The phrase ‘in the eye of the storm” refers to “the center of a tumultuous situation” and alludes to the center of a storm.

In the midnight hour of March 26, Newnan and Coweta County found itself at the center of a most tumultuous situation as an EF-4 tornado plowed through. Originating in Heard County, it crossed into Coweta just before midnight and barrelled up Smokey Road. On Timberland Drive, it destroyed several homes with one family taking shelter in a bathtub as their house was blown to pieces around them.

The tornado reached 170 miles per hour as it entered west Newnan. Homes were destroyed, including four on Arlington Court where one house lost every interior and exterior wall, but a sports car remained parked at what had been the carport. After traveling 39 miles in 53 minutes, the mile-wide beast of a storm finally dissipated above Peachtree City.

In the storm’s wake, Newnan’s landscape was dotted with blue tarps protecting homes from rain until roofers could make the rounds. More than 1,700 houses were impacted with 70 completely destroyed and 120 with major damage.

The phrase “in the eye of the beholder” is often connected with “beauty,” as in “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but it basically points out that we each have our own opinion.

Following the tornado, Newnan residents showed up en masse to love on each other. Whether that love was exhibited by a brawny man cutting limbs with a chainsaw or a church lady bringing lemonade and cookies, it was a thing of beauty demonstrated over and over again for days, then weeks, and still months since the storm.

Nature is a miraculous entity. A storm with such power that it can conjure the destruction we’ve seen here is nothing short of amazing.

But in our eyes, what we’ve beheld has been an even bigger miracle – our community coming together, once again, #NewnanStrong.

– Jackie Kennedy, NCM Editor

Written by NEIL MONROE

Devastation in the wake

“We train for emergency situations every month and everyone was very well-versed in our approach to a major storm,” says Burgess. “With our sirens, with electronic notifications, with the warnings from TV, people took cover. Thankfully.”

Most people in the affected area had a warning time of between seven and 12 minutes, according to Burgess. People took appropriate cover, and no one was directly injured by the storm.

After the storm passed, the challenge of response began, and an unprecedented period of cooperation, support and dedication to the safety of the public began as well.

The 911 system received more than 800 calls within the first hours of the emergency. Off-duty dispatchers started coming in, and police, fire and sheriff’s personnel were deployed across the damaged area. Utility crews began assessing damage. Calls were recorded and managed on paper because the EOC’s computer-aided dispatch system was inoperable due to the power outage.

“Every available first responder was already combing homes, cars and any damaged area, helping people find shelter, protecting areas around downed power lines, and just helping in any way possible,” Terrell recalls. “As much as we train in every area of response, there’s no real playbook for this. It’s just dedicated, experienced people doing their job, making minute-by-minute decisions, and helping in any
way possible.”

Disaster Response Before Sunrise

Written by FRANCES KIDD

It may sound like relief assistance magically appeared the morning of March 26, but there’s a lot more to the story.

True, volunteers showed up in huge numbers. Behind the scenes, though, an emergency response infrastructure is in place both in governmental agencies and nonprofit organizations with years of experience in disaster relief.

The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) provides aid to governments and, sometimes, to individuals and families. While FEMA approved aid for local governments for the cleanup effort, they denied aid for individuals, and Newnan City Council appealed that decision.

The Georgia Emergency Management Administration (GEMA) is the state's preparedness, response and recovery agency. After Governor Brian Kemp declared a State of Emergency on March 26, GEMA deployed state assistance to Coweta.

Locally, there’s the Coweta County Emergency Management Agency (CEMA) which was on the job before and after the tornado. Coweta's cities work closely with CEMA in emergency situations. Newnan Assistant City Manager Hasco Craver said the City has an organic relationship with the County and they work together to adapt hazard mitigation plans that are frequently updated.

After the storm, it was "all hands on deck" as each city office played a role in the aftermath of the tornado, according to Craver, who says the City kept residents up to date through social media.

Many nonprofit organizations also are at the ready for disaster response. Kevin Burgess is the construction lead for Inspiritus Disaster Relief, an agency with a full-time disaster response team that operates in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee to provide food and care following storms. Based in Atlanta, Inspiritus’ CEO immediately authorized its team to head to Newnan after the tornado. Home Depot sent volunteers to aid their efforts.

“We partnered with at least eight different organizations, including local government, churches and aid groups," says Kevin Burgess. NCM

The first sound on the morning of March 26 in Newnan was not the usual songbirds in trees outside the windows. It was the loud buzz of chainsaws.

Even before the sun came up, volunteer chainsaw operators arrived to begin tornado damage cleanup.

