Version 2.236

A couple of minutes before 1 PM, I got a message from a friend of mine in Oklahoma asking me if I lived in Nashville. I only read it after 3 PM, but I was a bit annoyed that he would ask, since I had told him where I had moved to; but I do move very frequently. I told him that I was in Memphis. He replied that there had been a bomb set off in Nashville and that he wanted me to be safe. He and I met in school in 1995, a few months after the Oklahoma City bombing. Events like this always have a bitter taste for people with connections to Oklahoma.

This bomb in Nashville, on Second St., was very strange. The location is a tourist hotspot, which I have been to. There are bars, restaurants, quaint little shops, concert halls, etc. It is a really great place to visit when there is no pandemic, but it was mostly empty at 6:30 AM on Christmas Day, when the bomb went off. Plus, the RV where the bomb was placed had a loud speaker system that first payed an audio recording of gunshots, then issued warnings that a bomb was to go off and it even had a countdown to the explosion.

The police had evacuated most people by the time it went off, but it seems that that had been the plan all along. The damage to property was very great and the front of one of the buidings collapsed. Then the power went out, even the natural gas supply was affected, which precluded the generator in an AT&T business from functioning, so communications were down up to 180 miles away. On my neighborhood Nextdoor, people are still complaining about the lapse in cell phone service.

The authorities are investigating the case and have no idea who could have done such a thing, but I guess it was someone who wanted to damage property while not hurting people. Maybe a desperate business owner who wanted to make a claim on his/her insurance. Hopefully, the FBI and the police will get a lead soon.