Lucky Stars

The extent of our damage. Our downspout is now a horizontal spout.

This is the house diagonal to ours. I took this from my porch.

Damage to a business near our house.

Lots of windows smashed out all around us.

As you may have heard on the news, Atlanta was hit with a series of tornadoes last night. Living so close to the city, our neighborhood also experienced some serious damage. Luckily, our house only lost a downspout, although we haven't gotten on the roof yet.

Just to recap, we heard the locomotive noise typical of a tornado at around 10:00ish. Luke and I were on the ground floor when he said that I should run up and grab the baby. I ran up the two flights of stairs, but was trying to carefully lift her without waking her. As I was lifting her, I heard him on the ground floor yelling for me to hurry. The noise outside was getting louder, the house was shaking, debris was hitting the windows, and I was struggling to see down the steps as I raced down with Hailey in my arms. In the meantime, Luke had opened the front door only to realize that he could barely get it closed even while throwing all of his weight against it. The three of us (plus Josie) crammed into the downstairs closet which Luke had quickly cleaned out. We waited for it to go by, but didn't understand the extent of the damage until the next morning. What struck me afterwards was just how little time we had from the time we figured out what was going on to the point at which it was really dangerous. If we had been watching tv and heard the warnings, it would have been different. GA might also consider investing in some tornado sirens.

Several houses in our neighborhood lost their aluminum chimneys, but the real damage was sustained on the streets that have older homes and trees. About 5-6 of the houses on the street directly across from us were crushed by trees, some of which had been completely uprooted. The damage was extensive, but I believe there were no injuries. Here are a few shots we snapped while driving around in the morning. We didn't get many of the houses because that road was basically shut down. Now that we have power, I thought that I would drop a quick blog to let everyone know just how lucky we are feeling today.