At about 4:30 yesterday afternoon, Alexa gave me a serious tornado warning.
It doesn’t happen that often. Twelve years ago, during our first winter here, a tornado touched down about seven miles from us, basically obliterating a few good-sized commercial buildings.
It happened again yesterday. We were told to go to our basement — we don’t have one — and a few minutes later, we lost electrical power for 20 minutes or so.
The tornado missed us again, by. three or four miles, but today when I was driving my wife to a doctor’s appointment, we saw the incredible amount of damage it did in Griffin.
The most incredible part of it all was the hundreds of large trees that were completely uprooted. Some crushed cars and houses, while others blocked city streets. We saw hundreds that had already been cut up and moved, but there are at least as many more blocking roads.
One of the scariest parts of it all was how many power lines were down.
A large part of downtown Griffin was without power, leaving busy streets without traffic lights. Between that and the streets that were impassible, it took us the better part of an hour to get home from a destination that usually takes us 15 minutes.
The saddest part of it all is that most of the damage was centered in what Johnny Rivers would have called the poor side of town. Whether the damage was to houses or cars, I found myself wondering if the people hurt by it were insured.
Two people in the area were killed, one a 5-year-old boy who died when a tree fell on his mother’s car and the other a state employee who was responding to storm damage.
As far as I know, our Sun City Peachtree community didn’t suffer any damage from the storm. The great irony of it is that most of us living here are well-off enough that we could afford whatever repairs or replacements were needed.
The people who can afford it least are almost always the ones who get hit the hardest.
It’s a helluva world, isn’t it?