Strong tornadoes ripped through the city of Nashville, Tennessee early Tuesday morning, with new estimates saying at least 24 people lost their lives, and the tragedy has hit the country music community harder than ever.
Nashville's famed venue the Basement East was destroyed by the tornadoes, but luckily no one was injured. Co-owner Mike Grimes told the Tennessean that most of the staff had cleared out by the time the tornadoes hit, although the ones that were there were moved to safety "with seconds to spare before the roof blew off." He added that the building is a "total loss."
Several country artists took to social media to either inform people that they were in fact okay, or share their devastation about what happened.
Dierks Bentley shared that he was actually in a plane flying through the bad weather but luckily landed before the tornadoes hit. "@astephens1110 and I ducked around this crazy cell and landed at John Tune airport around 11:30 last night, coming back from LA," he writes next to video of the weather. “Glad we landed when we did. Wouldn’t have been so good an hour later.”