26
Tornadoes confirmed since 1960
Guides · Field Guide 03
The sirens are not for you.
Twenty-six tornadoes have been confirmed in Williamson County since 1960, and seventeen of them arrived between dusk and dawn. The county's outdoor sirens were never built to wake anybody up. Here is the whole record, what the warnings actually mean, and the part most people get wrong about which storms kill people here.
Scroll the chart sideways to see the full 24 hours
17
Of them between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.
0
Ever recorded in June or July
1
Tornado death in 66 years
5
Deaths from wind and water
60
Outdoor sirens, none meant for indoors
01The 30-second version
Middle Tennessee gets tornadoes without having a tornado season, at least not the one people picture. Since 1960 the National Weather Service has confirmed 26 tornadoes inside Williamson County. Eleven of them came in December, January or February. Ten came in March, April or May. Not one has ever been recorded here in June or July.
The second pattern is the one that matters more. Seventeen of the 26 touched down between six in the evening and six in the morning. The F3 that stripped the roof off a Franklin condominium building arrived at 2:20 a.m. The county's worst tornado, an F4 on Christmas Eve 1988, came at 6:04 a.m., four minutes past that window and about fifty minutes before the sun came up. Night storms are the local norm, and they are the ones a siren cannot help with, because a siren is an outdoor device and you are asleep indoors.
The last pattern is the one that should change what you prepare for. One person in Williamson County has been killed by a tornado since 1960. Five more have been killed by other severe weather: four by thunderstorm winds, and one by a creek that came up over Peytonsville Road. The storm most likely to kill you here has no funnel in it.
If you read nothing else
Set up a way to be woken. Wireless Emergency Alerts on your phone, with the volume up and the phone not on Do Not Disturb, or a NOAA weather radio programmed to 047187. The sirens are for people who are outside.
02Watch, warning, and the one that means run
Three phrases carry almost all the information, and people mix up the first two constantly. The difference is area and certainty. A watch covers a lot of ground and says a tornado is possible. A warning covers a small polygon and says one is happening.
Tornado watch
Conditions are right.
Issued by the Storm Prediction Center, usually for a dozen counties at once and several hours ahead. Nothing has happened yet.
Fuel up, charge up, move the patio furniture, and decide now where you would go.
Tornado warning
One is happening.
Issued by the Nashville forecast office for a specific polygon, usually a slice of one or two counties, after radar or a spotter confirms rotation. Lead time is measured in minutes.
Go to your shelter now. Take your phone and your shoes.
Tornado emergency
The rare wording.
Reserved for a confirmed large and destructive tornado moving toward a populated area. It is not a separate product, it is language inside a warning, and it is used sparingly enough that you should treat it as the top of the scale.
Shelter immediately. Do not go look.
A severe thunderstorm warning sits below all three, and it is not the throwaway people treat it as. The threshold is 58 mph winds or hail an inch across, and four of the six severe-weather deaths in this county's record came from thunderstorm wind, not from tornadoes.
03How you will actually be told
Five channels reach Williamson County, and they are not interchangeable. Two of them work while you are asleep. The one everybody thinks of first is the one that will not.
01
Wireless Emergency Alerts
The loud one your phone makes on its own. Tornado warnings are included by default, no signup and no app, and the alert is targeted to the warning polygon. Check that Government Alerts are on, and know that Do Not Disturb or a silenced phone can suppress the sound on some handsets.
Works asleepif the volume is up
02
NOAA weather radio
The only channel that does not depend on a cell network, a power grid or a subscription. Program it with the SAME code for Williamson County, 047187, and tune the Nashville transmitter KIG79 on 162.550 MHz. Parts of the south county do better on Shelbyville's WXK63 at 162.475 MHz.
Works asleepand in an outage
03
Everbridge, the county system
Williamson County and the cities of Franklin, Brentwood, Spring Hill, Fairview, Nolensville and Thompson's Station all send through the same platform, by text, call, email or app. It takes one registration, and unlike the phone alerts it can tell you about things that are not weather. Sign up here.
Opt inone-time setup
04
The outdoor sirens
Sixty of them, mostly at schools and county facilities. The county activates only the sirens that fall inside the National Weather Service warning polygon, and adds more as the storm tracks, so hearing nothing does not mean nothing is happening two miles away. They are tested the first Saturday of each month at 1 p.m. The county says in its own words that they are not designed to be heard indoors.
Outdoors onlynot a home alarm
05
Nashville television and radio
Useful for watching a storm develop across the region, and the local meteorologists are often ahead of the formal product. As a warning channel it requires you to already be awake and already be watching.
Contextnot notification
The gap this leaves
Between midnight and 6 a.m. the county has recorded eight tornadoes. In that window, television is off, the sirens are outside, and Everbridge reaches whatever device you left face-down in another room. A phone with Government Alerts enabled and the ringer on, or a weather radio on the nightstand, is the entire system.
