Georgia Storms: A Personal Account

Many of you know about the tornado that struck downtown Atlanta on Friday. And maybe some of you know that the same storm that hit Atlanta hit us in Savannah.

Well I'll just share what I know happened in Savannah last night.

Starting around 3 or 4 pm(EST),the wind picked up. Not too bad, but it was a bit strong. At 6:00 pm, we watched the news and the counties northwest were in warnings-though they did say they thought it would miss us here in Savannah.

Around 9:30 pm the lights start flashing, now this is pretty normal for us in this town. Not good, but not out of the norm. But it got me thinking, and it was flashing more than they do on other stormy days. So we shut down the computer and unplugged it and some other important items. We sat at the table and brought a flash light with us, at this time we didn't know of any warnings or watches because we didn't have TV on, or a radio.

At 10:00 pm,the whole city of savannah and some other outlaying cities and counties nearby went into blackout. We are used to this, and I expected it. So we moved into the sunroom where we can watch the skies and see the cars drive by, giving us some type of light. I put on my mp3/radio player on and started listening for warnings and watches as we saw lightning that isn't normal. It didn't have 5 seconds before the next lightning struck. Plus no thunder.

I started to worry, but my mp3 player ran out of power, so I got my cell phone. We watched the storm head east of us, and pretty much skip Savannah. We were happy about that, and felt that the threat was over. This was around 11:00 pm,and still no power.

At 11:15 a tornado warning was issued for my part of the county, we first heard the sirens wail and I quickly looked up warnings on my cell phone. I kept it close by just in case. We got up my whole family and hid, for about 15 minutes. Then the warning expired because it had weaken a lot. It took a burden off my back. We stayed up checking updates, and we heard that the power was out because of a tornado.

It made sense as the odd lightning we saw earlier. And we still had no power at 2:00 pm.

We stayed up until 3:00 and wanted to go back into our beds. So we did, we were out of the watches and warnings. But I still felt uneasy. I rested until 6:00 this morning. I didn't really sleep.

I got up and the power was still out, for 8 hours long by that time. I heard another radio I found and heard of no new updates.

Out power was restored at 8:00 am this morning. So we were happier.

I am 100% happy that we didn't get hit, like some other sisters cities did. We are truly blessed.

At of this time, I have heard no deaths in my area and only one down power line.

It just shows you that mother nature can be frightful and at the same time, skip her wrath on you all together.