Guests who attended a Flowery Branch wedding on Saturday were left scrambling to reschedule flights, a job interview and make it to work after they were trapped Sunday by a washed out road.
The 6 to 7 inches of rain that fell across Hall County Sunday morning washed out several roads, including Trudy Drive that left dozens of residents — and visitors — trapped in a Flowery Branch neighborhood.
Repair crews worked throughout the day and well into Sunday night repairing a 50- to 75-foot stretch of Trudy Drive that was washed away by flood waters.
While there was still paving work to do on the road Monday, residents told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the repair crews had filled in the washed-out section of pavement enough by around midnight Sunday that they could finally leave their neighborhood.
The repairs came too late for some out-of-towners stranded in the neighborhood after attending a wedding on Saturday.
Gene Cassidy, who lives on the washed-out street, said his granddaughter got married Saturday at his daughter’s house three doors down.
About 140 people attended the wedding, he said, many from out of town.
“They were all leaving on Sunday, and the road washed out,” Cassidy said. “They had to change their plane reservations, and one of the grandsons had an interview down in Tallahassee that he didn’t get to go to today.”
Kim Lingle, the mother of the bride, said the washed out road was an “inconvenience” to the nearly two dozen guests who stayed over after the Saturday night wedding at home and her father’s house, and who had planned to leave out Sunday morning.
“We had folks that needed to fly out of town to go back to work, and folks that needed to fly out of town to go to interviews and to school,” she said.
“Everybody had deadlines that they needed to meet,” Lingle said. “We had one young man that had to get work yesterday, so he actually walked through flooded waters and left his truck here so he could get to work.”
C.J. Sweat, whose grading company worked into the night to fill in the large gully that cut the neighborhood off from the rest of Hall County, said the stranded residents were “real happy to see that we’re getting this done.”
One of those residents, Stede Granger, 21, said he had to spend Sunday night with friends because he couldn’t get to the home where his family has lived for eight years.
Granger called the repairs “pretty quick. I thought it might take a few days because of the extent of the damage.”
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