The severe weather finally abated, and it's beautiful here today. The Atlanta paper said that there's a minimum of $150 million worth of damage to downtown Atlanta. From looking at the footage on the news, it looks like it will be worse than that! There were two tornadoes that hit the downtown Atlanta area, the worst one being Friday night. Lots of houses/apartments are damaged or destroyed. One of the people who died in Polk County, north of Atlanta, got sucked right out of her house (the house was just a pile of sticks afterwards), along with her husband, and tossed across a field. Her husband is severely injured but alive. She was a retired veterinarian and raised dogs (didn't hear what breed). I think that rescuers found about 7 dead dogs and some were missing - so sad.
What's really amazing is that an SEC basketball championship game was being played in the Georgia Dome Fri. night, and one of the players had just hit a 3 point shot to tie up the game and send it into overtime, right before the tornado hit. If he'd missed that shot, the people would have been leaving the Dome and would have been out in the streets when it hit instead of inside watching the game (it hit the Georgia Dome, the World Congress Center, CNN headquarters, and Centennial Olympic Park, among other places)! The uncle of one of my son's friends was at that game and got a cut on his head from flying debris in the Dome (bolts from the ceiling started falling, and part of the ceiling caved in a little). He's ok, thank goodness. Wow!!
