Trenton, Ga., resident Loretta Blevins witnessed a shocking surprise when she looked out her kitchen window seven days ago. The family’s doghouse was flying through the air with their dog inside it, the Wizard of Oz come darkly to life.
Fortunately, the pet survived unscathed, a rare happy ending in what has become an overwhelming nightmare of heartache for too many in the Tennessee Valley, northwestern Georgia and far too much of Alabama.
It doesn’t seem like seven days, of course. If your home or business was blown to toothpicks, it probably already seems like seven years. For the more fortunate among us, it seems like yesterday, the tornado sirens blaring every few minutes as we fled to basements, under stairs or to any other spot deemed capable of protecting us from 150 mph (or more) winds.
I’ll never forget huddling with my wife and children in our basement last Wednesday evening, our battery-powered radio tuned to a weather update from Channel 3 meteorologist Paul Barys, who said, “This could be the mother of all storms. It should hit Trenton in four minutes; Lookout Mountain, Georgia, in 11 minutes; downtown Chattanooga in 13 minutes.”
Cruelly on cue, it did. Then the night got even worse roughly two hours later, the nastiest cell of all blowing apart Ringgold and Apison.