30 years later: STORM of the CENTURY
30 years ago, the second week of March of 1993 saw temperatures as high as the mid-70s across Northwest Georgia, but the weekend had snow in the forecast.
Beginning on the evening of Friday, March 12, however, the weather event that ended up happening would cripple nearly the entire east coast of the United States from northern Florida up to Canada with what has been dubbed the “Storm of the Century” ever since.
Virtually the entire state of Georgia saw recorded snowfall that weekend, with the northwest corner of the state — stretching from Carrollton at an angle up to Rabun County — getting anywhere from 12 to 30 inches or more.
Snow drifts were several feet high in most places, and roads were all but impassable for the better part of a week. Industrial buildings collapsed under the weight of the snow, and an untold number of trees fell across the area.
On the morning of March 13, it was easier to count the number of locals who had power and other utilities than to estimate outages, as extreme winds, thunder and lightening accompanied heavy periods of snowfall. Gordon County, like nearly every other county east of the Mississippi River that day, was literally frozen still.
Several local officials are still working in either the same organization they were in March of 1993, or in a similar capacity. We spoke with several in the community who remember the storm well.
BUD OWENS
Gordon County Commissioner Bud Owens had just recently assumed the role of Emergency Management 911 director.
“It was a very interesting time,” Owens said.
“We always watched the weather people on the Chattanooga and Atlanta channels in trying to balance out what was coming this direction,” Owens said. “There were mixed stories, so we really didn’t know.”
For Owens, cooperation with the Sheriff’s Office and early calls in to the National Guard ahead of the storm ended up being key for Gordon County’s response.
“We developed a plan in place the day before,” Owens said. “We were awake the entire night. It was a challenge, but nobody ever really panicked. We just took care of business.”
Happening prior to the 911 system in Gordon County, Owens said the bulk of emergency calls went directly to agency offices.
“We were in the Sheriff’s Office dispatch office quite a bit, just keeping up with what was happening, and making judgments based on those phone calls,” Owens said. “There were people stranded everywhere, and we were working as hard as we could to get resources out to help them.”
Owens said his house at the time on Piedmont Street was in eyesight all weekend, and though he could occasionally see if wife and young son playing outside in the snow, it was the floor of Sheriff Sid Roberts’ office he called home for several days.
Owens said the blizzard of ’93 was his first major test as EMA director. He said though he felt like he was clueless at the time, he had been taught to ask for help, and so he did.
“I tried to bring up some of the things I’d been taught in the single training class I’d been through so far, and I can remember them saying ‘if you think you’re going to need help, call the National Guard,” Owens said. “So I made that advance call before the snow ever started. They put us down for a large number of HMMWVs, and we were able to acquire those days before anybody else in surrounding counties with personnel. It put us at an advantage.”
Owens said his assistant at the time was Tim Reeve, who is now with Georgia Emergency Management, and the storm helped shape the careers of both men. Owens, who is also the Executive Director of Emergency Medical Services for Atrium Health in Rome, said the storm definitely affects the way he approaches adversity.
“One thing that lays in my mind still today is to always prepare for the worst,” Owens said. “If the worst never comes ... that’s great.”
TONY PYLE
Calhoun Police Chief Tony Pyle, then a young patrolman, said it was an event that nearly everyone underestimated, and not really one you could ever truly be fully prepared for.
“They were calling for snow, and we were like ‘well, we get that a lot ... it’s snowing a little bit ... everything will be fine,’ and then it just kept on and on,” Pyle said. “The next thing you know, the power is out and the roads were impassable.”
Once he started his shift that weekend, Pyle said it was a while before he saw a day off.
“I worked almost every night straight through once it started until things started getting better as far as the roads and power coming back on,” Pyle said.
Pyle recalls night shift officers sleeping in the basement of the North Wall Street Police Department on Army cots.
“There wasn’t really any point in going home because there wasn’t any power,” Pyle said. “We pretty much worked around the clock.”
Being better prepared, within reason, is an aspect of the storm that Pyle said lives in the back of his mind even today as he leads the same department he served in then ... most evidently with keeping some more versatile vehicles in the department’s fleet.
“Back then we had a fleet of Ford Crown Vics, and those things did not do well,” Pyle said, adding that the one front-wheel-drive Taurus that none of the officers liked to drive was the only car that would move through the snow. “It taught us to be more prepared.”
A borrowed tractor eventually became one of the department’s main modes of transportation for answering calls, Pyle recalls.
“A tractor with an enclosed cab ... we worked out of it, and there were a couple of local folks with older model Jeeps set up to climb rocks and that sort of thing, and they let us borrow those,” Pyle said. “That’s basically what we were patrolling out of. I don’t know what we would have done if they hadn’t offered those vehicles.”
Following the storm, Pyle said then Chief Gary Moss worked to add four-wheeldrive vehicles to the department’s fleet.
Pyle said the main thing he took away from the storm was a sense of community and a high value on cooperation.
“The thing I remember all these years later is how people came together, and how agencies came together,” Pyle said.
The local restaurants that managed to stay open or open back up kept stranded motorists and public servants well fed, Pyle remembers.
