Feeding units, chainsaw crews bring relief in tornado sites

Joe Westbury, Managing Editor

Martha Grissom, a member of Eastside Baptist Church in Marietta, piles cut branches onto a sidewalk for removal by city cleanup crews in the Cabbagetown community.

ATLANTA — Georgia Baptist disaster relief crews ministered in three locations in areas hit by a string of tornados that rolled across the state March 14-15. Downtown Atlanta was hardest hit in the first round of storms with nearly $150 million in damages.

The tornado, with winds reaching 135 miles an hour, hit the Georgia Dome and Philips Arena as Southeastern Conference basketball and Atlanta Hawks games, respectively, were underway. The Georgia World Congress Center received major damage. It was the first tornado to strike downtown since record keeping began in the 1800s, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Streets were littered with glass from hundreds of windows that were blown out of the city’s skyscrapers. 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 were onsite 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.

Cleanup and recovery unit 13R from Noonday Association and 19R from Sarepta Association removed rubble and downed trees in the historic Atlanta neighborhood. Lang said chaplains were also mobilized for Cabbagetown and Wrens.

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

In Wrens, two units were 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, operated out of Wrens Baptist Church. About 400 meals were prepared by the feeding unit.

Joe Westbury, Managing Editor

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.

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.

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. In February, two units were called out for a 48-hour response to a tornado that touched down west of Atlanta.