Forget about falling glass from downtown skyscrapers and blocked streets from last month's tornado. That wasn't the worst Atlanta has seen.

Ten years ago today, on April 9, 1998, a storm that spun through parts of DeKalb, Cobb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties uprooted entire subdivisions, destroyed 3,000 homes and felled 60,000 trees.

AJC STAFF (ENLARGE)

A truck spreading water on Fountainbleau Court drives past homes that were wrecked as a result of April 9, 1998, tornado. Many of the damaged houses were torn down.

CATHY SEITH/AJC STAFF (ENLARGE)

Melissa Angel looks over her bedroom destroyed by the tornado in Dunwoody. She and her family were away on spring break at the time of the storm. Her parents, Karen and Richard Angel, negotiated an insurance settlement with State Farm, with plans to tear down the house and rebuild.

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A decade later, some of those neighborhoods still bear the scars from metro Atlanta's most destructive storm.

"My yard changed from a shade yard into a sun yard in one night," said Art Collins, whose house was spared when the tornado upended 37 of his trees.

Like last month's tornado in downtown Atlanta, estimated property losses in the 1998 storm reached $250 million. One person died in each storm, from falling walls and trees.

But the wreckage in 1998 hit people where they live, no more so than in Collins' subdivision. Fountainbleu Forest on the DeKalb-Gwinett line was the storm's ground zero.

Some neighbors took to calling the place Fountainbleu Flats after their urban woods disappeared. Those with darker senses of humor, or who spent up to a year living elsewhere while their homes were rebuilt or razed, called it Fountainbleu-Away.

Now, fewer of those residents even call it home.

"I cried every time I had to go back to my neighborhood," said Wendi Lowry, who rode out the storm in her basement while the tornado shredded the second floor of her home. "It didn't look like home. It wasn't home anymore."

It took contractors nine months to repair her house. Her family moved away less than six months later — her familiar neighborhood just a memory.

Today, the split-level houses from the Brady Bunch era are separated by newer, bigger all-brick homes that replaced the houses wrecked beyond repair by the tornado.

The pine forest that lines the subdivision remains thin enough to see through. A drive down Winters Chapel Road reveals the storm's path, where dense clusters of dogwoods and hardwoods suddenly give way to treeless patches and smaller, newer saplings.

Lowry lost 80 trees in just her one-acre yard. By comparison, the most recent tornado felled 87 trees in all of Oakland Cemetery.

One tree — a dogwood — appeared salvageable. Lowry and her husband, Tom, saw its root ball was still linked and decided to take it off its side and replant it.

The family moved away before she learned its fate.

The scraggly tree, with its uneven top and wobbly trunk, is now in full bloom in John Thayer's backyard. A former renter in the subdivision, Thayer is the second owner of Lowry's former home on Joel Court.

"It looks kinda rough, but I like it," Thayer said. "It has character."

Down the street, Collins has replanted hardwoods such as poplar and sweet gum in his back yard. A nonprofit group, Replant the Dunwoody Forest, put in sugar maples along the street.

Another neighbor, new to Fountainbleu since the storm, didn't even bother to replace the dozens of downed trees. Ty Yoshimura said his back yard is now a lawn, not wooded.

The ragged dogwood in Thayer's yard, the old tree that survived the storm, may be the next to go, along with dozens more, this time on purpose.

The man who owned the home between Lowry and Thayer replanted hardwoods and fruit trees in the back yard, trying to rebuild the forest. Now DeKalb County plans to cut down those trees, to widen a water main in the area. The dogwood's roots are right in the easement, Thayer said.

"I really want to preserve the trees, but that legacy is going," Thayer said. "This whole neighborhood was loaded with old trees. It's not nearly the same now."