In the first photo, the line of trees alongside the road was, until Wednesday night, thickly wooded, and an almost-solid wall of oak, sweet gum, tulip poplar, and pine trees. Some of the taller trees along here were 60-80 feet tall and 24" in diameter. (I know this stretch of road very well, having traveled it hundreds of times.) Now the trees look like a gigantic lawnmower with a very, very dull blade mowed them down.
Before the storm, the little house in the second photo was surrounded and shaded by the same varieties of trees that were once in the first photo. Now many of those trees from the first photo are lying scattered around the little house, 100 feet across the road. While this house doesn't look to have had major damage, I didn't get a good look at the rear part of the property. But I can say that close to the front of the house, only ONE of those green things that appear to be large shrubs is actually a shrub that had long grown in its yard. Everything else resembling a large bush is actually part of the trees from across the road that were blown up against this house. If the people living here were home when it struck, they must have been terrified.
Also amazing is that this location is about 150 feet from a Georgia State Patrol post AND the Small County Jail...and neither of those buildings saw anything more than a few tree branches and leaves blown into their yards. But half a football field away, the trees were tossed and jumbled like a box of toothpicks that's been dropped with the lid open. Tornadoes are strange like that.
I had to keep moving pretty steadily, as Georgia Power, the Red Cross, and Small County Sheriff's deputies were directing traffic in between the heavy trucks pulling logs away from power lines and piling them up in a central location. The house I mentioned in yesterday's post truly does look like someone ripped the roof off of a Barbie house...or like your childhood Lincoln Logs masterpiece right after the family dog decided to take the upper half and chew on it not here, but in the comfort of the back yard. That house is seven or eight miles away from here, and is in a curve of the road where it's impossible to get a good photo without further snarling traffic.
My students who live in the storm-damaged parts of Small County and Bumpkin County tell me that they probably won't have electricity again until late next week. That says a lot. Usually, Georgia Power and Small County Electric Co-op can get utilities back up and running within a few hours. The cleanup is huge, and is taking every single person, truck, and chainsaw they have available.
The damage here, while substantial, is nothing compared to that in many parts of Alabama. The National Weather Service has confirmed that an EF-5 tornado, i.e. "the Big One," was what struck Tuscaloosa and the University of Alabama. Please continue to keep the victims and rescue personnel in your thoughts and prayers.
