ALBANY – Many towns have a great storm to look back on in fear of what the next might bring. This southwest Georgia city has plenty to consider. In January, two rounds of tornadoes weeks apart shredded homes and a massive mobile home park, killing four and leaving hundreds homeless. Then there was 1994’s Tropical Storm Alberto, which flooded the Flint River, killed 31 people in Georgia, including several here, and unearthed hundreds of caskets, sending them floating away.
On Sunday, the area awaited Hurricane Irma, which has the potential to open new wounds. Officials were asking everyone to be sheltered by 5 p.m. and warning that emergency services will be delayed once winds hit 40 miles per hour, sustained.
For Clarence and Virginia Robinson, who remember the shock of Alberto three decades ago, it was January’s tornadoes that brought them to the Albany Civic Center, where they lay on their cots holding hands.
“You have a tornado outside your window, it makes you think,” the husband said, draped in an American Red Cross blanket.
“Something told us to come here,” said the wife.
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
That something was actually a couple things: confusion about why this city can’t have some peace and why a hurricane is barreling toward landlocked southwest Georgia.
“This ain’t real,” Clarence Robinson said.
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Albany Police Chief Michael Persley said he’s worried about what happens here and farther up the Flint River. He saw the local consequences of heavy rains in Central Georgia with Tropical Storm Alberto.
“Alberto (was) stalling out over Central Georgia. It was a massive flood of water coming back down,” he said Sunday afternoon at Albany and Dougherty County’s joint emergency operations center. “We had water shooting out of manholes.”
Albany would be better prepared now because Alberto led to countless changes, including extensive improvements to drainage systems, the chief said. The emergency command center also started because of Alberto, with a seat set aside a seat for local and nearby officials to better coordinate response.
Others in town had the tornadoes on their minds when they decided to flee.
In the civic center, many residents who live in mobile homes took shelter after seeing how bad it can get back in January. They passed the time playing cards, poking at smart phones and just being together, and they tried to stay positive.
Neko Green, who back in January stared in disbelief at the remains of her 7-year-old son’s bedroom in the Big Pines Estates mobile home neighborhood, said Sunday she hoped this time will be easier.
It took her and husband Adrian Green weeks to get back on their feet after their trailer was destroyed. Now they’re worried their apartment, a first-floor unit, will flood.
“We just gotta pray,” Neko Green said after her family of five finished dinner at the shelter.
The biggest fear for Denise Derosia was if her trailer will be there when she gets back home.
“The hardest part is waiting,” she said, while playing a card game called Hand and Foot with her family. “There’s no way of knowing how bad this is gonna be.”
She and her husband had no interest in finding out in their mobile home.
“They tend to get destroyed,” Douglas Derosia said. “It’s the life of the mobile home.”
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