P.J. Bullock barely survived Friday night's tornado. He feared his dog, Jackson, wasn't so lucky.

Sunday afternoon, he and a friend returned to the Cotton Mill Lofts in Cabbagetown to look one last time for his 3-month-old mixed breed German shepherd. He was able to persuade a firefighter to check the apartment where the puppy was last seen.

Mary Pierce Zirkle / Handout

Jackson

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"They found him underneath a couch," said Bullock, who was having dinner in a top-floor loft on the Boulevard side of Building E when the tornado struck

The dog apparently had scampered underneath the furniture just as one of the apartment's walls was collapsing. That's where he was discovered Sunday, safely ensconced amid the rubble.

"Jackson was OK ... completely healthy," said Bullock, who likewise escaped the storm "without a scratch."

"We heard a huge breeze blow through," he recalled. "My friend got up to close the window but couldn't."

Seconds later, a wall ripped away, exposing the unit to the open air and the roaring wind, he said. The roof opened up and then crashed on the building's top floor, prompting a chain reaction collapse of the unit next door and part of the apartment where Bullock was a guest.

"It fell all the way to the basement," he said.

Bullock said he fled down the hallway and dove into an open room while his friends hovered under fallen plywood. When he realized his friends weren't with him, he ran back to find them.

"It was very chaotic," Bullock said. "When I went back to get everybody, there was no wall, there was no roof, and all I could see was just the city of Atlanta skyline."