9. The only F5 tornado in Tennessee history ripped through western Lawrence County.
Although this certainly wasn’t ‘cool’ to those who experienced it, it is still a remarkable part of our county’s history. On April 16, 1998, a large tornado touched down in Wayne County, Tennessee. It gained strength as it traveled northeast, and the damage it caused by the time it reached Deerfield in western Lawrence County was on such a massive scale that the National Weather Service later declared it to be an F5 on the original Fujita scale. This was the only tornado in Tennessee’s history to be considered an F5 using that particular means of measurement (meteorologists swapped to the enhanced Fujita scale, or EF scale, since 2007). However, because news coverage of smaller tornados in downtown Nashville overshadowed coverage of the Lawrence County event, meteorologists have dubbed it ‘The Forgotten F5.’[2]