Category Archives: weather

atlanta, weather

Thundersnow in Atlanta

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I think it’s been some twenty years since I actually experienced that rare phenonmenon known as ‘thundersnow.’ But that’s just what we had today in Atlanta. Aside from it being March, and that we haven’t had an accumulating snowfall in at least four+ years, the thundersnow was icing on the cake. It’s so eerie the way the sound is muffled by the thick, heavy snow. I’ll never forget a nighttime storm in Boston years ago when I was out photowalking, and saw lightning illuminating the inside of the snow clouds. Amazing. Don’t expect this storm to have enough legs to make it to the evening hours here – it reportedly is going to even dust my hometown of Savannah after midnight tonight. Craziness.

Photos above are from a brief walk around Grant Park with Sam this afternoon. Both his shoes and my own were quickly soaked through from the copious amounts of slushy mix on the ground. Sam (and dad) enjoyed it immensely.

grantpark, weather, xbox360

Arcing

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Arcing, originally uploaded by jetrotz.

Yes, that’s a powerline sparking and arcing as two lines crossed during the high winds yesterday. After a fabulous weekend celebrating Amy’s birthday (Saturday) and her being the best mom ever (other than my mom and hers ;-)), which we spent eating (Cuerno on Saturday night and Shaun’s for Sunday brunch) topped off with 7-th row seats to Jon Stewart’s show at the Cobb Center, I was relaxing and editing some photos on my computer on Sunday afternoon.

Shortly thereafter, I began to hear popping sounds outside the window, and saw the fireworks display of two live wires crossing as a tree branch pushed them together from the high winds we were experiencing. Shortly thereafter I began to hear those same sounds INSIDE our home, and began to frantically shut down and simply yank plugs on the computer gear in front of me. Turns out those sounds (and the smell of burnt electronics) were just a few appliances being fried, and no fire ensued, although we did have the fire department come to check things out with their spiffy thermal imaging camera – I need one of those! $500 dollars and five hours later, we had some new switches in our breaker box, a few new GFI plugs in place and the power restored. The HVAC is back to normal after a $100 transformer replacement, but it looks like we are shopping for a built-in microwave/range hood and a dishwasher. And my darn wireless bridge for my Xbox 360 also seems to be dead.

I should add that my surge protectors and UPS systems did their job. The $200+ monster cable surge protector on the HDTV, cable box, Xbox, Wii, etc. burned out during the incident, but all my gear seems fine. And the UPS on the computer systems kicked in very quickly – that alarm was really my first warning something was up, as it was buzzing like it does when we *lose* power while the lights were still on in the house, and all that gear seems ok. Whew!

We’re looking into whole-house surge protection now for an added level of protection.

atlanta, weather

Atlanta’s Downtown Twister

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ATL Tornado by Shane Durrence

So we thought living ITP would keep us free of the trailer-park loving cyclonic activity we usually think of out in the hinterlands. Well, not so much. The photo above is not by me – it was taken by photographer Shane Durrence and shown by WXIA here in Atlanta and shows, backlit by lightning, the tornado on the ground over downtown at the far left of the image.

We got the tornado warning (SMS from wunderground.com) about five minutes before it hit on Friday night. It was a fairly generic notice – for the whole county – so I wasn’t really worried, didn’t grab the kids etc. as they were asleep. In seconds the rain began to pound and swirl, and then we heard that classic freight train sound. I actually went out on our back deck to grab some things that were flying around – silly me. And then it was done. Turns out that the 200-yard-wide EF2 tornado (estimated winds of 135mph) had carved a path from the west side of the Georgia Dome (the Vine City neighborhood) onward over the dome, ripping sections of the roof away just as it did about ten years ago when I was there covering a game (designed that way?) then right over the Ga World Congress Center and past CNN Center and Centennial Park. That side of CNN and the Omni had dozens of windows blown out – including ones just feet from my friend Steve Almasy, one of the handful of folks working at 9:45pm on Friday night in the CNN.com newsroom and near my friend Kate Sandhaus’ desk. The twister then went past Centennial Tower, the Georgia Pacific Building, the Westin Peachtree Tower and the Equitable – taking out many windows, interestingly mostly on upper floors. Then the storm headed towards us – taking the roof off parts of the Cotton Mill Lofts and then destroying close to 20 homes in the Cabbagetown neighborhood – but sparing Sam’s preschool, the Grant Park Cooperative campus in C-town, only a block away from the worst damage. Then the tornado crossed over I-20 and hit parts of East Atlanta, coming less than 1/2 mile from our house – we were really lucky.

The second round of twisters that came through North GA on Saturday had us taking things quite seriously, holed up in an interior closet for the duration of the warnings. That only resulted in 1/4″ hail without much other damage at our place – but two deaths in a rural county near Atlanta. Weather is serious business.