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A Kentucky–Tennessee resident captured the moment she saw a tornado heading her way in a terrifying video that has been watched 43 million times.
Sasha Sverdrup had been filming the lightning at night on her phone when she noticed a barely visible tornado in the distance. The moment was captured on video, as were her screams of fear.
Over the weekend, Tennessee faced multiple devastating tornadoes. They also continued to rip through Kentucky, where the death toll is currently 74.
Sverdrup reportedly lives in Fort Campbell, an army installation located between Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and Clarksville, Tennessee.
"Had the heart attack of my life tonight when I looked out the window and saw this," Sverdrup captioned the video. In the clip, which can be viewed here, a tornado can be seen in the distance, seemingly headed in their direction.
"S*** Alex, Alex, tornado, tornado," screamed Sverdrup to her husband, who was outside the house "weather watching."
"Get up girls, get up girls," she can be heard repeating to the children, as she ushered them into a safer area of the house.
In the full video later uploaded to her account, Sverdrup continued to call for her husband while waking up those in the house as a safety measure. Her husband, however, was reluctant to believe there was a tornado at first, because there was no wind or debris outside the house.
Luckily for the family, they were not harmed in the tornado, which hit behind them instead. "It did hit behind us," she confirmed in a later clip. "People on the same side, like the same road that we're on, got hit and houses were destroyed—but we're not.
"It was so scary and it was the weirdest feeling because it took me a second to register what I was seeing."
According to Clarksville Now, the documented tornado rolled into Kentucky after it hit Fort Campbell.
In response to criticism over her husband's reaction in the full video, in which he told her to stop scaring the children, she explained that she is "very weather paranoid" and had already suggested "hunkering down" after the warning.
According to Sverdrup, there had been no wind and everything was "calm" when her husband was standing outside the house.
"If there was a little bit of wind, we would have walked a few steps to our half bathroom and taken shelter, where my kids were already taking shelter," she said.
President Joe Biden was set to visit Fort Campbell on Wednesday for a briefing before heading to Mayfield, Kentucky, one of the worst affected areas of the state.
