Storms rips through downtown Atlanta
Here’s hoping none of you lost friends or family to downed trees, and that in the end, there isn’t massive property damage to the “little people”. 
just saw the news on cnn. it looked like a scary time in the georgia dome.
the mayor is due to speak at noon atlanta time. and more strong storms on the way.
i hope eveyone is okay, and that they can check in soon.
Is there a map of the tornado path?
they just bumped up the conference due to a line of storms incoming.
it was an f2 tornado that started around cimson? simpson? cinaminson? and bank, went to olympic park,cnn centre, georgia dome, then to i85, cabbagetown, and slammed the cotton mills lofts.
they are under a tornado watch until 7pm tonight.
From our corporate overlords at Creative Loafing. 
The tornado was a few blocks south of me. (I’m up near Freedom Park.) Got a lot of wind, though, and rivers of rain.
The Cabbagetown neighborhood, which caught the brunt of the storm, is an interesting place. It started life as a factory village built in the shadow of the Fulton Bag Mill. The mill workers were mostly my fellow hillbillies from north Georgia, who brought their culture and music with them. There are different stories about how the neighborhood got its name, but the one that rings true to me is that you could walk through it and smell the cabbage all the poor people were cooking.
You could argue that the country music industry has its roots in this neighborhood. A lot of the mill workers spent their downtime sitting around on their porches playing mountain music and swapping musical ideas. Out of that milieu came Fiddlin’ John Carson, who was working as a painter in Cabbagetown when he took his fiddle into the studio of Atlanta’s WSB in 1922. He was an instant hit with radio listeners, a fact which soon got the attention of record companies. A wave of other “hillbilly” acts followed: The Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers…and country music was born.
For years after the bag mill closed, Cabbagetown was a sort of hillbilly ghetto, producing all the crime, violence and drug issues you’d expect from any impoverished neighborhood. In recent years, it has seen a rebirth, as the bag mill was converted into lofts, and a lot of the houses nearby were bought up by young professionals. (There are still a few straggler hillbilly families around, though.)
I never would have thought it possible to gentrify shotgun shacks, but if you visit Cabbagetown, that’s exactly what you’ll see.
It’s very sad for me to see the place wrecked by this storm.
sorry! that should be originating near simpson and burbank.
I had really hoped it was merely a bad storm, and not actually a tornado. 
Do you think they will get insurance help to rebuild, or have they just pretty well suffered a big financial disaster that may end in ruin?
There will be insurance coverage. But expect the insurance companies to quibble over what losses, exactly, are covered. (For example, there’s a lot of gray area between wind damage, which is generally covered, and water damage, which may not be, depending on the precise circumstances. Likewise expect quibbling over coverage for debris removal, and over hotel stays during repairs.)
And then there are the policies structured so that the insurer doesn’t have any obligation to reimburse you until after you rebuild. Oh, those will be fun.
Quibbling is what insurance companies do.
nod That’s what I was thinking would likely happen. Same kinds of things that happened in Coffeyville Kansas after the flood with the forty two thousand gallons of oil spilled into the waters, and sewage. The east side of town was flooded, and lots of people displaced. (For a town that size.) I wish there were a way to curtail such practices, I don’t know how to do it without creating further problems, but it needs doing.
I went to bed early since moving has worn me out so you can imagine the surprise when I saw the headlines on Yahoo about a tornado in Atlanta. I heard thunder overnight but nothing too bad. I read the article but kept checking the date (in case it was April 1) and re-checking the city AND state because I didn’t believe it. Finally checked the local news on tv - was a shock!
The radar was fascinating all day (as long as you were south of the next tornado…)
I’m in Duluth, about 35 miles NE of Atlanta – Friday night was uneventful, with only light rain. Saturday afternoon, around 4PM, we had a severe storm pass through that dropped 3/4" hail for a few minutes. There were a number of tornadoes north of here on Saturday, but I haven’t seen any reports of damage or injuries.
I had just typed a long reply (Pulitzer material, too) when I deleted it by virtue of my fat fingers.
Suffice to say, my wife and I were in Phillips Arena when the tornado went through. Had we left when I intially suggested we would have been on the top of the CNN parking deck when it touched down. My wife cares naught about pro basketball. I won the tickets and parking pass in a drawing at work. This was just a date night for us. What made her want to stay another 15 minutes to watch a blow out win in a sport she doesn’t follow — well, I have my opinions. I’ll let you supply your own.
200 million dollars in damage and no loss of life. Not even a pet has been reported killed. On our way home we drove through parts of the city where it looked like a large bomb went off. Simply amazing.
-and what you’d see if you were standing in front of my house!
Saturday when the sky turned green and the rain was going more horizontal than verticle, I took what solace I could in the fact that my house has been here since 1930; was one more day too much to ask?
I was out driving around about five miles away when it hit. The lightening was incredible, and there was some hail, and some little voice in my head said ‘tornado weather’, but I didn’t know anything had actually happened until the next morning. I have clients in Cabbagetown and nearby, and spent a lot of the morning checking up on people, but thankfully none of them got hit. One had a tree land on her house, but it was a smaller tree and a sturdy roof. I’ve seen at least half a dozen houses that seem mostly flattened by the huge old trees that uprooted and landed on them. Could have been a lot worse.
We were incredibly lucky, just lost some limbs out here in the 'burbs.
The same storm that ripped up downtown passed over my neighborhood, just gave us a lot of rain and wind, a little bit of hail.
Usually I grumble when I have to go haul all the lumber off the lawn (we have a lot of old oaks, which are very brittle and rain down a lot with any storm), but this time around I was very thankful.
Wow, somebody got a great picture of the tornado during a lightning flash. (This picture is looking southeast toward downtown. Tornado is on the left side of pic. The picture was apparently taken after the tornado had passed through downtown, and while it was hitting Cabbagetown.) Scary.