“I was at work, the night shift,” says Greg Girtman, a lead aircraft mechanic at Delta. “People started asking me, ‘Don’t you live down that way?’”

After Girtman texted his brother and a friend to check on them, he went home from work, changed clothes and headed out to help.

“The sheriff had put out a call for anybody with a chainsaw to come to Newnan High School,” he recalls. Local law enforcement was monitoring traffic into the hardest-hit areas, and Girtman couldn’t get close to his destination. An officer told him there was too much debris on the streets to go any farther.

In some areas, as far as the eye could see, trees were down and houses walloped in several areas in Newnan after an EF-4 tornado with 170 mile-per-hour winds raged through.

For most residents of the affected areas and those who showed up to help, it was something previously seen only on television news. Homes were crushed by trees, some well over 100 years old, and roofs and facades were ripped off houses.

Tornadoes are not unusual in the Southeast, but this one was stronger than most and hit parts of the heavily residential center of Newnan as well as areas in the county.

Girtman is just one example of Coweta’s civilian early responders. Before long, teams were forming in people’s yards. At that early point, no official structure was in place and there were no questions asked. Folks simply started doing what was needed. Those too young to wield a chainsaw joined others who dragged limbs away and picked up pieces of tin and other debris.

Newnan and Coweta County law enforcement, as well as officers from the Georgia Department of Transportation, were instrumental in keeping traffic out of the areas where downed trees and wires spread across the streets. They remained in their posts for close to two weeks, keeping residents and helpers safe.

Over the next few days, more and more of the community turned out to help.

Restaurants and caterers brought food for the volunteers and homeowners who, at first, wandered around in shock. Chick-fil-A, the Blue-Eyed Daisy from Serenbe, and local catering companies drove through the streets handing out meals. Boy Scout troops and church groups distributed sack lunches. Local food trucks from The Mad Mexican, Heirloom Bakery and Mi Lumpia Long Time set up at various locations to keep everyone fed.

During the week between Palm Sunday and Easter, several church groups put together and distributed Easter baskets to children whose parents were too caught up in calling contractors or making living arrangements to worry over an treat-filled basket.

Melanie Reeves, executive director at RiverLife in Newnan, ended up in the thick of things.

RiverLife’s mission is to connect local volunteers with people in need of home repair. But this was their first time getting involved in disaster relief.

“We always work collaboratively,” says Reeves. “When this happened, we immediately started trying to figure out the best way RiverLife could help.”

Her efforts connected her with Keep Newnan Beautiful, which connected her with Coweta County resources and, finally, to Katie Westbrook from Georgia Emergency Management Agency (GEMA), responsible for organizing the volunteer effort.

“The county had just opened a call center/information line and our group was put to work answering phones,” says Reeves.

The volunteer group at the call center grew, moving quickly to develop a system that matched people who needed help with the right volunteers. In the first two days following the storm, approximately 1,200 volunteers showed up to help, according to Reeves.

There seemed to be no stopping the community response.

Local churches established the Community Tornado Relief group. The Coweta Community Foundation joined with others to set up the “HOPE Has No Deductible” Grant Program to provide funds to individuals to help with downpayments for new homes and auto-insurance deductibles. Along with their usual work, Bridging the Gap served as a clearinghouse for donations and volunteer groups. And a donation center was set up at the Coweta Fairgrounds to distribute items; they even provided transportation for those who had no way to get there.

Hope Global Initiative, with a six-year history of helping residents of the Chalk Level Community, moved into disaster relief mode in order to directly help their area. Their own office was impacted, along with multiple homes in the neighborhood. Members of some Atlanta sports teams pitched in. The Atlanta Falcons showed up as well as the Atlanta Braves. Braves pitcher and Newnan native Will Smith organized his teammates to auction autographed items to raise money for the relief effort.

Yamaha Motor Manufacturing Corporation of Newnan and its employees donated more than $55,000 toward tornado relief efforts.

Kids in an area not affected by the tornado sold lemonade and baked goods to raise money for families who were affected.

There was simply no stopping this community.

Individuals and people with organizations from outside Newnan and Coweta County also responded.

The American Red Cross helped find housing for those displaced by storm damage. Inspiritus, whose mission is to help people go from “surviving to thriving,” arrived with their seasoned disaster-response team. They were joined by Samaritan’s Purse, from North Carolina, who began deploying volunteer teams on March 27 to Newnan and other Georgia and Alabama cities impacted by the storms. Duracell, in LaGrange, made a large donation of batteries and power banks. 

Local churches and organizations responded by providing operating bases for these groups who brought their well-honed disaster response experience. To name all the groups who assisted would be next to impossible. To describe the gratitude with which they were met by a hurting community would take too many words.

