The strong thunderstorms that rocked north Georgia for a second straight Monday night didn't leave as much damage as last week's storms, but try telling that to a Buckhead couple who barely escaped serious injury -- or worse -- when their home was sliced open by a huge tree late Monday night.
"Luckily, I was in my closet, which wasn't touched," Carol Young told the AJC. "The bed is covered with the tree."
She said her husband, Blake, was "in his office, which is right over our bedroom, and he had just gotten up from his desk, which is covered with the tree, and was on the staircase on his way downstairs."
"I had just gotten down to the bottom of the steps, and if I had been in my office still, sitting in my chair where I had been ... well, you have to look at it and see," Blake Young said. "It shook the whole house. A huge noise."
"We are so thankful," Carol Young said. "We're big believers, and we really felt like we were watched over last night. This can all be fixed."
"It's sobering, to say the least," Blake Young said, adding that he and his wife "easily" could have been killed. "We're thankful to the good Lord that we weren't."
Laura Martin lives next door to the Youngs on Lakeview Avenue. She said that Monday night, "I heard the rain and I heard the wind, then a tremendous crash."
She was shocked to see her neighbor's house "almost destroyed, and it was such a gracious home. Their bedroom is gone, and the fact that they're OK is almost a miracle."
Jack Burch, who lives on the other side of the Youngs, said it was a "terrible" feeling to walk outside and see the damage to his neighbor's home.
"It's pretty startling," Burch said. " It's a very beautiful home. It's got an awful lot of charm to it."
Mike Jones was walking his golden retriever, Prudence, early Tuesday when he came across his neighbor’s heavily damaged home.
“This is a big hit,” said Jones, who has lived in the Peachtree Heights neighborhood since 1970.
“Usually around here, when trees go down, it just damages the roof, maybe a little bit of the outside,” Jones told the AJC. “Boy, this one looks like it hit the whole front of the house. That tree’s got to be a hundred years old.”
Jones said it’s common for strong storms to bring down trees and limbs in the neighborhood.
“The storm a week ago, four trees on our street went down,” he said. “You live in these wonderful neighborhoods where there are old trees, and this is the risk you put up with.”
Asked if he worries about other huge trees in the neighborhood falling, Burch said, "I try not to think of that. If it's going to happen, it's going to happen."
The strong storms that prompted another round of tornado watches and severe thunderstorm warnings has moved well south and east of metro Atlanta by daybreak Tuesday. The watches and warnings posted Monday night had all expired, although a wind advisory was issued for north Georgia, including metro Atlanta, effective from noon Tuesday through 8 p.m.
Channel 2 Action News meteorologist Karen Minton forecast sunny skies and highs around 70 degrees Tuesday afternoon. Winds will be brisk, with gusts up to 35 mph, Minton said.
Minton's forecast for the rest of the work week calls for sunny skies Wednesday and Thursday, with a 50 percent chance of rain on Friday. Highs will be in the 70s, with lows in the 40s and 50s.
The National Weather Service received scattered reports of trees down overnight from the northwest corner of the state southward to the Columbus area, including metro Atlanta.
Georgia Power reported about 12,000 outages overnight, a tiny fraction of the 240,000 customers who lost power during last week's storms. Spokesman Brian Green told the AJC that as of 6 a.m., the number of outages had been cut to 1,700 statewide. About 500 of those outages were in metro Atlanta, with the remainder mostly in the Dalton and Carrollton areas, he said.
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