I didn't even know anything had happened. I was at Yasmin's watching Clerks, and saw flashes of light from behind her burgundy drapes that cover her large window.
"Oh, how pretty," Yasmin said, and we opened the drapes to get a view of the pretty spring thunderstorm.
The storm passed rather quickly and in our area in Decatur, we didn't even get any hail.
I drove home later that night, after the rain had stopped. As I was walking from my car to my apartment, I noticed a man standing outside of his apartment talking on his cell phone. "Yeah, I have a few large bay windows in the apartment, but everything is pretty safe," he said. I was confused. Are we going to get some severe weather? I thought, but didn't spend too much time thinking about it and went to sleep pretty easily. Unlike some of my fellow Atlantans that night...
I woke up the next morning and found endlless news coverage on the tornado that ripped through downtown Atlanta. I couldn't believe it. The strangest thing for me was seeing amazing pictures of building and houses destroyed, knowing that these areas are located only 10 miles west of where I live.
The extent of what happened really hit me yesterday morning when I drove to Grady where I was on call in the nursery. I had trouble getting to work initially - many roads were blocked off. I was surrounded by downed trees and powerlines. Large oak trees were snapped in half. It looked like somone had literally taken a bit out of some of the brick buildings. Debris was scattered everywhere, including some dangling fro powerlines. A buildboard on the corner of I75/85 and Edgewood looked like someone placed it in a paper shredder. On Dekalb Ave, to my left, I saw the Cotton Mill Lofts - the top floor was completely gone on one side. Further along Edgewood at an intersection, I realized a traffic light that once directed traffic had likely been completely blown away. A glance upward - multiple windows were blown out from tall landmark skyscrapers - the Equitable building, the Sun Trust building, the Westin Tower. At Grady itself, the back windows where the cafeteria is had been blown out and were covered.
Only the work of a Tornado.
Mine is a passive story. I had not realized that 130 mph circular winds had literally changed lives until the morning after, and it was not until 2 morning after the visit, when I heard the stories of my fellow residents - stories that could have easily been my own.
A dear friend of mine, was on call at Hughes Spaulding, the children's hopsital across the street from Grady. She was working at the walk-in clinic, which is part of the ER. She barely realized that there was a storm, when all of a sudden, one of the entrances blew open and she said debris was flying everywhere within the halls of the hospital. Suddenly, it was chaos, and there was a mad rush to get all the families and patients downstairs to the basement.
Another friend was on call at the NICU and was literally putting in an umbilical line in a premature baby that had just been born. He would later say that the procedure note was a colorful one. While he was scrubbed in, he got a page that he was not intially going to answer. It was his wife, who had jumped in the bathtub when the tornado hit their neighborhood. He rushed home that night to find that his front door had been blown off.
Only a few stories from that night. There are many more of people who have lost their homes. And there are the pseudo-famous Atlanta Tornado '08 stories. One is of a 3 month old puppy that survived for 2 days in the Cotton Mill lofts and was recently found alive. Another is of a white carriage horse that was pulling a carriage and took off as the winds picked up - images caught by city video surveillance.
I can say that when there is a natural disaster that hits so close to home, there is this natural tendency by those who were spared to try and understand what happened, because the situation could have easily been that it was my roof, my call night, my front door... or even my life. And the fact that it wasn't, means that I can only read and hear the stories, send prayers and well wishes, and offer any assistance that I can.
