Sask. man recounts deadly Nashville tornado

“We don’t have basements here at all. My wife’s uncle kind of said, ‘If you want to make a basement here, you’d be using dynamite,’ ” Sorestad said.

“If you can imagine in a city this big with most places not having basements. I grew up knowing you go to your basement, find a place with no windows and seek shelter. But what does that look like in a town like this?”

From what he has seen so far, “the pictures and videos coming from the news, it looks horrible. There are houses that are absolutely just shredded and ripped apart.”

Sorestad has lived in Nashville for the past seven years; he said Nashville is similar to his childhood home.

“It reminds me so much of home, of Saskatchewan, that you just do what needs to get done,” he said. “People just come together, and it’s extremely resilient.”

And the feel is like a small town, he said.

“You feel like you should be able to reach across and shake hands with your neighbour,” he said. “So I would say that this community will rebuild.”

He was up late Monday night into Tuesday morning when the storm rolled in.

“(It was) a pretty eerie feeling having tornado sirens going off, especially after midnight,” he said.

“I was able to turn on the news and of course everyone had it turned on … Fortunately for me, I was up late and I knew that the storm was coming in. The one thing they do really well here is they track storms.”

— With files from 980 CJME’s Adriana Christianson

by CKOM

Sask. man recounts deadly Nashville tornado

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