Tornado Touches Down in Sewanee On Thursday evening, Jan. 21, a tornado determined to have been an F-1 touched down in Sewanee, uprooting and snapping trees and causing damage to homes and vehicles. No one was injured. University professor and Chief of Emergency Services Gerald Smith was driving home to Cowan after work on Thursday afternoon. When he saw the first funnel cloud form overhead, he called for the emergency siren to be sounded. There were several clouds that followed. Above, you see a very dark wedge hanging down from the main cloud. That wedge is a “wall cloud” and is usually the point from which tornadoes form, Smith reported. As this wall cloud passed over the Mountain near Sewanee’s War Memorial Cross, it dropped several funnel clouds and one touched down near the airport and then Midway.