Disaster relief crews ministering at tornado sites

Joe WestburyIndex

Cabbagetown resident Rebecca Anne Young, left, expresses appreciation to disaster relief worker Marvin Sibley, center, and chaplain Ron Brent, right, upon learning that Georgia Baptist volunteers will remove the tree from her roof at no cost. The 18-year resident of the historic neighborhood had received two bids for $3,500 to remove the large tree which blew over onto her 1920s-era house. "This is just awesome...this news makes be feel so much better because I just don't have that kind of money," she told the volunteers. The workers will also repair the roof damage at no cost. Many of the residents of the area hardest hit by the storm had little or no insurance to cover such losses. Sibley and Brent are members of Hebron Baptist Church in Dacula.

ATLANTA – Georgia Baptist disaster relief crews are on site in three locations that were hit by a string of tornados that rolled across the state Friday and Saturday.

Downtown Atlanta was hardest hit on Friday night with nearly $150 million in damages while outlying areas received varying degrees of damage. The tornado, with winds reaching 135 miles an hour, was on the ground for six miles before it hit the Georgia Dome and Philips Arena that were filled with sports events. It was the first tornado to strike downtown since record keeping began in the 1800s, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The downtown area was declared to be in a state of emergency by both the city and state, which allowed government funds to be released to areas with more than $11 million in damages. Many streets near Centennial Park and CNN Center remained closed to traffic on Monday.

Streets were littered with glass from hundreds of windows that were blown out of the city’s sky scrapers. The Omni Hotel said about 467 rooms in its South Tower will be closed two weeks for repairs.

A second major storm passed through the downtown area again on Saturday, further escalating the damage and hindering cleanup efforts.

Two fatalities were recorded following the weekend storms, both outside the city in rural parts of the state. No Baptists were among those with serious injuries.

As bad as the Atlanta tornado was, damage could have been far greater if the second storm, which touched down Saturday in rural Polk, Floyd, and Bartow counties, had hit downtown. That tornado was nearly five times wider and stayed on the ground almost three times as long, the newspaper reported.

Stuart Lang, who coordinates disaster relief ministry for the state convention, said units are serving in the downtown community of Cabbagetown, in Aragon an hour north of the city near Cartersville, and in Wrens about 30 minutes west of Augusta.

Joe WestburyIndex

Martha Grissom, a member of Eastside Baptist Church in Marietta, piles cut branches onto a sidewalk for removal by city cleanup crews. Grissom was one of about a dozen Georgia Baptist disaster relief workers who were ministering in the Cabbagetown neighborhood near the city's historic Oakland Cemetery, which was also hard hit by the March 14-15 tornados.

Unit 13R, a cleanup and recovery unit from Noonday Baptist Association near Marietta, is removing rubble and downed trees in the historic Atlanta neighborhood which received heavy damage. Lang said chaplains were also being mobilized and were expected to be on site late Monday or on Tuesday. About 10 volunteer disaster relief workers are serving in the setting.

“We could easily be on location in Cabbagetown for the majority of this week as we respond to needs,” Lang said.

A second cleanup and recovery unit of a half-dozen volunteers, 8R from the Dalton area in northwest Georgia, is serving in Polk County where 36 homes were damaged and where one of the area’s two fatalities were recorded.

In Wrens, two units have been dispatched to provide ministry services in the rural community. Unit 2F, a feeding unit from Thomson and unit 4R, a cleanup and recovery unit from Wrens, is operating out of Wrens Baptist Church.

Gayle Swan, secretary at the church about 30 miles west of Augusta, said none of the congregation’s 600 members received serious damage to their homes. However, the Red Cross did designate the church as a shelter and the congregation housed three families on Saturday night. The church is without a pastor.

Swan said the tornado was one of about 14 storms of varying intensities that raked the area and left a path of destruction across the neighboring state line into South Carolina. The Atlanta newspaper reported the Wrens tornado, which touched down at 6:25 p.m. on Saturday, was a quarter-mile wide and left a 19-mile path of destruction.

The weekend’s mobilization is only the second time this year that Georgia disaster relief units have been activated. Three weeks ago two units were called out for a 48-hour response to a tornado that touched down west of Atlanta.