Atlanta, Georgia

Reposted from my personal LJ:

Yeah, so there was this tornado.

Just spent about an hour surveying the damage. While my building and block got its share of damage (lots of gutters, roofing, trees thrashed), a lot of areas are much worse. Caleb's building was right in the path of it and around there and all through down to Centennial Park, CNN, Georgia Dome, etc., it really does look like a bomb went off. Hundreds of blown out windows, crushed cars, giant hunks of building cornice lying around, steel fences twisted like plastic, a whole building reduced to its frame, etc. We ran into neighbors who say that another downtown park, Hurt, lost most of its trees. It's dark out so you can't see some of the worst of it. Tomorrow morning is going to be a sight.

Here's a list of all the damage I've seen:

• That huge billboard at Marietta & Spring was shredded; all that's left is part of the Philips Arena sign, that clock and the jumbotron.
  
  
• Large buildings with many, many windows blown out: Westin Hotel, Omni Hotel, Equitable Building, SunTrust Tower, a popular 1940s parking garage on Spring St.
  
  
• Lot of smaller buildings with windows blown out, including my friend's building, 123 Luckie. Of my neighbors over there lost 11 windows.
  
  
• Smashed storefronts, from windows and glass doors being sucked out/in.
  
  
• Trees knocked down, pulled out by the roots, thrown a few blocks.
  
  
• Several large steel-supported billboards twisted up by the power of the storm, keeled over and crushed parked vehicles. I'd say at least a dozen cars were totaled, just on Centennial Park Drive.
  
  
• They were setting up a crane at Marietta & Forsyth, to install some rooftop equipment at 55 Marietta. I think it got knocked over, looks like anyway.
  
  
• The lobby of my building (Healey, 57 Forsyth) got thrashed -- revolving door collapsed, ceiling lights swung and hit the ceiling, shattering, the glass down in the rotunda is partially shattered.
  
  
• Windows of the big 24-hour Kinko's are blown out.
  
  
• Ted's Montana grill is now an open-air restaurant.
  
  
• Big chunk of cornice in building Ted Turner owns (Luckie & Spring) was ripped off, is on the sidewalk.
  
  
• All around the neighborhood there are huge, mangled chunks of stuff that have blown off roofs -- metal air vents, gutters, insulation, tiles, slabs of tar paper.
  
  
• The Tabernacle sustained major damage -- a couple of the big marbled windows are gone, lots of smaller windows are shattered, the building sign (T A B E R N A C L E) is gone.
  
  
• The white pointy building sort of connected to the Tabernacle was destroyed. There are no walls, just metal beams.
  
  
• Right when the thing hit, I saw a ton of paper (imagine 100 cases of office paper) swirling around SunTrust building by Woodruff Park. Neighbors say the building's windows were blown out and the paper was actually stuff sucked out of the office. There are curtains from the building on the street now.
  
  
• I saw a whole bunch of blankets and comforters, presumedly from homeless people, flying through the air.
  
  
• Centennial Park is probably the thing that shocked me most. It's really devastating, and we could only see park of it. The metal and stone wall that goes around the outside is just a big twisted line of rubble. At least two of the big metal torch towers are down, thrown like matchsticks. A couple of the food vending stands were obviously lifted off the ground and thrown.
  
  There's even more stuff I saw, but you get the idea. For more, see CNN, which is headquarted right in the line of the tornado. Lots of reports the building got heavy damage, esp. the glass atrium. The Georgia Dome is messed up, the Fulton Cotton Mill got major damage (I think the top floor is missing from one building... looked like on CNN), Hurt Park has lost a ton of trees, Edgewood Ave. got torn up. But anyway, just wanted to share.
  
  If anybody has a question about a specific building or anything, let me know. If I didn't see it tonight, I'll be going out tomorrow and can check, see a lot more in daylight.
  
  UPDATE: The damage at the Cotton Mill is really bad. A friend called and said something about it pancaking, according to the news. People must have died. Anyone over there who can report?