Little happens these days without social media involvement. Newnan and Coweta County governments kept their websites and social media pages updated, and new pages sprung up with a host of different types of resource information. A Facebook page vitally important to those hit by the storm, Newnan Tornado Lost and Found helped reunite dogs, cats and other pets with their owners.

“Our community really looked after each other,” says Reeves. “When the GEMA workers left, one person told us that in 15 years and 12 different disasters, she had never seen the outpouring of support she’d seen here.” 

When an EF-4 tornado touched down in the early hours of March 26, it did more than shatter windows and lift trees from the ground. As Newnan residents cowered in hallways and crouched in their basements, the rotating, high-powered winds ripped away not only siding and roofing. It also robbed residents of their sense of safety and wellbeing.

In the days that followed, therapists Jennifer Glover Yaeger, Anna Nance and Coweta County Schools Mental Health Specialist Ruth Scott rushed to Ground Zero to provide tornado victims with immediate trauma therapy. Their observations about this traumatic time in Newnan’s history are heartbreaking and inspiring, expected and surprising. As NCM caught up with them in the weeks after the storm, they discussed the intense loss they witnessed, the processes and methods for treating acute psychological trauma, and what lies ahead for both the affected victims and the local mental health community.

As soon as the winds settled and the sun rose, Scott pulled together a team of school psychologists, counselors and social workers to comfort students affected by the storm and to educate teachers, support staff and bus drivers about how children respond to traumatic events.

“The main approach to dealing with this kind of disaster is walking a student, or any victim, through their story,” says Scott. “It doesn’t require full-blown psychotherapy. In the moments following a disaster, what’s important is allowing people to talk through what happened, where they were, what they were thinking, what they were feeling, just that simple process of debriefing that has shown to prevent larger mental health issues down
the road.”

Nance concurred. “Basically, people needed to have their stories heard and to have someone validate the shock they were in,” she says.

“You could see glazed eyes, you could see that people were a little bit dissociated, because the brain will literally shut parts of itself down to protect you after a traumatic event,” says Yaeger. “The first step is to get someone stabilized in their body, before you can get them to cognitively work through something like this. They may still experience and express emotion, they may still cry, but in reality, there’s still a disconnect. So the first thing we try to do is get them to feel safe in their bodies.”

Scott, Yaeger and Nance, along with psychologist Tom Freeman, made themselves available to provide trauma intervention at Central Baptist Church for a week after the storm, but their efforts to comfort and heal took some time.

“We didn’t see as many people reaching out for help in the immediate time period after the storm as we knew needed help, and I think that’s just because they were so focused on their immediate physical needs,” says Nance.

Yaeger agrees. “Nobody, in the days after, was really ready to dig in and do in-depth trauma work. It was: ‘Where am I going to stay? What am I going to do?’ People were in robot mode trying to take care of their very
basic needs.“

Scott found more success with a different approach. She recalls: “We originally set up at Central Baptist, and not a lot of people showed up for that, so I found that, when I volunteered on a Saturday at the Methodist Church off of Robinson Street, people were just driving through for aid, and I would just step up to the driver’s side and ask ‘How are you doing? How are your kids doing?’ And I would give out a worksheet on common trauma responses and some advice on how to help your kids through it. I felt like that was a lot more effective than just sitting somewhere and waiting for people to show up.”

Once they realized that victims needed to get their immediate needs met before attending to their emotional state, the therapists made a plan to provide ongoing treatment as people emerged from the initial dissociation of the trauma and began to get resettled. The validation of people’s emotions and experiences, both by their individual support systems and the mental health community, will become increasingly important in the weeks and months to come, according to the therapists.

The team cautions that validation of the event is only the first step of trauma treatment – and that Cowetans will suffer the emotional effects of the storm long after homes and businesses are rebuilt.

Yaeger lived in Mississippi when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. “It took about seven years for all of the mental health facilities in the area to become overwhelmed with people coming in, saying, ‘I lost everything,’ she recalls. “So what will happen is, as people start to stabilize with their basic needs, we’ll see a little bit of an influx, but to be perfectly honest, the floodgates won’t really open for a long time. When people talk about this being a marathon and not a sprint in regards to rebuilding homes, I think the emotional fallout, much the same way, is years down the road.”

Scott worries about the distress to children not just from the tornado but from the pandemic and the resulting isolation they experienced.

Nance said, simply, “The grief continues. Some of these people will be out of their homes for months or even years. This feeling of displacement and vulnerability is going to linger. We’ll continue to deal with this as a community for some time.”

The trio is encouraged by the outpouring of support in the initial wake of the storm, and they hope the community’s generosity will extend not just to the victims’ physical needs but their emotional ones as well.

