Tornado damage in Cookeville, Tennessee on March 6, 2020 (Jim Watson / AFP)

Tornado did not hurl car into third story of Tennessee building

This article is more than one year old.
Published on March 13, 2020 at 17:26
3 min read
By AFP USA, Manon JACOB,

Facebook posts shared more than 100,000 times claim that a car was hurled by a tornado into the third story of an apartment building in the US city of Nashville. This is false; a staff member of the news channel where the claim originated said it was an optical illusion.

The photo that sparked the claims, taken by a NewsChannel 5 (NC5) employee and posted on Facebook by its senior meteorologist Lelan Statom, appears to show a red car stuck inside the building after deadly tornadoes ripped through Tennessee, including Nashville, on March 3, 2020.

A screenshot taken on March 11, 2020 shows a photo by LaRita Love, NewsChannel5

The post was updated after less than three hours, raising doubts about what the photo showed. But local radio nonetheless spread the photo here, here and here. It also circulated on Twitter here, here and here.

“I am the one that took the picture of the red car from where my apartment is and where this was,” LaRita Love, an NC5 employee, told AFP by email. “It was a perfect look after the storm of a car possibly being tossed into a building. But I believe it ended up just being a misleading shot.”

That was confirmed when Statom updated the original Facebook post on March 12 to state that the car was actually “in a parking lot on the other side of the breeze-way.”

A screenshot taken on March 12, 2020 of the edit history of Lelan Statom's Facebook post

AFP contacted the Nashville Office of Emergency Management and Metro Police Department and neither had reports of a car having been lifted into the third story of an apartment building by a tornado.

Using Google maps, AFP identified the building in the photo as being part of The Meridian at Hermitage.

A screenshot taken on March 9, 2020 of the photo of a building at The Meridian at Hermitage

As shown on Google maps, a parking lot is located between the buildings depicted in the photo.

In the screenshot below, the first circle shows an aerial view of the building in the photograph that allegedly had a car stuck inside it. The second shows the parking lot, and the third shows the second building that can be seen in the background of the photo.

A screenshot taken on March 9, 2020 of an aerial view of the apartment complex from Google Maps

The series of severe storms that passed through Tennessee caused major damage to buildings, roads, bridges, utilities and businesses, the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency said.

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Tornado did not hurl car into third story of Tennessee building

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