Crews clear trees, restore power
Fast-moving storm remnants leave outages across state ♦ Floyd County and much of the Southeast take a hit from Zeta.
A massive number of trees were toppled early Thursday as the remnants of Hurricane Zeta brought rain and high winds, causing power outages across Northern and Central Georgia.
“There are trees down all over the place,” Floyd County EMA Director Tim Herrington said. “People need to be careful.”
Floyd County Public Works Director Michael Skeen sent out a lengthy list of locations where trees had blocked roadways, or fallen on power lines. As many as 18,000 households were without power during a high point in outages early in the day.
Before dawn, public works and Georgia Power crews were out dealing with the issues caused by the storms. And the trees and limbs kept falling.
“We have cleared approximately 100 trees off county roads since about 3:30 a.m.,” Skeen said mid-afternoon on Thursday. “As more people get out and about, the calls are still coming. One just fell at 1 p.m.”
Several roads were blocked, traffic lights were out for a time down Shorter Avenue, and Kingston Highway was closed early in the morning after a tree fell across the roadway.
The good news is the weather cleared up around noon, but power outages remained.
“(The storm) was moving by pretty fast,” Skeen said. “I’m happy about that.”
Floyd County Schools canceled classes for Friday and Rome City Schools, which had planned virtual lessons, also canceled those lessons.
Darlington School’s PreK to 8 division will be open Friday. As of Thursday night, power had not been restored to the upper school and Darlington spokesperson Tannika King said the school would be closed. Coaches and program leaders will be in touch about afterschool activities.
Zeta batters Southeast after
swamping Gulf Coast
Zeta sped across the Southeast on Thursday, leaving a trail of damage and more than 2.6 million homes and businesses without power in Atlanta and beyond after pounding New Orleans with winds and water that splintered homes and were blamed for at least six deaths.
A Category 2 hurricane when it hit the southeastern Louisiana coast Wednesday, the National Hurricane Center said Zeta weakened to a posttropical storm by Thursday afternoon — with maximum sustained winds of 50 mph about 25 miles southeast of Charlottesville, Virginia.
Some voting places were affected and hundreds of schools canceled classes or planned to open late in areas from the Gulf Coast to the Carolinas. Widespread power outages occurred across seven states, from Louisiana to the south Atlantic seaboard. Some places could be in the dark for days.
The latest punch from a record hurricane season left people shaken. Will Arute said it sounded like a bomb went off when part of a large oak snapped outside his home in New Orleans, and crashed into his car and a corner of his home.
“I did not anticipate this to happen. It was pretty intense along the eye wall when it went through here,” he said.
Mackenzie Umanzor didn’t make many preparations because the last hurricane to threaten her home in D’iberville, Mississippi, a few weeks ago did little damage. Zeta blew open doors she had tried to barricade, leaving her with a cut hand, and the top of her shed came loose.
“You could hear the tin roof waving in the wind. ... And there was a couple of snaps, lots of cracks of branches and trees falling,” she said. “It was pretty scary.”
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said the most severe destruction — what he described as “catastrophic damage” — appears to be on the barrier island of Grand Isle in Jefferson Parish, where Zeta punched three breaches in the levee, the only levee failure from the storm in the state. Edwards says he ordered the Louisiana National Guard to fly in soldiers to assist with search and rescue efforts, including door-to-door checks on property.
The governor also urged people to be cautious during the recovery.
“Oddly enough, it isn’t the storms that typically produce the most injuries and the fatalities. It’s the cleanup efforts. It’s the use of generators. It’s the carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s the electrocution that comes from power lines. So, now is the time to be very, very cautious out there,” Edwards said Thursday.
Six killed by intense storms
Four people died in Alabama and Georgia when trees fell on homes, authorities said. The dead included two people pinned to their bed when a tree crashed through, Gwinnett County fire officials said.
In Mississippi, Leslie Richardson, 58, drowned when he was trapped in rising seawater in Biloxi after taking video of the raging storm, Harrison County Coroner Brian Switzer said. Richardson and another man exited a floating car and desperately clung to a tree before his strength “just gave out,” Switzer said.
A 55-year-old man was electrocuted by a downed power line in New Orleans, a Louisiana coroner said.
Morning rush hour commuters in Atlanta had to dodge downed trees and navigate their way past signals with no power. Trees blocked lanes on two interstates, the Georgia Department of Transportation said.
Damage from Zeta extended far inland. More than 80 miles north of the coast, Mayor Sheldon Day of Thomasville, Alabama, said hundreds of fallen trees blocked roads and crashed into houses, with canopies at some gas stations blown over.
“At one point, every major thoroughfare was blocked by trees,” Day said. Hundreds of miles away in North Carolina, a highway was blocked by a toppled tree in Winston-salem and Wake Forest University canceled classes for the day.
Power failures delayed voting or left some precincts without power in two Georgia counties, officials said.
“We’re still assessing the situation ... but we don’t see that there will be an overall impact on voting,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said.
Thursday was the last day to request an absentee ballot or vote by absentee in person in Alabama, and power was out in areas including heavily populated Mobile on the coast.
Mobile County tweeted that the absentee voting office still would be open and voters, some holding umbrellas, waited outside the county courthouses in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa to cast ballots.
Zeta was the 27th named storm of a historically busy Atlantic hurricane season with more than a month left to go. It set a new record as the 11th named storm to make landfall in the continental U. S. in a single season, well beyond the nine storms that hit in 1916.