Here’s my report on the tornado that took Atlanta by surprise

By Art Harris, (c) www.artharris.com, all rights reserved

As a native Atlantan, I took a surreal walk though glass-strewn streets downtown Friday night and early Saturday morning, stepping over downed power lines, lamp posts snapped like toothpicks, crushed cars and looked through my camera lense at buildings I knew…landmarks with roofs sucked right off by a monster tornado.

At The Tabernacle, rock stars usually raise the roof, but that’s where I found my old friend, survivor and rock promoter extraordinaire, Peter Conlan, mulling his missing roof. He can bring the Rolling Stones to town, but can’t negotiate with an act of God. He seemed calm for a survivor, but then he’s been hanging backstage for years, survived screaming superstars and smashed guitars, good practice for a violent weather jam.

Peter was in bed, watching the news when he saw the storm had hit his block, and raced downtown to his beloved building. He stood by, helpless, as firemen climbed inside to shut water and power off. There was no concert there Friday night, and won’t be one for two weeks. Another miracle off Peachtree Street?

Click on our video and you’ll meet Peter and other veterans of Atlanta’s worst intown storm that left a city of grateful survivors.

Miraculously, no one died, but many might have if a basketball game in the Georgia Dome not gone into overtime, or a unique, flexible roof designed to give, but not buckle under stress by Larry Gellerstedt’s company, held firm.

When I heard it hit, I packed up camera gear and drove around police roadblocks, crushed cars, detours, weaving through back streets I knew in a city I loved.

I found a lot across from CNN Center and Atlanta Centennial Olympic Park, where convicted bomber and murderer Eric Rudolph, now doing life at Supermax, had set up a backpack stuffed with dynamite and turned the city’s 1996 Games into a murder scene.

Moments after that bomb went off in 1996, I was in the park, interviewing cops and survivors; so the tornado, with its own eerie yellow crime scene tape, summoned flashbacks. Rudolph killed one and injured more than 100, and Atlanta was lucky that time, too. Had the pack not tipped over, hundreds might have died from the shrapnel.

Made me wonder if a city called too busy to hate just might now be known as a city too lucky to die. Walking Atlanta’s new tornado alley reminded me of shooting with a hand-held Sony in Iraq during the 2003 invasion. Now the war zone was my backyard, and the phone began ringing with well-wishers from across the country asking if we were okay.

The first tornado I ever covered as a cub reporter hit Atlanta in the mid-70s, targeting Buckhead, and cut a swath through the city’s mansion district, proving the rich may be different, but no one is immune from violent storms.

Now, here I was, aiming the lense at my own city-turned catastrophe by mother nature that had, for some unknown reason injured dozens, left one dead in North Georgia, but spared the city a mega-tragedy. Gravestones littered historic Oakland Cemetery, where my grandparents are buried. Whether ghosts were disturbed, there were millions of dollars in losses, but buildings can be rebuilt; people can’t be unburied.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 12:57 am and is filed under ART HARRIS REPORTS, ARTHARRIS.COM EXCLUSIVE, Atlanta Tornado, HUMAN INTEREST. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.