Georgia ARES Groups and the April 1998 Atlanta Tornadoes

Edward Hill, KE4JCG, Douglas County ARES member

Photos by Linda Blankenship

One elderly man died, many were injured and hundreds of houses were destroyed in the series of tornadoes that swept through Marietta, Roswell, Norcross, and north Atlanta on April 8 of 1998.

Wednesday night we had big thunderstorms. The weather service said that Marietta had been hit badly by tornadoes. The doppler radar showed tornadoes near Roswell. Numerous cars on Interstate 75 were flipped over. The power failed and we switched to flashlights, radio and the ham radio for news.

We were too wired up to sleep. The ham radio storm network (SKYWARN) was operating. Radio operators in Roswell and then our neighborhood, Norcross, started reporting hail, high winds and tornado damage. We heard the heavy rain increase drastically then slack off. The wind outside began to increase. The trees were loudly cracking and swaying outside.

The windows started popping and vibrating like they would break, as the wind noise increase to a steady dull roar. We went into the hall of our apartment, and then the closet, away from the windows. My wife and I, and especially our child began to feel very uneasy. About 12:30 am it got totally quiet for a several seconds and we stayed in the closet.

Suddenly an eery low pitched moaning sound began to get very loud. It got louder like being next to a train. It kept getting louder like it wouldn't stop. Little Brandon was scared, so we held him. The wind came back even stronger than before. 

This sounds impossible but the walls seemed to be vibrating a little. The windows kept cracking and popping. I thought the glass might fly in to the apartment. It must have been the tornado passing over us. The weird moaning wind sound got louder and suddenly the sound died away. It scared the hell out of me.

I went outside with a Petzl caving head-lamp shortly and our apartment building had lost tarpaper, shingles and had big patches of siding ripped off. But the stand of maybe 30 pine trees 20 feet outside our bedroom window was gone. They were all clipped off about 12 feet above the ground.

The tornado must have skipped over us because it didn't destroy our building. The powerlines from the street were sagging down to the ground under a tree trunk and arcing with a weird blue light. It was still raining so I stayed far away from it so I wouldn't be electrocuted. I went home to sleep.

Thursday morning the roads around our apartment were jammed with emergency vehicles, hundreds of evacuating families on foot, a few broken cars blocking the street,  broken trees, splintered telephone poles, building lumber and wall materials. Tree-smashed cars, broken glass, shingles, siding material, pink or yellow insulation, and electrical power lines where everywhere. It looked like a bomb tore up all the apartments, stores and houses.

Big crowds of people walked around in the streets like it was some freakish street carnival. There was so much debris the police just closed off Holcomb Bridge Road (a major traffic artery). I wanted to go to my office around 1 pm so I had to drive quite a ways around the damaged area.

Friday we had no power and the food in the refrigertor was ruined. Fortunately, we still had water and canned foods to cook with my backpacking stove. The power was restored to our neighborhood by late that night. Some neighborhoods would have no power for days. Saturday, electric power was still out in many other neighborhoods.

I volunteered with a Red Cross damage assessment team on Saturday and the damage near Duluth and Berkely Lakes was intense. Fifty of the ham radio guys from radio clubs in Atlanta used our two-meter radios to help the Red Cross damage teams, and the food trucks communicate between each other. We set up an antenna and base radio at the emergency victims shelter set up at the high school.  The Red Cross provided food and sleeping space in the gym for all the families that had their apartments or homes destroyed.

The radios were helpful because all cell phone circuits were clogged and used continuously with emergency traffic. Some telephone lines and Fire department radio relay towers were knocked down in the ten mile long tornado zone. I heard one damage assessment team summon EMT's for a 58 year old man with heart trouble using the radios. In Dekalb county they assigned ham radio people to ride with the Fire trucks and provide communications until the trunk radio relay system was restored. Most neighborhoods still had no power or no water.

We ran into a Georgia Forestry crew of 12 men sawing and clearing trees. They had used up their water in the stifling heat so we requested more water from the Red Cross shelter. The water was contaminated in that neighborhood.

The two Red Cross volunteers did the damage assessment and then I radioed in the damage reports and requests from the home owners for info to Ham Radio volunteers at the Red Cross center. We counted over 60 houses with holes in the roof or missing walls, windows and doors. We must have covered over two hundred houses that day.

Two houses on top of the hill there had the entire back walls and portions of roof removed with their living rooms open to the sky. The families were moving all their furniture out on Saturday. They all complained that the moving companies were charging four to ten times the normal rate. But they paid it any way.

When we stopped to eat our lunch in the supermarket parking lot, there were almost a hundred power company trucks from different surrounding counties that were being dispatched to different neighborhoods. In the grocery store all of the the bottled water was gone. The shelves had been cleaned out of foods that didn't need cooking. There was plenty of fruit so we ate that.

All the neighbors were out in the street or up on the roof trying to put tarps over the holes in the roof to protect their furniture from the impending rain storm. We didn't see any looting, although we heard the police arrested a few looters. Some home owners had guns in their belts as a looter deterrent.

The Red Cross, Salvation Army, ARES and other volunteers did a great job helping their communities in the first weeks after the tornado damage.