The real point of this post is to mention a few facts about tornado warnings in this area. I lived in Cookeville, Tennessee for three years after having lived in Oklahoma City for six years. To be honest, I thought tornadoes were scarier in Cookeville than they were in Oklahoma. I've taken the official tornado spotter class from NOAA twice, and there is some interesting information that I don't think most people know.
The problem with tornadoes in this part of the country is that they are much harder to track. Typically, a tornado in the west grows out of a low precipitation supercell. These "dry" storms are fairly easy to see, so spotters can triangulate from their favorite spotting positions and give an accurate picture of the storm's path and speed. In the east, there are more tornadoes that come from a high precipitation supercell. In these storms, the funnel is hidden in the thick clouds and rain. I was living in Louisville in '96 and saw the big one that passed just south of town. I saw a huge, black cloud about ten miles away, but I never saw the tornado in the cloud. Because the tornado is hidden, spotters cannot get as accurate a position or be as certain that a tornado is on the ground.
Another problem is that hills mask the tornado from Doppler radar. I once complained to someone from the weather service about the fact that tornado warnings around Cookeville were never as precise as those in Oklahoma City. He told me that the Doppler radar used to track these storms is usually based in Nashville. As the radar signal goes east and hits the beginning of the Cumberland Plateau, it is reflected and cannot "see" anything below a straight line passing from the tower to the highest points on the plateau. Therefore, the Doppler radar is blind to many tornadoes in that area when they are close to the ground.
The result of these factors is that it is much harder to predict a tornado on the Cumberland Plateau than it is on the plains of Oklahoma. When I lived in Oklahoma City, it seemed that the emergency weather broadcasters could almost track tornadoes by street address. If the tornado wasn't on my street, I felt pretty good. In Cookeville, the sirens would sound, but no one seemed able to give the location of the tornado within even a couple of miles. I suspect that the towns hit in Tennessee weren't so much without warning as they were without a specific enough warning to know what action to take.
I once read a book on tornadoes, and the book said that someday an F4 or F5 will hit a major city directly. It will topple some big buildings, and the scale of destruction will be similar to what happened when the World Trade Centers fell.
Part of the solution for mountainous areas might be for more people to take storm spotter training. I don't know what assets they had available last night, but better spotting likely could have helped. Another part of the solution might be that some public or civic group in some of these areas could buy the used Doppler Radars that big city news stations discard when they upgrade their equipment. This equipment wouldn't be the best, but it would be better than having no warning at all.
WFTR
Bill
I completely forgot how rural these town are, and yes, I understand that bodies can lodge themselves in trees in the middle of heavily wooded acreage.
Thanks for the education on twisters. ;^)