Thankfully, Union County dodged the worst predictions for the massive storm system that swept across much of the Central, Southern and Eastern United States March 15 into March 16.
The storm killed several dozen people before arriving in the North Georgia Mountains Saturday evening, but by press time, there were no locally reported deaths, injuries, structures damaged or storm-related 911 calls aside from issues caused by downed trees and powerlines.
Continue reading with a subscription.
North Georgia News — serving Union County since 1909.
Cancel anytime.
Hours before the storm hit, the National Weather Service was forecasting a 10%-15% chance of overnight tornadoes in the region – for perspective, those odds are 25%-50% higher than the average chance this time of year – with wind gusts potentially north of 80 mph.
On Sunday afternoon, well after the storm passed, Union County Emergency Management Agency Director David Dyer said the highest local wind gust measurements he could find topped out at 47 mph, captured at the Blairsville Municipal Airport.
“Last night, we were under a Wind Advisory, Flood Watch, Hazardous Weather Outlook and a Tornado Watch for most of the night,” Dyer said. “The winds were the main concern; we had sustained winds of about 20-30 mph, with gusts up into the 40s.”
“Rain was off and on from most of the night and heavy at approximately 2-4 a.m.,” Dyer posted to Facebook Sunday. “Estimated 2 inches of rain total over the last 24 hours. Multiple trees down and power outages reported.”
Some minor flooding occurred at the Butternut Creek Golf Course, where the creek runs shallow in places. But that was apparently the extent of flood damage in the county, with nearly all waterways flowing full but staying inside their banks during and after the storm.
“The biggest concern was the trees down, powerlines down,” Dyer said. “This storm took down a lot of trees in the roadways; we’ve had over 60-70 reports of multiple trees on multiple roads.”
A final tally of downed trees was not available by press time, but the Road Department spent Saturday night and Sunday clearing them from roadways, and the Blue Ridge Mountain EMC worked around the clock as well to restore widespread electric outages.
Around 2 p.m. Sunday, the EMC said the system had suffered an estimated 20 broken power poles, but “there’s much more that we haven’t been able to lay our eyes on yet.”
At the peak of the outages around 4 a.m., the EMC was reporting close to 15,000 members without power across its five-county territory, which included disruption to over 6,000 meters in Union County, or about 30% of the meters here.
Dyer said the southeast area near Trackrock and northwesterly parts of the county seemed to be hardest hit, but impacts were felt countywide, with storm-related incidents including powerlines causing some small fires, blown transformers, several fire alarms and a utility box fire.
To his knowledge, Dyer said no tornadoes formed in Union County and there was no hail formation. A tornado warning was issued in nearby McCaysville of Fannin County, but there was no reported debris field associated with the tornado, so it might not have touched ground.
“They’re always concerned about our elevation,” Dyer said of the National Weather Service. “In Blairsville, Georgia, we’re right at 2,000 feet, and so they’re always concerned about the mountains getting these high winds that are moving down into these higher elevations.
“But watching it all last night, as soon as it came into Georgia, I think it started to lose steam. As it moved up north, northwest, it was the same situation that we usually get into – as soon as it starts hitting these mountains, it loses that momentum and that power, and it just dissipated.”
Fire Station No.1, which serves as the local Emergency Operations Center, hosted multiple weather briefings in the days before the storm, and during the storm, Dyer opened the EOC in a monitoring capacity to enable a quick ramp-up if emergency resource management was needed.
“This was a significant storm,” Dyer said. “You can see by the death toll that swept through Missouri, Mississippi, Alabama, and all the way into Georgia. But I think once it got to here, it lost steam, and thank God we live where we live, because we’re in that bowl.
“We’re protected by those mountains that take the punch out of a lot of these storms before they can even get here. So, I think that helped us. It’s very difficult to forecast in the mountains because it’s hard to get radar to work well up here, it’s hard to know what’s going to happen when the winds hit those mountains.
“They kind of do one of those forecasts of, ‘let’s prepare for the worst and hope for the best,’ and we’re OK with that. We take that information and evaluate it based on what we’ve done before. This time, we were going to monitor (at the EOC).
“We had 911 Dispatch with more personnel to help take calls. We had the Road Department, of course, fully staffed and ready to go. The Sheriff’s Office was out there on call if they had to help with traffic and if trees were across the road. We were ready.”
And Dyer urges residents to be ready for inclement weather as well, with advice on how to prepare a “Ready Kit,” what to do during power outages, how to plan for specific types of weather events and more available at https://www.ready.gov/.
“Being aware of weather events is a big deal, making sure you have several sources to receive information,” Dyer added. “Having a NOAA Weather Radio is something that I would recommend to people, because if your cellphone doesn’t pick it up, the weather radio will.”
