A handful of residents were displaced Tuesday evening when a huge tree came crashing down onto a Buckhead apartment building.
The tree that hit the building on Terrace Drive was one of many that toppled across metro Atlanta Tuesday after a night of heavy rain and gusty winds.
No injuries were reported, but the tree left four of the apartments in the two-story building off Peachtree Road uninhabitable.
Tracy Barnett was one of the luckier residents, as the tree just barely missed her apartment.
Barnett, who was out taking pictures of the mess Wednesday morning, said she was at work when the tree fell.
“I came home and I was shocked,” she said. “It was scary.”
Fiana Swain’s ground-floor unit was also spared.
Swain said she was at home and watching TV Tuesday when she “heard this huge sound.”
“It kind of sounded like a tractor-trailer flipping over,” Swain told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I was expecting it to be a tree because I had just finished watching the news, about four different stories about people having trees falling on their house.”
Swain said she was still a little worried Wednesday about other nearby trees, one large oak in particular.
“Every time it storms, I look at that tree, and like, ‘oh, please, don’t ever fall,’ because it is so huge,” she said.
Tuesday’s incident brought a feeling of déjà vu to Swain’s neighbor, Meg Kelly.
Kelly said that about 10 years ago, when she was living in Richmond, Va., a tree came crashing into her home.
“Hurricane Isabel came through and a tree fell from my front yard onto my house, through the top floor, and we had to move and renovate the whole house,” she said. “It was a pretty bad experience.”
Kelly said she got home from an exercise class shortly after the tree fell on Tuesday.
“Everyone was outside, and there were fire trucks and news crews out here, and it was quite a scene,” she said. “It was pretty crazy.”
Metro Atlanta was under a wind advisory Tuesday, as winds gusted as high as 36 mph.
Channel 2 Action News meteorologist Karen Minton is predicting dry weather for Wednesday through Friday, with highs in the mid-50s Wednesday and upper 40s Thursday and Friday and lows in the 30s.
There’s a 20 percent chance of rain Friday night into Saturday, and the National Weather Service said the rain could be mixed with snow as far south as the northern suburbs of metro Atlanta. No accumulation is expected, though, except in the higher elevations of northeast Georgia, where a light dusting of snow is possible.
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