Southern Storms

[dixiechick]

TweetI don't know how many of you were paying any attention to the weather this weekend, but for those of us that live in the South... we had a pretty wild weekend.

Tornados hit downtown Atlanta Friday night, and it looked like a war zone. I couldn't believe the damage. I heard about it Saturday morning on the radio while I was getting dressed. We were going to ATL to visit my family. They live in a 'burs outside of east of ATL, so they didn't get hit. I missed the weather report some how, and we packed up the truck to take some things to my mom and left. It was just extremely cloudy and had stopped raining, but we had some pretty bad t-storms at our place.

Then my mom calls. She was being a concerned mom giving us an update on the weather. Apparently tornados warnings were still issued in the metro ATL area, so we told her we would be careful. Then she started calling ever 15 to 20 mins with tornado update. LOL It was about to drive us batty. We were getting off the exit about 20 miles from where the tornado were headed, and we were an 1 hour out for reaching that exit. When we reached our exit, the bottom dropped out. We pulled over at the exit to get something to eat. Mom calls us with an update, and they were in their basement because of warnings. The rain let up, and we headed out. We were almost to my parents and it started turning black, raining with a little hail. My husband decided to pull over. He spotted a former bank with two teller lanes, and we pulled into one of the lanes. That when the hail started coming down and getting bigger by the minute. It quickly turned into marble size and at times was the size of hard peppermint candy (red & white stripped kind). My called again and said another warning was in effect for an area and it was headed their way. They were back in the basement, and she wanted to know where we were. We were right in the middle of it!

So the wind never picked up, but it rain so hard we couldn't hardly see across the street. The hail continued to come down covering the ground. I have never seen anything like it. When the rain let up, it left the ground almost white. It was wild. As the hail started melting, the sun came out for a minute and fog covered the ground making it look even wilder.

Thankfully the tornado never touched down; however, two did touch down but we weren't in those areas. Here are pictures of the ground after it stopped hailing and raining.

crap... the photos are too big to attach. I'd have a program to make them smaller. I'll have to edit them at work tomorrow.

[space mountain]

Tweetyea i have people that lives just 20 min from downtown.! i called them first thing. they were fine but business near their work got damaged..all we got was heavy rains and thunderstorms

[Deno]

Tweetyeah... i'm glad you folks from Atlanta are safe.

[dixiechick]

TweetSM... good to hear that your people were all ok. I guess that it hit after most people were home from work. There were a lot of people in town for the b-ball tournaments and the conventions at GWCC.

Here are the photos after the hail storm.