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Within a Room
Leslie Maxwell / Columnist
By now, all of you are probably familiar with the photographs and news videos of the tornado damage in South Georgia. For many of you, the tragedy was still distant although the tornadoes occurred less than 150 miles from here.
Well, the tragedy wasn’t so distant for me. Although my parents and close friends weathered the storm in safety, many people in my church community were left without homes and loved ones.
The victims of the storm ranged from the elderly to a young mother and her 7 month old daughter.
The disaster has touched the lives of everyone in Grady and Mitchell Counties in one way or another (Houses in Colquitt County were also damaged, but I don’t have much information about the effects of the storm there).
I went home this weekend to see first hand the devastation that the tornadoes left behind them last Sunday night.
On the drive home, I had to pass through Camilla, the town that suffered the worst of the storm.
I was amazed to see full-grown pecan trees uprooted and large pine trees snapped off like twigs. On the side of the highway, a piece of a roof lay turned upside-down, the rafters sticking up like exposed ribs.
Some houses were barely damaged while others were reduced to small (and I mean small) pieces.
It was chilling. I always thought that tornadoes like that only happened in other parts of the country, not in South Georgia—not only fractions of a mile away from my friends and family.
When I finally got home, I sat reading through the newspapers that my mom had saved for me. I was greeted by huge headlines like “PULVERIZED,” “NIGHTMARE,” and “Just Devastated.” Headlines from later in the week read “Picking up the Pieces,” and “They never knew what hit them.” Reading all of the details made the tragedy really sink in for the first time since it happened.
The storm obviously affected those who lost lives, homes, farm equipment, vehicles, and even pets, but also affected many others in the two counties — especially the emergency teams and hospital workers.
The Mitchell County Hospital, a small facility with only 33 beds, treated over 120 patients.
The newspaper account described the hospital as looking like a “bloody battlefield.”
The news story also described an elderly lady with an injury unrelated to the tornadoes. She sat patiently for hours while letting the storm victims get treatment ahead of her.
Some of my close friends, one paramedic and several volunteer firemen, worked in the aftermath of the storm transporting the injured and recovering the bodies. There weren’t many smiles among that group this weekend.
When I asked my paramedic friend about the storm, he commented, with his typical grim sense of humor, “It blew.” (And that’s the only thing he would let me quote him on.)
But, in the aftermath of it all, I guess we can be thankful that it wasn’t worse. Out of the 300 or more houses that were hit, only 20 people were killed.
Many people survived the storm by sheltering themselves in the only part of their house that was left standing after the storm.
One young man shut himself in the utility closet of his trailer, only to emerge and find the closet intact and the rest of his house blown away.
He directed the camera crew to two pieces of wood that had blown against the exposed closet wall and stayed there — in the shape of a cross.
Some people may take that as a coincidence, but I think that someone was looking out for a lot of people last Sunday night.
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