Like anyone forced to spend an icy night in a home without power, Christina Ledford remembers the moment on Wednesday when things went dark.
She was snuggled on the couch with her son, Tate Agoo. He’s a wiggly kid, as all 2-year-olds are, but at the moment he was arm-to-arm against his mom, still. They were watching “Open Season,” an animated film about a bear trying to dodge hunters. A deer was talking. It was 7 p.m.
The TV’s big screen blinked, like an animated eye — light one moment, then dark, then light again. And then, it shut a second time. Didn’t open, either. The house was black.
Angela Agoo, Tate’s grandmother, was sitting in the kitchen. She sighed; 67 years of life prepare you for unpleasant surprises. She mentally berated herself for not getting firewood before freezing rain moved in late Tuesday, icing over her neighborhood five miles south of Eatonton. They’d have to bundle up.
An hour later, the power returned. “Oh boy!” Ledford yipped. “We’ve got heat again!”
They had it for 10 minutes. The three were watching TV again when — boom! — an explosion sounded in the distance. An electrical transformer shattered; maybe it overloaded and blew; perhaps water got in its steel case, triggering a bang. It sounded like a bomb.
Ledford, 34, walked to the paned front window in time to see an arc of blue lights in the distance. It changed to pink, then blue again. And then the sky, like every house in the neighborhood, was dark.
Ledford addressed the Almighty. “Is that what you do?” she asked the sky. “You do this?”
*****
Eighty-five miles west, in Atlanta’s southern suburbs, residents were already 12 hours into a day with no power.
Shannon Montgomery got the first sign of trouble when her air purifier, which she relies on to soothe her sleep, clicked off at about 8 a.m. She and her husband, Roy Wayne Mays, just moved into their Riverdale home two weeks ago. Surrounded by moving boxes and inoperable computers, they had little to do but arrange furniture.
Nearby, Kimeke Armstrong-Walker of Riverdale thought her family had perhaps a few unpleasant hours ahead of them. They ate sandwiches and mainly slept the day away.
As the sun set on Wednesday, Tori Webberley down near Fayetteville was running low on firewood. Her power had been out all day. With a 6-year-old and a 5-week-old to keep warm, she’d turned her gaze to an entertainment center sitting in the garage to burn next.
“This is horrible,” said Webberley, who lives off Ga. 85. “I thought I lived in the South.”
Wednesday night, they were rescued and taken to a shelter by a Good Samaritan in blue.
Fayetteville Police Department Capt. Chad Myers contacted The Atlanta Journal-Constitution after a friend sent him an online story detailing the family’s plight. After the AJC got them in contact, Myers was able to take them to a shelter.
As time passed and their fingers and toes grew numb, Shannon Montgomery and her husband directed their anxiety at Georgia Power, whose recorded messages and websites didn’t say when electricity would be restored to Clayton County.
“In other areas, their power goes off for three or four hours and then it comes back on. That must be nice,” said Montgomery, who wondered whether their area wasn’t a priority because it wasn’t as wealthy as other Atlanta suburbs to the north. “If they can’t restore power, just let us know why. I hope that’s not too unreasonable.”
They charged cellphones from car chargers. Mays, a software engineer who works from home, used his phone conservatively while three laptop computers, two desktop computers and two iPads stayed off.
He tried to balance complaints with humor.
“Nine hours no power or heat. Can you cook a hotdog over a cinnamon scented candle? Asking for a friend…” he posted on Facebook.
Faucets dripped to prevent frozen pipes. The couple’s uncle passed the time watching movies in a truck with a DVD player charging from the vehicle’s outlet.
As time slowly passed, they lost motivation to do much of anything but read and try to sleep.
Armstrong-Walker and her husband, Keino Walker-Muhammad, and their two children, 5 and 17, wrapped in multiple layers of clothing and said goodnight Wednesday, hoping for improvements with daybreak.
They awakened Thursday to more cold, little to eat and a dead car battery. While her husband stayed home with their youngest child, Armstrong-Walker walked with their 17-year-old son to a grocery store five miles away.
“We saw all the electrical lines broken on the nearby streets,” she said.
After their icy trek, they found a gas station that was open. But its power was out, too. Cashiers could only accept exact change. They kept walking.
Finally, they came upon a store with power and bought charcoal and lighter fluid. Once they managed to get back home, the family was able to cook out and invited their snowbound neighbors who had no way to cook in their similarly dark and frozen homes. Power came back on that night, about the same time it did for Shannon Montgomery and her husband.
“I’m originally from New Jersey but I have been in the Atlanta metro area for about 15 years now,” Armstrong-Walker said. “I just didn’t want to be cold anymore.”
****
In Eatonton, Ledford took her little boy to his bed Wednesday night, then paused. The house was warm, but would get cold. She carried the kid back to her bedroom. She dressed him in button-up pajamas. She tugged thick socks on his fat little feet. She wanted to put a hat on his head, but gave that up.
“You can’t get him to wear a hat,” Ledford said.
With nothing else to do, everyone turned in. During the night, the wind rose, then dropped. The temperature also plummeted.
When they woke Thursday morning, their breaths misted in the quiet home. They looked at the rear deck, covered with ice. It resembled a bumpy mirror. Ledford lifted her son and placed him gently on the ice, curious to see how the kid would react. Tate yelled.
“He’d never felt anything like that before,” said his grandmother.
But Angela Agoo has. She’s lived across the country, and remembers bad storms in Virginia and New York. She especially recalls a tempest in Texas — sand, immense, incalculable amounts of sand, mountains and oceans of sand, moving in a wall across a flat highway. She had to stop the car; she couldn’t see past its hood. Thinking about it still scares her.
But on Thursday afternoon, with the temperatures climbing to the low 40s, with water falling in silver rivulets from thawing trees, she could afford a smile about weather’s casual cruelties.
Ledford shook it off, too. She’s originally from Louisville, Ky., where snow is a lot more commonplace than in Central Georgia.
But that doesn’t mean either wants to deal with the loss of electricity again. They are caring for a little boy; one day he, too, will look out a window and wonder at the power of nature.
“I would have done whatever I needed to do to keep him warm,” said Tate’s mama. “Even burned my clothes.”
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