24 hours to remember

     For days weather people warned of the possibility of bad storms coming our way. Those storms arrived here at 10 p.m. on April 28th.

   We were watching TV that night and the local station kept cutting in with reports of storms in Mississippi and Alabama. One huge tormado touched down in Tuscaloosa, AL and leveled a large part of the city . A little later several super cell thunderstorms with embedded tornados crossed the state line into Georgia and skirted pass Rome, a city west of us.The next report was golf ball sized hail on the ground about 30 miles from us, so we gathered the animals and headed for the lower level of our villa.

    It was raining and blowing pretty hard around 10 p.m. and the sky was alive with lightening when the power went off. Text messages from friends and family on Lydia's cell phone warned of more storms heading toward us, so we stayed downstairs. We declared an "all clear" around midnight, returned upstairs, and went to bed.

I got up at 7am the next morning to sunshine and blue skies. As I stepped outside to walk the dog, I discovered a tree laying on my car. The top of a large oak had been twisted off. Later that morning I hiked around our area and discovered the path of the tornado about 100 yards west of our villa. During the day, we heard reports that a tornado ripped through Bent Tree taking down lots of trees and power lines. Fortunately, there were no injuries and property damage to homes was minimal, a miracle considering all the trees here.  Our power came on about 4 p.m. on Thursday, but others were out until Friday evening. Roads are passable here not, but the clean up will take months.

  Hope you stayed safe where you are.