Friday storms brought warning, but no tornado activity
A string of severe thunderstorms that prompted a tornado warning for Gilmer County last Friday didn’t result in any known tornadic activity here, although conditions were almost on point for that type of destructive event.
“We didn’t experience (anything) that would’ve prompted the weather service to come out and investigate for tornado activity,” said Keith Kucera, Gilmer County Public Safety director.
The rain and wind were heaviest during mid-afternoon around 3-4 p.m. Gilmer County Schools released students early, while several county offices also closed early as a precaution.
The main things Gilmer Fire and Rescue responded to during the stormy day were calls about downed trees, Kucera noted.
“We had probably a dozen downed trees. As far as any significant damage throughout the county (like) trees down on houses, we don’t know of any,” he added. “The road department took care of the lion’s share of the trees. The fire department coordinated with the road department to make sure we had plenty of crews available with chain saws and all the proper safety equipment. We ramped up our communication so we could talk back and forth when we had trees down.”
Mike Dempsey, Ellijay Fire Department assistant chief, said, call-wise, it was actually pretty quiet during the storms.
“We didn’t run any major calls, and we didn’t have any flooding, which was surprising because of as much rain as we got,” he added. “We caught some wind and sideways rain, a whole lot of it in a short time, but it got out of here in a hurry and was gone.”
The wind was strong enough to rip tin from the roof of the Ellijay Pepsi plant on Sailors Drive.
“There was a secondary roof under it, so luckily it wasn’t as bad as it looked because there’s still a roof there,” said Craig McFarland, the plant’s supervisor. “We had everything cleaned up, and a crew came out to get all the loose tin that had blown off. ETC also came out and put their phone and internet wires back up. We’re all good now. We just have to have a new roof.”
Employees who were working in the Pepsi warehouse moved into offices and hunkered down after the tornado warning was issued a little after 3 o’clock that afternoon, McFarland confirmed.
“There had been high winds all day, and it got pretty rough there,” he added. “We’ve never had that here before, but we were lucky and very thankful the Lord helped us get through that.”
A total of 4,670 Gilmer County Amicalola Electric customers lost power, and the northern part and northwestern corner of the county seemed to be the hardest hit, noted Stacey Fields, Amicalola EMC representative.
“Outages began coming in around noon on Friday. The majority were restored by early Saturday morning, but there were a few that were restored mid-afternoon on Saturday,” Fields said.
Ryan Steingruber, Gilmer County Public Works director, said other than several downed trees, the severe weather didn’t cause extensive damage like some past storms with high winds and heavy rain.
Most of the downed tree calls were in the areas of Clear Creek, Big Creek, Whitepath and Cherry Log, he noted.
“We didn’t receive anything like (washed out) culverts or anything like that. It could’ve been a whole lot worse,” said Steingruber.