Stormy beginning of 2023

January

Having arrived back home on December 30 through an intense storm, we were pleased to find things peaceful at home, and were relieved that there was no damage to our plumbing from the extreme cold of late December. We had worried about the problem of the failed seals on the plumbing leading to the vulnerable outside faucets, so on January 2 we were glad to get our currently valued pair of plumbers to come and replace the seals on five faucets, the main water valve to the house and the four associated with the two outside faucets.

January 4 brought cataract surgery for Rod's right eye, which went very well and left him with remarkable vision in that right eye, praise the Lord.

On January 12, we were staying home in the afternoon because of predicted violent weather. Early in the afternoon we were getting heavy thunder and then around 3pm we lost power. Because of the continuing heavy thunder, we decided to go to the basement. We just relaxed there although we were aware of some heavy showers. We were of course checking the Weather Channel on our phones regularly, and the display we had gotten at 3 pm was enough to keep us on high alert. In retrospect, it is surprising that we didn't hear any more from outside because of what we found when the power came back on and we came upstairs to look around. Marty had gone out on his carport to sit when the power went out, so he told us about it later.

When we came up and went outside, everything was calm and we were shocked to se that about 40 feet of our wooden fence had been blown down.

The lower half of that section had been blown almost flat, even though it had to stretch out a lot of ivy vines to do that.

Because it had been so calm when we came up and looked outside, it took us a while to appreciate the sudden violence that had happened.

It took us a couple of days to appreciate the strength of the event with the fence. It had to happen very suddenly and involved breaking five 4x4 posts, smashing the fence against two trees with breaking of boards, and breaking other boards in the middle. Marty was sitting out on his carport two houses down from us when the strong wind event happened. He saw the trampoline behind Lindell's house across the street fly around the house, and saw horizontal rain bursts traveling down Moody Lane. It was very quick.

It was quite calm after these events, and later in the afternoon we walked out to the street to talk with Courtney. A tree had blown onto her house across the street and punched through her bedroom ceiling, leaving ceiling debris in her bedroom. Roy Vaughn was there putting a tarp over that corner of her house. The house just diagonally across Moody Lane had major roof damage from a blown-down tree and they were tarping most of the house. Not until the next day did I realize that it had blown down the awning structure over Lindell's basement door. So the main force of the wind burst had been on the left side of Moody Lane, and our fence was the only significant damage on the right side. On Friday the 13th the insurance estimator visited us to examine the fence and also examined the roof to assure us that there was no storm damage there.

We were seeing images of the damage to the Premier Products building on Oak Ridge Parkway on the news along with comments about damage on Ivy Log Drive in the Camerons Crossing subdivision across the creek from us. On Saturday we drove over to have a look. It was sad to see the extensive house damage from falling trees. From the news we heard of severe damage to 18 houses and displacement of the residents from 14 houses. From the image above it can be seen that two of the major damage sites were about a quarter of a mile from our house across the creek.

On Monday Rod and Brenda went out to cut back the ivy and assess the situation. With Marty's help we partially stood up part of the fence, but are still thinking about the path to repair.

By 7pm on Thursday the Weather Channel was posting the extimate of the number of reported tornadoes associated with this stormy afternoon. There was some ambiguity about whether the storm in our area was a tornado or just strong straight line winds. But you can see the line of multiple reported tornadoes traveling all the way across Alabama and directly toward our location in Georgia west of Atlanta. There was terrible damage in Selma, Alabama and also severe damage in Lagrange and Griffin, Georgia.