Residents on the outskirts of Westmoreland awoke to a rude awakening Thursday evening when a tornado cut a path through their properties.

The National Weather Service office in Nashville confirmed the event was a F1 tornado.

“The tornado was 100 yards wide, and the path length was three miles long,” said Bobby Boyd, National Weather Service meteorologist. “It traveled south to north across Highway 52 about three miles west of Westmoreland. It had winds of 95 to 100 miles per hour.”

Initial reports show no homes were totally destroyed, but a barn was flattened and several outbuildings such as carports sustained damage. A few homes had shingles blown off their roofs, and other various types of damage was reported.

“There were at least a few hundred trees snapped off or uprooted; a few houses sustained very light damage with windows blown out,” Boyd said.

Resident Shep Holmes had just gone to bed when an “awful racket”’ woke him – it was the tornado ripping through his new sunroom, which was totally destroyed. The home, located on Old Highway 52, also sustained considerable roof damage, which caused the dining room ceiling to drop and resulted in leakage in the kitchen, creating havoc on recent remodeling.

“We were just fixing it up like we wanted it when this happened,” Holmes said.

Com. Shawn Fennell lives near where some of the tornado destruction occurred, and he visited the area Friday.

“I live adjacent to where the tornado happened, but from my house, we couldn’t hear or tell anything,” Fennell said. “I went up this morning and you could see the damage swirled around, indicating rotation.”