Storm Clean-up Efforts Continue

Clean-up efforts continue from a powerful early morning storm that destroyed one business and damaged several other structures, including homes, barns, sheds, Smithville Elementary School, and the county administrative building under construction, formerly known as the Town and Country Shopping Center.
South Congress BP Convenience Market Destroyed from dwayne page on Vimeo.
Many are still unsettled on whether the storm actually spawned a tornado. Officials who make that determination apparently have not made an evaluation but the high winds ripped apart the South Congress BP convenience market on Highway 56 south.
Click here to listen to Emergency Management Agency Coordinator Charlie Parker for the latest update on the storm damage.
Charlie Parker, DeKalb County Emergency Management Agency Coordinator, told WJLE that no one was injured during the storm which struck around 1:00 a.m. “It looks like a possible tornado. I know the weather service likes to make the official determination on that but it looks like it had a path. We went back and surveyed the damage. It started somewhere around Short Mountain Highway where Larry Summers’ barns and equipment shed are located. It did a lot of damage to his barn roofs. It went onto the BP station. Most of the damage between the two (locations) is where there are large trees and limbs that are broken out, knocked over, or twisted. It’s kind of a path from there onto the BP Station (on South Congress Boulevard) and then over behind the county building (Town and Country Shopping Center) and Smithville Elementary School,” said Parker.
“We had trees down on College Street, Meadowbrook and Green Acre Drive, Braswell Lane, and Jacobs Pillar Road. Green Meadow and Greenwood had some trees down. On Green Acre and Meadowbrook we had some trees that actually fell on houses. There was one on Braswell Lane also where a tree fell onto a house. It did a fair amount of damage to them. Nobody was hurt but it still did some pretty good damage to the house. At least three houses that we could tell had some fairly significant damage. There were other houses that looked like they had shingle and roof damage and maybe to some siding in the Bright Hill and Meadowbrook areas. Once it (storm) left the Bright Hill area, there was a building shed at the builders supply (Potter’s Home Center) that received damage. On past that, there were reports of trees that were down in the edge of the roadways but that was not very extensive. Most of the damage was in the city in the Congress Boulevard area,” said Parker.