Tornado in Downtown Atlanta

First of all, Lee and I thank all of our family and friends for calling to check on us Friday night (and Saturday morning). Thank God, we’re fine.

I have to say that I’m still in shock. Everything is still so surreal. We were eating dinner at a new restaurant in Midtown when everything happened. I was watching the weather closely before leaving the house, and there was no indication whatsoever that anything like this was going to happen. As you’ve probably seen from the news stories, there was about an 8-minute warning before the tornado touched down. For us, there was NO warning! Towards the end of our meal, all of the lights in the restaurant went out, which was right at 9:40, when it was confirmed to have hit. There was heavy rain and wind, but beyond the lights being out, no one in the restaurant was really fazed because no one had a clue how much danger we were actually in. Needless to say, we couldn’t pay with our debit card since the power was out, so we had to wait a while for them to run it through the old-fashioned way. While we were waiting, Lee got a phone call from the staff at the downtown building, saying that the power was out, the fire alarm was going off, etc. So we knew we were headed there when we left the restaurant. STILL, at this point, no one knew the severity of the situation. We all thought it was a bad thunderstorm. Finally, we left and headed towards downtown. We saw all the lights ahead of us from the police cars and fire engines, but it still didn’t quite hit us. We thought traffic lights were just out. Then it all became real! We saw street lights down, huge trees lying in the street, glass everywhere, cars crushed, half of a brick building in a pile…We seriously couldn’t tell if it was a bomb or if it was weather-related. This was before any news crews had arrived, so we still had no clue what had happened. The video was taken using my phone, after it hit me that whatever this was was BIG! Please forgive all of the extreme motion, but it is definitely raw and in the moment!! That’s how my head was moving around! 🙂 At one point, you can hear me saying that it is the most bizarre thing I had ever seen in real life, mostly because it really came out of nowhere!