 

Tonight, Maria had decided to go visit a girlfriend of hers at a Buckhead restaurant so Christopher and I decided to go to our little neighborhood pub, Sidebar. Sidebar is next door to the Mark nightclub and across the alley from the old Fulton County Courthouse and twenty feet from Slice Pizzeria. We were sitting at the bar playing video poker and sipping scotch when the whole bar was shaken by a huge BOOM. We sat unflapped as everyone ran outside to find that the Mark's awning was gone, broken glass was everywhere and most amazing, Slice's wrought iron outdoor tables and chairs were gone too. They had blown away! I had just been outside ten minutes earlier trying to make a call and it was completely calm. You can't believe the damage down here. It took alittle while for the reality to filter into our feeble brains that an actual tornado had hit our neighborhood. Once it did, we headed back to our building to assess any damage. We were lucky. There was minor exterior damage to the Metropolitan, but the Healy, just a block away had it's lobby rotunda wrecked. From our vantage point, we can clearly see whole window blocks just missing from the upper floors of the Equitable and Suntrust buildings. We can't see it from our window, but I've been told that the Flatiron building is screwed up too. We gathered with some neighbors and toured the wreckage. Amazing how quickly we became the white trash trailer park of American cities. Here are some pics;

This is about three blocks from our loft. The CNN Center.


Same area. Tourist heavy.


The Philips Arena Sign has basically collapsed onto our favorite Chinese restaurant... 


This dangling traffic light (one of dozens in the same condition) is right in front of our building.


Heavy billboard falls on car. The iron beams just folded.


This is the Tabernacle entertainment venue. Earlier tonight, there were large letters on the front that spelled out TABERNACLE. Not so much anymore.


Centennial Olympic Park. The column on the ground in the lower left should be pointing in the same direction as the others.

For anyone going to Momocon tomorrow, the roads are open around the Georgia Tech Campus according to GDOT Navigator maps. However, there is talk of The SEC Tournament games being moved to the Ga. Tech Coliseum and parking may become a serious concern. Also, the weather services are calling for more storms tomorrow. Please come early and plan accordingly. Thanks for reading and hope to see you there.

I'm supposed to go to an event at the Contemporary [at Marietta & Means Sts.] tomorrow at 11 am, and I'm wondering if streets around there are/will be closed. If anyone downtown can let us know about street closures, I for one would hugely appreciate it. I will obviously call before I head out tomorrow, but you know... just wondering now.

Check out the final preview of Sherry Kramer's When Something Wonderful Ends at Actor's Express for just $11.00 at the door.

The box office opens at 7:15 p.m.; the show starts at 8:00 p.m. sharp. Sorry, late seating is not permitted.

Actor's Express is located inside the King Plow Arts Center at 887 W. Marietta St. NW, Ste. J-107; Atlanta, GA 30318. Free self parking and valet parking are both available at the venue.

Starring Vickie Ellis Gray, When Something Wonderful Ends is one woman's journey through her life, her loves, and the Middle East as she faces her childhood Barbie™ collection. This performance is appropriate for audience members 13 years of age and up.

x-posted to ljatlanta, atlantatheatre, and atlanta_acting

00
NWS survey results just came out ...

NWUS52 KFFC 151738
LSRFFC

PRELIMINARY LOCAL STORM REPORT...CORRECTED
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PEACHTREE CITY GA
137 PM EDT SAT MAR 15 2008

..TIME...   ...EVENT...      ...CITY LOCATION...     ...LAT.LON...
..DATE...   ....MAG....      ..COUNTY LOCATION..ST.. ...SOURCE....
            ..REMARKS..

0938 PM     TORNADO          1 NW ATLANTA            33.77N 84.43W
03/14/2008  F2               FULTON             GA   EMERGENCY MNGR

            NWS DAMAGE SURVEY CONCLUDED AN EF2 TORNADO 6 MILES LONG
            AND 200 YARDS WIDE TUCHED DOWN AT SIMPSON AND BURBANK
            ROAD AT 938 PM. IT MOVED ACROSS DOWNTOWN ATLANTA AND CAME
            UP AT THE CORNER OF BRAEBURN AND JOSEPHINE ROAD IN
            WESTERN DEKALB COUNTY.


&&

I spent a couple of hours walking around my neighborhood checking out the damage. Here's what I saw, organized a bit by building, area, type, etc., with some comments.



