‘A LOT OF LOSS’
A tree is snapped in half on Berkeley Lane on Wednesday in Hixson after Tuesday evening storms caused isolated damage throughout the region. At the height of the storm, an EPB spokesman said, about 60,000 homes were without power.
Bobby Keyes and his wife were crossing Chickamauga Dam, headed home from dinner out at Hamilton Place, when he noticed. There were no lights to be seen anywhere.
“I told my wife there’d been a disaster somewhere — the power’s out in a 15-mile radius. It has to be something pretty good-sized,” Keyes said Wednesday.
Just then his phone rang.
It was his neighbor, saying the roaring spring storm that blew through Tuesday night pounced on his home in the Prairie Peninsula neighborhood west of Dallas Bay.
Keyes got home to what he calls “a lot of loss.”
The storm winds clawed off part of his roof and dumped it in Dallas Bay. They smacked his guest house off its foundation, flung and
splintered giant old trees, and damaged his pool.
Over 30 years in that house, he said, “we’ve had some winds coming off the water, but we’ve never had anything like this.”
The National Weather Service said it recorded wind speeds of up to 50-60 mph in some areas of the region.
The storm lobbed tennisball-sized hail in the Rolling Hills area of Bradley County, carpeted yards and roads with smaller icy chunks and left trees and power lines down across the region. No serious injuries were reported in the tri-state area, although The Associated Press said one death in Georgia was blamed on the storm.
Glenn Carrin, meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Morristown, Tenn., said the agency’s Severe Weather Center accurately sized up the early season storm’s power and fury.
Given that the spring storm season usually peaks in April and May, “what happened yesterday was certainly more significant than normal,” Carrin said. “It was probably a more aggressive severe-weather event than just a normal event.”
In Chattanooga, EPB said 60,000 people lost electricity and about 3,000 were still without power as of midafternoon Wednesday. It was the same story in North Georgia, North Alabama and the Southeast Tennessee region.
Tony Reavley, emergency management agency director for Hamilton County, said his crews have seen a good bit of windcaused roof and shingle damage, but most was fairly minor except in Keyes’ neighborhood.
Marion County EMA Director Steve Lamb said some schools had water damage and one house received major damage, but “we didn’t roll an ambulance last night, thank goodness.”
Lorri Wickam said her family had gathered at her mom’s house for dinner on Candies Lane in Bradley County when the howling winds pitched tennis-ballsized hail through the glass of the family’s vehicles. Driving home, she said, they crept through the citrus smell of the carpet of pine needles and cones that nearly covered the road.
She said four cars will probably be totaled.
“If we’d been home, our cars would have been in the garage,” Wickam said ruefully.
Coby Goins said his home on Freewill Road was hammered by hail, too.
“I watched as the hailstones went from marble to close to baseball size in minutes,” Goins said via email. “After the hail finally stopped, the steam off of the ice created a really thick fog with yards and roads covered in ice. People had to drive like they were driving during a snowstorm.”
The hailstones hit hard enough to disable the photoelectric cells in the tops of some streetlights, said Kim Duncan, operations engineer for Cleveland Utilities. The cells tell the streetlights to turn on at dusk and off at dawn. Crews had begun fixing those after restoring power for most of CU’s customers, she said.
In Dade and Walker counties in North Georgia, hundreds
“You knew it was coming, you could see it coming, but when it finally got here, whammo!”
— JOE LEGGE, SPOKESMAN FOR WALKER COUNTY COMMISSIONER SHANNON WHITFIELD
of trees blocked roads, making it hard for line crews to get the power going again. Dade County Executive Ted Rumley said Sligo was the hardest-hit community in his area, with several roofs gone from homes and barns.
Joe Legge, spokesman for Walker County Commissioner Shannon Whitfield, said the storm’s punch was surprisingly strong.
“You knew it was coming, you could see it coming, but when it finally got here, whammo!” he said.
The damage was worst along Marble Top Road and down Friendship toward Highway 136, Legge said, and along Harp Switch and Mill Lee Hollow roads. But all were passable as of Wednesday afternoon, although “it looks like it’s probably going to take several weeks to pick up all the brush,” he said.
Catoosa County Public Works Director Buster Brown said only Martin Ward Road and Grove Street in the Keith area were still closed Wednesday afternoon, and EMA Director Doug Flury said 8,000-9,000 people were waiting for power to be restored.
One person was slightly injured in the Higdon community of Jackson County when she was struck by flying debris, EMA Deputy Director Felix Jackson said. As elsewhere, crews were working Wednesday, clearing roads and getting the lights back on.
Neighboring DeKalb County got off lightly, EMA officer Matt Martin said, with several trees down and some small brush fires that might have been caused by lightning, but no power outages that he’d heard of.
Several local officials expressed gratitude for the firefighters, road workers and line crews who swung into action during and after the storm, and promised to get everything cleared, fixed and working as quickly as they could.
“We appreciate everyone’s patience,” said Duncan with Cleveland Utilities.