Nance says the way the Coweta community came together after the tornado promoted healing from the start.

“It was kind of like a balm,” she says. “Things had just been so raw and painful for the past year or so because of the pandemic. I’d say there’s been a lot of healing in that. I hope that desire to help and support continues as time goes on, because this is not going away. I think we’re going to need it for a while.”

Defining Trauma

Trauma is defined as an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, assault or natural disaster. This intense response can include feelings of shock, denial, grief and physical symptoms like an elevated heart rate, headaches or nausea.

Here’s what our team of local therapists wants you to know about trauma in light of the tornado:

Allison and Kurt Ziegler live at Hollis Heights with their two sons, Nolan Lake, 3, and Levi, 10 months old. On the night of the tornado, when their cell phone alarms sounded, they rushed to the basement with Levi. Nolan Lake was spending the night with Allison’s mother two blocks away.

For a moment, everything became still and warm, and then Kurt noticed that the radar was no longer working on his phone.

“Mommy, you’re squishing me!” your older daughter squeals. The sound of a runaway roller coaster is shaking the house at incredible decibels. You put yourself between the tornado and your babies (at a time like this, your children naturally become your babies again), crouched behind you in the corner. You hope the wadded towels in front of their faces are enough to protect them should glass shoot through the room. You say a prayer and wish your husband was there to comfort you, yet you also feel relieved that he is not in danger at the moment – this won’t-it-ever-end moment. Eventually it is quiet again.

Through the Dark of Night

The staff of The Newnan Times-Herald worked from long before sunrise to long after sunset, March 26 in order to get its weekend edition out on time. Since electricity and internet service were out at the office in downtown Newnan, that meant moving operations to the home of NTH publishers Clay and Beth Neely, where staffers put together one of the newspaper's most important issues.

The Prom Must Go On

With 1,700 homes in and around Newnan impacted by the tornado, Coweta County's Women's Council of Realtors knew there was a need to help Newnan High School students. On the heels of a pandemic year that made school strange already, the tornado threatened to ruin prom, too. With the Realtors leading the way, more than 2,000 prom dresses were donated. On the day of the giveaway, April 21, boys were given vouchers for free tuxedo rentals and girls were outfitted in their dream dresses.

Heading Back to Normal

After a year of relatively few downtown events due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Cowetans were looking forward to the Spring Art Walk set for March 26 in downtown Newnan. The early morning tornado that day canceled the event.

In an effort to raise funds for the Chalk Level neighborhood, hit hard by the storm, local insurance agent Nathan Brain planned an event to take the place of the canceled Art Walk and called it #NewnanStrong, the same moniker he used three years ago to rally the community together in response to a Nazi group and Antifa protestors' visit to Newnan.

Just as Newnan residents pulled together to put a positive face on what might have been a negative experience in 2018, they came together on May 8 to show positivity once again. Block after block in downtown Newnan, artists gave demonstrations and showed their wares, musicians played and sang, and residents thankful to see their community come together again swelled downtown streets to support those impacted by the storm.

While it was estimated that some 1,500 local volunteers helped with cleanup and other efforts in the days just after the tornado, there's no way to count the manhours residents have put in since then to continue caring for this community. From kids making bracelets, to lady realtors gathering prom dresses, to benefit concerts and community events, we've come together to prove #NewnanStrong.

At the Waverly Circle home of Sandy Hiser, tree removal following the March tornado took place in mid-May with Avalon Tree Services in charge. While Avalon Superintendent Mauricio Gomes worked with his feet on the ground, tree climber Gerardo Bautista sometimes seemed to be swinging from the branches as he located, cut and removed limbs.

Bautista’s first experience with tree removal came from working as a ranch hand in Mexico, where he helped cut down trees as necessary at the ranch. Making his living as a tree climber for the past four years, he’s learned the tricks of the trade.

“When he worked as a ranch hand, they didn’t use proper roping and all the equipment we use now, so he’s getting used to how to do things properly and safely,” says Gomes.

As a climber in charge of clearing downed trees from property damaged during storms, Bautista says he can remove about five oaks in one day. Depending on their location and how the trees fall, he can remove 12 to 20 smaller trees, like pines, in a day.

A horse trainer by trade, Bautista enjoys the process of tree removal, which involves climbing, swinging, balancing, cutting and watching large limbs fall to the ground.

“It’s peaceful because I get up there and do what I have to do,” he says. “I don’t have to deal with all the groundwork. Plus, there’s the adrenaline.”

After climbing trees for so long, does he still get that rush?

“Every cut,” he concludes.

NCM