04Every tornado since 1960
This is the full National Weather Service record for Williamson County, newest first. Shaded rows are the significant tornadoes, F2 and above. Times in red touched down between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.
| Date and time | Scale | Touchdown | Path | Casualties | Damage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 30, 202510:08 p.m. | EF0 | 1.65 mi NW of Craigfield | 1.81 mi | — | $25K |
| Aug 12, 202310:47 a.m. | EF0 | 1.37 mi NE of Ewingville | 1.85 mi | — | $100K |
| May 9, 20216:38 p.m. | EF0 | 1.02 mi SSW of Rudderville | 0.78 mi | — | $5K |
| Sep 1, 20203:28 p.m. | EF0 | 2.14 mi WSW of Bending Chestnut | 2.8 mi | — | $5K |
| Feb 6, 20198:03 p.m. | EF0 | 2.24 mi WNW of New Hope | 0.27 mi | — | $5K |
| Mar 1, 20177:00 a.m. | EF1 | 1.08 mi S of Berrys Chapel | 10.48 mi | — | $7.27M |
| Apr 3, 20154:22 p.m. | EF0 | 0.54 mi SE of Kingfield | 5.6 mi | — | $20K |
| Jan 30, 20133:18 a.m. | EF0 | 0.57 mi NE of Ewingville | 2 mi | — | $100K |
| Jan 30, 20133:01 a.m. | EF0 | 1.63 mi NW of Bending Chestnut | 0.92 mi | — | $60K |
| Jan 30, 20133:41 a.m. | EF0 | 3.11 mi SSW of College Grove | 0.29 mi | — | $80K |
| Apr 26, 20126:00 p.m. | EF0 | 0.8 mi NNE of Franklin | 3.77 mi | 6 hurt | $75K |
| Feb 6, 20081:45 a.m. | EF0 | 2.26 mi S of Kingfield | 1.6 mi | — | — |
| Feb 5, 20088:46 p.m. | EF2 | 4.77 mi SW of Lampley Store | 19.98 mi | — | $0.25M |
| Nov 15, 20056:32 p.m. | F0 | 5 mi W of Thompsons Station | 0.1 mi | — | — |
| May 11, 20032:20 a.m. | F3 | 5 mi WNW of Franklin | 1 mi | 1 hurt | $2.2M |
| May 11, 20032:30 a.m. | F1 | 1 mi SW of Nolensville | 0.5 mi | — | — |
| May 5, 200312:38 a.m. | F1 | 6 mi SSW of Franklin | 4 mi | — | $3M |
| Oct 24, 20017:00 p.m. | F0 | Leipers Fork | 0.2 mi | — | — |
| Feb 25, 20011:20 a.m. | F0 | 6 mi NE of Franklin | 0.1 mi | — | — |
| Dec 24, 19886:04 a.m. | F4 | Location not recorded | 6 mi | 1 killed, 7 hurt | $25M |
| Feb 17, 19862:40 p.m. | F0 | Location not recorded | 0.7 mi | — | $250K |
| Aug 16, 19855:50 p.m. | F1 | Location not recorded | 1 mi | — | $2.5K |
| Feb 17, 197611:00 p.m. | F1 | Location not recorded | 12.3 mi | — | $250K |
| Apr 21, 19723:15 p.m. | F1 | Location not recorded | 1.5 mi | 3 hurt | $250K |
| May 26, 19683:40 p.m. | F1 | Location not recorded | 0.1 mi | — | — |
| Jan 10, 196311:59 p.m. | F3 | Location not recorded | 2.7 mi | — | — |
Scroll the table sideways for path, casualties and damage
Touched down 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Daylight hours
F2 or stronger
The three that did the damage
December 24, 1988, F4. The county's worst, and still the largest tornado event in Williamson County history. It formed before dawn on Christmas Eve and ran six miles from the Rebel Meadows area of Franklin into Brenthaven in Brentwood, killing one man and injuring seven. It destroyed 54 houses, 13 apartment units and 31 businesses, and flipped six airplanes parked at a private airstrip off Mallory Station Road. Ernest Rice Lane is named for the man who died.
May 11, 2003, F3. Touched down at 2:20 in the morning about five miles west-northwest of Franklin. Forty-three homes damaged and three destroyed. Twenty-eight units at the Executive House condominiums had to be evacuated after the roof came off, and crews spent Sunday cutting people out of houses on Big East Fork Road. An 84-year-old woman was pulled from a collapsed three-story home on Old Hillsboro Road with a fractured pelvis. A second tornado touched down near Nolensville ten minutes later.
February 5, 2008, EF2. The Super Tuesday outbreak, which struck the mid-state after the polls had closed. Nearly 20 miles on the ground, the longest track in the county record, through the Leiper's Fork area. One house collapsed on Cold Water Road.
