Gainesville, GA Weather Event March 15, 2008

It was quite a weekend here in North Georgia. It started on Friday evening with the tornado hitting downtown Atlanta. I was amazed at the coverage and the discussion about the fact that tornadoes have not hit large cities. Guess everyone forgot about Lubbock, Texas in 1970. If the same twister had hit downtown Atlanta at the hour it did, there would have been much more loss of life and damage. Check the link below for a bit of history on the Lubbock event.
http://lubbockonline.com/lubbock_tornado/stories/20Years/022.shtml

The storms started in Gainesville early Saturday morning and kept on coming and coming and coming until late in the afternoon. The next two pictures are at the intersection of McEven and Dawsonville Highway where a micro burst took down several power poles and left that area in the dark for much of the night while the power company crews worked to replace poles and get everything back to normal.

Pictured below is the size hail that hit my house. This is slightly smaller since I waited until it stopped to go out and pick up the samples. I guess I could have put on my bike helmet and gone out. No real damage here at the house.

The photo below came from www.accessnorthga.com and shows a couple of the stones that fell in the Oakwood area and compares them to a penny. These are the type that fell in the Browns Bridge road automobile dealer row and damaged a lot of the new vehicles on the lots. Look for future hail discount sales - there should be some good deals to be had if you don't mind a ding or three in the finish.

Saturday evening, all the mess had passed over and life was somewhat back to normal unless you wanted to eat at one of the many places in the Dawsonville/McEver stretch including Chilis, Texas Roadhouse, Panera Bread, Atlanta Bread, Outback, and several other places that I don't remember all the names. That was a windfall for the Browns Bridge road restaurant row I am sure. As for me, I had a free meal at Ryan's so we eneded up there. Never turn down a free meal.