka Wonder Woman right here," said another student whose mother had made it through bumper to bumper traffic.
"We've having a lot of wrecks on the interstate right now," said a police officer.
"Oh, bad!" said a man parked on the interstate in 2003. "Bad! Slow moving. Two miles an hour. The whole time! The road's a solid sheet of ice. It's crazy.
"We came from Birmingham, Alabama, and we're headed to Louisville, Kentucky, but we're not sure we're going to make it," a woman added.
Like all those other major winter weather years, 2024 will go into the archive.
Fostering Hope provides Christmas for kids in foster care. I'm delighted to see Fostering Hope expand this year to expand their reach to now include kids in Foster care in metro AND foster kids in East TN hard hit by Helene.
-Bree Smith