The only other injuries in the record come from an EF0. On April 26, 2012 a weak tornado crossed Highway 96 at Founders Point Boulevard and went through Jim Warren Park, flipping vehicles and hurting six people, then damaged three mobile homes along Highway 246. A weak tornado is only weak in the rating.
05Two seasons, and one that does not exist
Ask anyone in Middle Tennessee when tornado season is and you will hear April. The county record says February, and it is not close. February alone accounts for six of the 26, more than any other month. Put December, January and February together and the cool season edges out spring, 11 to 10.
JAN
4
FEB
6
MAR
2
APR
3
MAY
5
JUN
0
JUL
0
AUG
2
SEP
1
OCT
1
NOV
1
DEC
1
Confirmed tornadoes by month, Williamson County, 1960 to 2026. Red bars are the December to February cool season.
The June and July blank is the most striking thing in the table. In 66 years of records, the county has never had a confirmed tornado in either month. Middle Tennessee summers are hot and unstable, but they lack the wind shear that organizes a thunderstorm into something that rotates. The summer threat here is lightning, flash flooding and straight-line wind, all of which the record has plenty of.
The practical version: the months when you are least likely to be thinking about severe weather, because it is cold and the trees are bare, are the months when this county is most likely to get a tornado. A December watch deserves the same response as an April one.
06The problem with night
Seventeen of 26 is 65 percent, and it is the single most useful number on this page. The Southeast is the worst region in the country for nocturnal tornadoes, and Williamson County sits inside that pattern. Eight of the county's tornadoes touched down between midnight and 6 a.m.
Night matters for reasons that have nothing to do with the storm itself. You cannot see it coming, so there are no spotter reports and no wall cloud on the horizon to make you act early. You are asleep, so the warning has to be loud enough to wake you. You are probably not dressed, and glass and debris are what hurt people afterward. Research on tornado fatalities has consistently found nighttime tornadoes to be substantially more deadly than daytime ones at the same intensity, and the reasons are all human ones.
Both of the county's serious historical tornadoes arrived in darkness. The 2003 F3 came at 2:20 a.m. The 1988 F4 is charted above as a daylight hour, which is a quirk of where the six o'clock line falls: it touched down at 6:04 on a December morning, roughly fifty minutes before sunrise, with most of the county asleep on Christmas Eve. Three of the four tornadoes on January 30, 2013 came down between 3:01 and 3:41 in the morning.
What this changes
A plan that depends on seeing the sky, hearing a siren, or watching the news is a daylight plan. Two-thirds of the time here, it is the wrong one. The overnight plan is one loud device you cannot sleep through, shoes by the bed, and a room already chosen.
07What has actually killed people here
Six people have been killed by severe weather in Williamson County in the period covered by the federal record. One of them was killed by a tornado, in 1988. The other five were killed by wind and water on ordinary storm days, and the pattern in those five is tight enough to plan around.
In June 2003 a tree fell on a minivan on Liberty Church Road, killing the 58-year-old woman driving it. In April 2011 a woman was struck in the head by a falling limb and died the next day. In May 2020 a tree fell on a man near Bethesda Road at Highway 431 who was outside with his daughter by a creek. In October 2022 a tree came down on a car on Old Natchez Trace northwest of Franklin, killing the 22-year-old woman at the wheel. And on the first day of the May 2010 flood, a man drove into Garrison Creek where it crosses Peytonsville Road.
Four of the five were killed by trees. Three of the five were in vehicles. None of the five was in a tornado, and none of those days carried a tornado warning at the time and place they died. This county is heavily wooded, the soil goes soft when it is saturated, and 58 mph is enough to bring down a mature hardwood onto a two-lane road.
The one behavior to change
Do not drive through a severe thunderstorm if you can wait twenty minutes, and never drive into water on a road. Turn Around, Don't Drown is a slogan because it keeps being necessary: the 2010 death here was a vehicle entering a flooded creek crossing in daylight.
The damage numbers tell a similar story in a different currency. Tornadoes account for the largest single share of recorded property damage in the county, about $39 million across 66 years, but flooding is second at roughly $12 million, and most of that came in two days in May 2010. Flash flooding is the hazard this county sees most often after wind and hail, and the Harpeth does not need a tornado to get into a house.
08Where to go, decided in advance
Most Williamson County houses have no basement. The rule that replaces one is simple: get as low as you can, as far inside as you can, and put as many walls between yourself and the sky as possible. Pick the room now, while nothing is happening, because the warning gives you minutes and an argument about which bathroom is not a plan.
Pick the room today
Lowest floor, interior, no windows. An interior bathroom, a closet under the stairs, or a center hallway with the doors shut. A bathtub is a decent hard-sided box; the plumbing wall behind it is the real reason. Count the walls between that room and the outside, and pick the room with the most.