“That’s huge when you’re in that situation,” Pyle said.
Pyle said the thing he’s most proud of is that during even the worst part of the storm, the department answered every single call they received. Not every call was asking for help, however. Pyle said several citizens called into the department simply to check on how the officers were doing.
“People calling to say ‘I know y’all are stuck down there, are you OK?’” Pyle recalls. “That really stuck with me all these years.”
MITCH RALSTON AND
ROBERT PARIS
In 1993, Gordon County Sheriff Mitch Ralston was a
Georgia State Patrol dispatcher in Cartersville, while his Chief Deputy Robert Paris was a Sheriff’s Office detective.
Sheriff Ralston wasn’t able to get anywhere near Cartersville for the first six days of the storm.
“What I remember most is how the interstate was a parking lot,” Ralston said. “I couldn’t get to work. It was unreal.”
Ralston’s wife and young son went to stay with his inlaws due to a lack of power, and eventually another local trooper who worked out of Cartersville was able to pick him up to work the radios.
“It wasn’t really that crazy on the radios because nobody was out,” Ralston said. “All the phone lines were down, and we didn’t have cellphones.”
Paris was a detective, but there wasn’t much detective work to do once the blizzard hit Gordon County.
“I was a kerosene attendant at one point,” Paris said with a laugh. “At one point I rode in a helicopter with a Colonel McNutt, and we flew around with a map of Gordon County. He’d elbow me because and ask me where we were compared to the map. Once we were six feet off the ground, I was ready to get out.”
Another example of cooperation from the public, Paris said the helicopter he flew in with Sheriff Sid Roberts and that colonel was owned by the late singer Kenny Rogers.
LENNY NESBITT, TERRY MILLS AND TODD
SISSON
Calhoun Fire Department Chief Lenny Nesbitt was a fire inspector in 1993, and wasn’t scheduled to work on March 12, but like so many ... once he was able to get to work, he didn’t leave for a while.
“I had just transitioned to five days a week, so I was usually off unless I was filling in for someone,” Nesbitt said. “We were eating at El Pueblito that Friday night. We went in and there was nothing, but when we came out it was just snowing to beat the band.”
Nesbitt walked through the woods to his parents’ house where they had water, gas, and cable and dropped off his two daughters for safe keeping.
“They had a phone, so I finally got a hold of somebody here, and they sent a truck to pick me up,” Nesbitt said.
Deputy Fire Chief Terry Mills had been with the department three months when the storm hit, and had been at the fire academy going through recruit school all week.
“I came home on Friday, and my wife said ‘it’s going to snow tonight,’ and I told her it wasn’t going to snow since it had been warm all week,” Mills said. “I ended up not coming in until Sunday because I had so many trees across my driveway. It took me two days to get out, because my driveway was about a half-mile long.”
Battalion Chief Todd Sisson was also scheduled to be off that weekend, but early Saturday morning he was back at it.
“They called me in about 5 a.m. Saturday, and I came in through over a foot of snow from Resaca,” Sisson said. “I spent most of my time coming in ditches and in people’s yards. At the time the City of Calhoun only had two four wheel drives in the whole fleet, so my truck stayed on the road for four days straight running parts to the electrical department, and checking on people in places we couldn’t get fire trucks.”
Fire crews worked for four straight days, and then were able to begin working shifts, but Nesbitt said with all the industrial building collapses, inspections of still standing plants and warehouses became a priority as well.
“The buildings here back then weren’t built to code for snow loads,” Nesbitt said. “All these carpet mills were built in the 40s, 50s and 60s. We walked through a bunch of them.”
Even after the snow began to melt, the thaw brought bigger problems.
“There were water leaks when it started to thaw, and power lines would get energized when there’d be a problem somewhere else that would cause it to blow,” Nesbitt said. “All kinds of alarms were going off, and there were calls for gas leaks. If they had a phone line, they were calling. When people don’t know who to call, they call us.”
The city’s fire trucks were able to navigate main roads with the help of custom tire chains, but to access most small roadways, a lot of walking was required.
“Sometimes we’d be wading chest deep in snow,” Mills said.
After the storm, the Fire Department, like so many other agencies, began to make conscious efforts to stock more equipment like chainsaws, and began to replace aging vehicles with trucks that had four-wheel-drive.
MICHELE TAYLOR
Calhoun City Schools Superintendent Dr. Michele Taylor was a young fourth grade teacher in 1993 at the elementary school on South River Street in the former
Junior High building where CMS is today.
Living alone in an apartment off Dews Pond Road, Taylor recalls being rescued by her boyfriend Joe.
“I called my boyfriend, who is my husband now, and he said ‘I’ve got four-wheeldrive, so I’ll come rescue you,’” Taylor said. “He had to dig the snow away from my door.”
Taylor would spend the next several days at Joe’s house where much of his extended family was hunkered down due to the fact that his parents had a wood stove.
Eventually duty would call Taylor back to work, but it wouldn’t be students that needed help, but stranded motorists.
