High winds wreak havoc

Mark Millican
markmillican@daltoncitizen.com

April 13, 2009 08:52 pm

— A huge limb crashing into his truck served as Charles Ballew’s alarm clock Monday morning.
“It sounded like a big crack of thunder that echoes,” the Chatsworth resident said. “I jumped up and out of bed.”
What Ballew discovered sometime between 5 and 6 a.m. was that his pickup was spared a hit by the trunk of the massive oak supporting the limb, but the damage was done. Only a standing tree on the other side of his home at Fort Street and Fifth Avenue — catching the falling tree — prevented his roof from being damaged.
A Murray 911 operator said the agency had “50 to 60 calls” of trees down across the county by 8 a.m., after high winds of up to 40 mph raked north Georgia. But it didn’t stop the school buses from rolling.
“We got all the kids in safe thanks to the (Murray County) road department,” said transportation director Johnny Ward. Whitfield County schools are on spring break this week.
In western Whitfield, a large pine tree was uprooted by the wind and smashed the back bedroom of an unoccupied mobile home on East Lee Drive.
“I’d actually been expecting the (pine) tree next to it to fall first since it was leaning,” said Dewayne McClure of Westside, whose late grandparents once occupied the single-wide trailer. Another neighbor said she was “blessed” to have slept through the high winds and did not hear the crash.
The Rocky Face and Varnell communities also had several trees down on side roads that had to be cut away by county crews.
North Georgia Electrical Membership Corporation reported approximately 20,000 customers out of power across their seven-county service area as power lines also fell, and 3,400 outages in Murray and Whitfield.
“Multiple poles were broken in the Whitfield-Murray area,” said spokesman Jeff Rancudo. “Crews are working all the major outages, and the number of people without power is going down as the day progresses.”
Rancudo said there will still around 100 outages at 5:30 p.m. in the northern sections of both counties, and that crews would work into the evening until power was completely restored.
Utility officials said many trees were falling because the ground remains heavily saturated due to recent rains. They advise calling the local power company or 911 when lines fall instead of trying to move them.
Staff writer and photographer Misty Watson contributed to this report.

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