Lani Nichols is moving fast and talking faster. She's just received word that a small rural community in tornado-torn Alabama has been without food for 24 hours, and she's scrambling to get help.
The Coweta County event planner has been put in charge of a growing group of Auburn and University of Alabama fans in Georgia who are helping victims of last week's tornadoes. She has worked three 21-hour days, dispatching a half dozen donated tractor trailers, which are delivering pallets of water, food, clothing, plywood and more.
Nichols' group, which coalesced through the website Toomers for Tuscaloosa, is among dozens of ad hoc relief efforts that have sprung up across metro Atlanta. Not formally aligned with any charity, the volunteers include students, church members, staffing workers, unemployed office managers.
Many are Georgians who grew up or went to school in Alabama. Others just saw the carnage, packed up and took off.
Nichols has received 250 phone calls, texts and emails. Her cell phone has died and been recharged four times in a day. She has appointed a volunteer to go through her emails.
In 2008 Nichols survived a tornado strike on her Carroll County home; she remembers cowering in the basement, clutching her 8-week-old baby girl as trees slammed into the house.
"I've been there," she said. "I know exactly how it feels."
The relief efforts come in all shapes and sizes. High schools in Roswell and Marietta have become collection points. Atlanta bars are holding fundraisers. Churches are loading up volunteers in buses and heading to places they've never seen before.
Those involved say they are shocked by how fast a single post on Facebook or Twitter has grown into scores of volunteers and donations, and they are clearly reveling in the communal energy of giving. Some efforts are bumping into one another and combining forces.
Alpharetta resident James O'Dwyer was in his first floor dorm at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa when the lights went out. While the school was spared, the freshman was shocked when he ventured out after the storm. His favorite places to eat, his laundromat and rows of shops were reduced to wood chips and sodden debris.
Back home in Alpharetta, he followed the lead of his mother, who had helped evacuees from Hurricane Katrina. He packed a rented van with donations from friends and drove for four hours back to Tuscaloosa. There, he hooked up with some friends and headed out to find places to help. They stretched tarps over busted roofs and cleaned up yards that looked like bomb sites.
"You see people just wandering," O'Dwyer said. "They have no place to go, and nothing to bring with them."
O'Dwyer stepped up his efforts. On the Toomers for Tuscaloosa Facebook page, he found a truck driver named Tina who was willing to drive her 18-wheeler to Alabama. Volunteers loaded it Tuesday with donated goods in the Home Depot parking lot in Alpharetta.
Robert Malone, an unemployed operations manager who lives near Buckhead, headed to Alabama for family. He grew up in Cullman, a hard-hit community north of Birmingham.
But by the time he arrived in his Jeep Cherokee loaded with supplies, there wasn't much he could do for his aunts and uncles. The National Guard had removed most of the big downed trees from their property, and several relatives were simply going to have to rebuild from scratch.
Malone spotted a resident, a stranger, cursing the chainsaw he was using to cut fallen trees. Malone gave the man his own chainsaw and drove off.
He found a way to help through the aid station in the high school he attended. He helped cook and feed a few thousand people, who seemed willing to take anything handed out. One older woman asked him for a tarp to cover her broken roof. She hadn't eaten in days. He offered her some food but she refused. It was raining, she said, and she had to run back to protect her home.
Among the other volunteers, Malone encountered a group of 60 people from North Point Baptist Church in Carrolton. They had come with a school bus and some cars and a few horse trailers filled with water, food, coffee and 10,000 paper plates.
Pastor Rodney Agan said this is part of the church's mission, to get out and help the community. The teenagers and adults cooked hundreds of eggs , grilled chicken and fried catfish. They formed landscaping crews that cleared yards and cut up trees.
Watching the kids work, Agan thought about how the experience would help them appreciate the blessings in their lives. They brought thermoses filled with coffee to troopers guarding the ravaged communities. And they slept overnight on auditorium chairs in a local church.
Meanwhile back in Atlanta, sleep-deprived Lani Nichols, her mind still clicking on all cylinders, was trying to find a way to get food to the Alabama town of Flat Rock. Then it hit her: the solution, in the persons of James O'Dwyer and Tina the trucker, was right on her group's Facebook page. She contacted O'Dwyer.
He and his volunteers were just finishing loading the truck Tuesday evening. They had baby supplies such as diapers, and tons of water and clothes and toiletries. He talked excitedly as he directed the loading. The whole experience was making him realize how fortunate he was.
"It's the least I could do," O'Dwyer said. "These people didn't have nearly as much as we have. And now they have nothing."
The truck headed out to Flat Rock Wednesday morning.
Saturday the group plans to load another truck.
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