“The schools became a shelter, so all the teachers tried to come in and volunteer to help,” Taylor said. “We fed people who had been stranded on I-75, and somehow ended up at the school.”
One older couple from Canada who stayed at the school left a lasting impression, even later becoming pen pals with the students at the school.
“I was so very proud of our school for taking care of all the people who were stranded in our community, because there were a lot of them,” Taylor said. “It was like a little resort. They had privacy, and showers, and food delivered by the National Guard.”
TERRY NESBITT
Major General (ret.) Terry Nesbitt, then a colonel, was living in Cobb County in 1993, serving as Chief of Staff of the Georgia Army National Guard, but had been in town with family when the snow started on March 12.
“We were here in Calhoun celebrating my dad’s birthday,” Nesbitt said. “The storm hit the evening of his birthday, and I told Letha my wife ‘I’ve got to get back home tonight, because this thing is going to get bad and I’m going to have to go to work tomorrow.’ So we drove home in the snow, slipping and sliding.”
Waking up the next day to a harsh reality, Nesbitt said he, along with some other officers who had phone service, worked slowly buy surely to organize the state’s guard for mobilization.
“I remember walking to an overpass on I-75, and there was not a vehicle moving in either direction,” Nesbitt said. “It was eerie”
From there, lucky to have phone service, Nesbitt called his commander.
“I got on the phone with General Bill Bland, the Adjutant General,” Nesbitt said.
“For the first couple of days, he and I pretty much ran the operation out of our houses, because nobody could get to the headquarters.”
The two began mobilizing vehicles and helicopters to rescue those who were stranded along the roadways as priority number one, while working to organize the delivery of food, water and medicine to the most critical citizens. The use of vehicles to bring in staff took a back seat early on in favor of critical rescue and delivery.
Nesbitt said the way many of Georgia’s National Guard Armory’s are positioned, it made access easier for deployment of rescue vehicles, but the storm revealed a need to better stock those facilities with food and water, as well as other critical supplies.
“We set our armories up as shelters, and we could provide some food and water to them,” Nesbitt said. “That was a challenge. Immediately after that we put in place a plan to stock our armories as shelters.”
Rather than a central warehouse, the GNG began strategically storing C-rations (and later MREs) across its armories, rotating new ones in and using older ones prior to expiration in the event a disaster saw a need for those meals for soldiers of citizens.
Nesbitt said going forward, the Georgia Guard made a better effort to “lean forward” and have a plan in place ahead of pending events, even if they didn’t always materialize.
“We would already have people into armories, and into position,” Nesbitt said. “From that point forward, we were much better prepared.”
When the ’93 blizzard hit, Nesbitt said the soldiers they could contact had to find their way into their respective armories — some by foot — and once vehicles were able to come off critical rescue duty, they started deploying HMMWVs and other equipment to work their ways down muster rolls and pick soldiers up at their homes.
Quick action from members of the guard saved countless lives, Nesbitt believes.
“If we hadn’t of been able to act as quickly as we did, I believe more people would have died,” Nesbitt said. “The casualties would have been far greater.”
Nesbitt said guardsman did everything from deliver food and medication, to transport people to shelters, and take medical personnel to hospitals.
“Everything you could think of to provide basic needs, we did,” Nesbitt said.
As resources became
available, eventually the state headquarters became somewhat staffed and a more normal organization took shape across the state, but early on, Nesbitt recalled how weird it felt to be one of a handful in the organization’s command with an immediate ability to communicate and continue working.
“It was a really odd feeling to be in that situation,” Nesbitt said.
NATHAN SERRITT
For Nathan Serritt, his family-owned Calhoun Farm Supply almost immediately became one of many local lifelines for emergency operations in Gordon County.
“We got there about 8:30 or 9 a.m. Saturday morning,” Serritt said, adding that local government officials had been calling asking him to open the store. “They said ‘if you can’t get there, we’re going to come pick you up to get you there,’ because they had to have chainsaws and other equipment.”
Serritt said it didn’t take long to run completely through some key inventories.
“We sold completely out of chainsaws and poll saws in a matter of hours on Saturday morning, and we had to order more,” Serritt said. “We sold hundreds of chains, cases of bar oil, hundreds of bottles of mix oil to the government crews and tree services.”
Without electricity at the store until the middle of the next week, the store’s old school record keeping methods at the time actually became an asset.
“We were lucky that happened before we were computerized, because now we’d be dead in the water,” Serritt said. “Without power, we can’t look up inventory, tell prices, take credit cards ... but back then, everything was hand written.”
Serritt, along with his two brothers Roger and Ricky, kept the store open throughout the recovery process, and even had some help from members of the community.
“We had non-employees come in who didn’t have anywhere else to go help us record sales, and write down serial numbers for warranties,” Serritt said. “We paid them, and some people even worked voluntarily.”
North Georgia Electric Membership Corp. alone reported over 65,000 members lost power at some point during the storm.
According a National Weather Service report, over 40% of the nation’s population at the time experienced effects of the storm, with over 300 fatalities, and more than $5.5 billion in damage, and lives in the memories of the millions who lived through it.