Governor Phil Bredesen announced yesterday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency will extend the disaster declaration to include the Middle Tennessee counties hit Friday afternoon, by the second round of tornadoes in less than a week.
Bredesen says the extension of the federal disaster declaration to cover several counties just north of Nashville, including the city Gallatin, will allow residents to qualify for small business loans and other clean-up assistance.
“The most immediate help they have is for uninsured losses and certainly in the Gallatin area I would guess most of those losses were insured. In some of the more rural counties I think there will be larger uninsured losses and the individual assistance programs will be of great help to those families.”
Bredesen says the damage in West Tennessee was more severe than the damage caused by tornadoes in Nashville in 1998.
“Where in East Nashville I saw houses that had pieces blown off and trees blown down on them, and in a few cases, destroyed, in west Tennessee I just saw home after home that was scraped off the face of the earth. There’s no other way to describe it.”
FEMA will announce which counties are included as part of the federal disaster area, in the next few days.
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