COLUMBIA, Tenn. (WTVF) — Sometimes you're in the wrong place at the wrong time when severe weather strikes.
Overnight, dozens of people camping out ahead of Mule Day in Columbia found themselves in trailers in a wide-open park.
"I stood under the trailer and watched the rain, watched the wind, watched the clouds," explained Martha Carner.
For 12 years, Carner's participated in Mule Day, which includes a parade on Saturday featuring dozens of mules and horses.
Without a doubt, Carner says, there's always bad weather around Mule Day.
"It always rains at least one day while we're here, but this year I think it's going to rain three out of the five days," Carner said.
Around midnight, radar picked up rotation near Columbia. Local law enforcement, paying attention to the meteorologists on the air, told people in the campground to move inside to a nearby high school.
"I woke up during the heaviest part of the rain — around 12:30 a.m. — when the cops came through and told us there was rotation, so we should probably take shelter," Carner said.
Unlike other areas of Columbia, like a stretch of Trotwood Avenue near Old Sunnyside Lane, there was no damage to the campground.
According to the Maury County Office of Emergency Management, they took calls about downed trees and power lines, and damage to multiple structures. Most people who lost power were customers of Columbia Power & Water Systems. However, as of Monday afternoon, all outages had been resolved.
At Maury County Park, not everyone heeded the warnings and took shelter. Carner chose to stay with her pregnant horses.
"We didn't want to leave the horses here, so we just stood there under the nose of the trailer and watched the weather around us," she said.
They were lucky that, this time, the cues they took from their horses were right.
Do you have more information about this story? You can email me at hannah.mcdonald@newschannel5.com.
My friend and colleague Carrie Sharp had a lot of fun last week, on an adventure to a country more than three thousand miles away! She’s back now – sharing her Adventures in Iceland through stories, and incredible images of this remarkably beautiful and unique island nation (kudos to Chief Photographer Catherine Steward)! But did you know Nashville has something very important in common with Iceland? Tourism! Here, Carrie explains how a volcanic eruption decades ago helped save the country’s economy from collapse!
-Rhori Johnston