Put shoes and a helmet in it
Head injury is the leading cause of death in tornadoes, and a bicycle or batting helmet is the cheapest protection available. Closed shoes matter for what comes after, when the floor is glass and nails. Keep both in the room, not in a closet you would have to cross the house to reach.
Leave the mobile home before the warning
A manufactured home is not shelter in a tornado or in straight-line wind, and the April 2012 EF0 damaged three of them along Highway 246. If you live in one, your shelter is a sturdy building you can reach in a few minutes, and the time to drive there is during the watch, not the warning.
If you are in the car, get out of the car
A vehicle is the worst place to be in this county's record. If a warning catches you driving and there is a sturdy building within reach, go inside it. Never stop under a highway overpass, which accelerates wind rather than blocking it. If there is nothing at all, a ditch or low ground away from your car and away from trees beats staying belted in.
Register the shelter you have
Williamson County keeps a storm shelter registry so responders know where to look for people after a collapse. If you have an installed safe room or storm cellar, add it. It costs a form and it tells someone with a saw where you are.
Keep the phone with you in the shelter, and keep it charged during a watch. After a hit, it is how you are found and how you find out whether the roads are open.
09How we know, and what the record cannot tell you
Every tornado, damage figure and casualty count on this page comes from the NOAA Storm Events Database, filtered to Williamson County, Tennessee across all 77 annual files from 1950 through September 2026. That search returns 915 severe-weather events for the county, of which 26 are tornadoes. The first is dated 1960.
The count measures attention, not weather
Williamson County recorded 5 severe-weather events in the 1960s and 386 in the 2010s. The weather did not change by a factor of seventy-seven. The observers did. The clearest break is the 1990s, when the county's recorded events jump from 10 to 80: the Nashville forecast office opened its current facility with Doppler radar in the late summer of 1994, and a radar that can see rotation inside a storm finds tornadoes that a 1960s observer network simply missed.
The tornado list shows the same fingerprint. Of the 7 tornadoes recorded from 1960 through 1989, exactly one was rated at the bottom of the scale. Of the 19 recorded since 2000, 14 were. Weak, short-track tornadoes in empty country did not start happening in 2000; they started getting confirmed. Read the older decades as a record of the storms big enough that somebody could not miss them, and do not read the recent increase as a trend.
Four other things worth knowing about the table
Ratings changed system in February 2007, when the Enhanced Fujita scale replaced the original Fujita scale. F and EF numbers are not strictly interchangeable, though they are close enough to read together. Records before 1996 carry no narrative text, which is why the 1988 F4 has a damage figure but no description in the federal file; the detail in this piece comes from later reporting. Damage estimates are the survey's number at the time, not adjusted for inflation, and the survey itself notes several as rough. And events are filed by county, so a tornado that crossed a line appears in the record of each county it touched: the March 2025 EF0 in the table began in Hickman County, and the February 2008 EF2's 20-mile path was not all inside Williamson.
One more limit. This page describes what the record holds, which is not the same as what is possible. The county has never recorded a June tornado and has never recorded an EF5. Neither fact is a promise.
Sources
- NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database. All 26 tornadoes, the 915-event county total, casualty counts, damage estimates, narratives and timing. Pulled September 13, 2026 from the bulk CSV archive at ncei.noaa.gov.
- NWS Nashville (OHX). The forecast office responsible for Williamson County, at Old Hickory. County zone TNC187, forecast zone TNZ059, radar KOHX. Office and zone assignments confirmed through the National Weather Service API.
- Williamson County Department of Public Safety. Siren count and placement, polygon activation, the first-Saturday test, the statement that sirens are not designed to be heard indoors, watch and warning definitions, shelter guidance and the storm shelter registry, via WilliamsonReady and the county's Alert Systems page.
- NOAA Weather Radio station listings. SAME code 047187 for Williamson County; KIG79 Nashville at 162.550 MHz and WXK63 Shelbyville at 162.475 MHz.
- Reporting on the 1988 tornado. Path, structure counts and the naming of Ernest Rice Lane come from local coverage of the storm and its anniversaries, since the federal record for that year carries no narrative.
Found something wrong, or remember a storm the record missed? Write to hello@franklinfrontline.com. Corrections get made on the page.
The rest of the field guides
Guide 01 is The Field Guide to American Ticks, eight species with a removal protocol. Guide 02 is Snakes of Middle Tennessee, the twenty species verified in this county and the two that are venomous. If you want the ground rather than the sky, the neighborhood guides cover nineteen places from Brentwood to Columbia, and the Parks & Greenways Atlas maps where the trails are.
Franklin Frontline
The next warning will come at 3 a.m. We would rather you already knew the plan.
One email, no noise: what the city approved, what is being built, where to eat, and the occasional field guide you hope never to need.