Atlanta tornado discussion

[Jeff Pahl]

Well, I can confirm that it's pretty ugly in Atlanta. I was there last night, and the three hours of local news that I watched in my hotel room did not look good. A lot of the contents and pieces of the Omni hotel were in the street. Pieces of the roof and sides at Phillips arena were missing. At least one hole in the roof at the dome. A broken water line inside the GWCC somewhere was running down one of the interior staircases like a waterfall. As I went through downtown on the interstate very early this morning to get to the airport to come back home, a large swath of buildings still did not have power. Billboards and interstate exit signs were just missing. And apparently it is worse to the east of the dome area, where at least 20 houses were flattened, and a condo building collapsed. The fire department did not excpect to have the condo building structurally stabilized enough to even search until tomorrow.

Please keep all those who were injured and killed (at least one that I know of), and all those involved in the clean up, in your thoughts and prayers.

Yes, if you have reservations at the Omni you probably want to call them, but wait until Monday... They have enough problems right now, the SEC basketball tourney is this weekend (there was a game in progress when the tornado hit the dome). Not only did they lose all the glass on one side of the building, but it looked like the ceiling tiles and insulation, along with some of the chairs, lamps, etc, were sucked out. Hopefully they will have it fixed in a month, but there is a lot of work to do.

Oh, yea, the Westin Peachtree Plaza (the tall round hotel with the outside glass elevator) has a bunch of windows out, too, so if you are staying there you might also want to check with them.

And, also, the Peachtree Regional is this weekend on the northeast side of ATL, and then NWS just issued a tornado warning for a couple miles north of the regional site.