( 60 pics of Downtown under the cut )

...yikes, more tornado warnings and huge hail. I live next door to a GSU building (Aderhold) and the emergency warning PA system came on an hour ago screaming for people to take care, tornado warning. I was in the basement of my building until five minutes ago. Anyway, those storms running from Alabama out to Athens look scary. College Park, Clayton County, Covington, Athens, all look like they're in it right now. Hope all are in a safe place.

P.S. My post about just now here.

Well, after attending the Artist Survival Skills workshop at The Contemporary this morning, a discussion of blogs as the primary means of disseminating information about the local art scene prompted me to finally create lj feeds for several art-related blogs that I read, most of them local. So, I just thought I'd share in case anyone else is interested in reading them. Feel free to recommend any more blogs/etc that you know of that are interesting, and if you don't have a paid account I can create feeds of them for you. A couple of these already existed, and a friend of mine created one of them, so it's a group effort. ;)

( This is an xpost from atlantaart, so you guys get a cut for redundancy and potential lack of interest.... )

if anyone here has attended the Portfolio Center and how they felt about it. Also, i am trying to get an idea of cost, since my school loans are already about to hit...yikes!

Thanks!

oh, and everyone stay safe in these storms, ok?

There were taken about 4:30ish. Whenever the hail ended in Duluth. In the time it took for me to get dressed enough to go on the porch, some of it had dissipated. The wind was making the rain and hail come sideways and the streets were full of patches of hail. As it was hailing, people were actually getting in their cars and driving.

( a couple of pics )

Well, today was the afternoon of the second mission of Improv Everywhere's Atlanta Chapter, The Gobi Lumberjack Society. It was at Lenox Mall, but we met outside a little eary, to plan things out.

I showed up nice and early, with two new Agents in tow. We checked out the meeting spot, and wandered for a bit, and waited for the brethren to show. Soon, there was some order to our meeting, and another new agent of mine arrived as the meeting was starting, and so I quickly filled him in on what was to come!

"We're dancing," I told my tardy friend. "We dance to no music, and we dance with fun in our minds and hearts. Now let's get out there and shake our groove-thing!"*

The agents dispersed and approached the destination from assorted directions. After a round of a&d alliteration it would seem, we soon found our target area, just in front of Loius Vitton. We planned to sit back for a few, and pretended to be surprised when it all started, and that we would join in, too! Very quickly, a few folks started to dance, and then more joined in the fun! The new agents, and myself, all jumped in (none of us with any coordination) and wreaked havoc on the dance floor! One agent and I quickly attempted some more formal forms of dancing, only to discover it was not fitting for the music in our heads. Instead, this kilted white-boy broke out into the meanest cabbage patch, and no one dared challenge its authority!

Within minutes, people found themselves transfixed on this, our impromptu dance party. Once I realized we had a good crowd going, I turned to one of the new agents I brought with me, and quietly uttered, "Jump on it!" Instantly, we were jumping on it, as it were, a dance we do weekly for physical warm-ups with our improv troupe (Mr. Friskett)**, and very quickly everyone joined in. I vocalized as quiet as I could our beat, and almost everyone was doing the exact same dance!

In going with the flow, you find you cannot go with the same dance for too long, and soon we naturally broke back up into different dances. My fellow jump on it agent decided it would be fun to start the Electric Slide, and others picked up, but it was a dance too daunting for this white-boy. Once that found its natural rhythm, and a large amount of people were all timed together, the mall security woman (you know, the black woman from police academy) waltzed (or should I say walked) right into the center of our dance floor, and pulled the plug of our music and told us we were all to leave by the nearest exit.

The lights were flicked on, and the cockroaches fled. Some left to shop, and others went back to the meeting spot, as is custom, to discuss the scene that just occurred. Was it deemed a success? Yes! Unlike the freeze, we have actual video this time, so our epic music video will hit the netwaves soon! Until then, watch out, Atlanta, because there is music in all of our hearts, and nothing you can do will stop us from dancing and sharing it with you!

* - Actual Conversation was more grunts, and less with cliche phrases.
**- Info about Mr. Friskett can be found here: http://mrfriskett.googlepages.com [/shamelessplug]

After the worst of the storm had subsided, I grabbed my camera and headed downtown to see what the tornado had left in its wake...





CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL GALLERY

I was watching CNN today to see their take on the tornado and subsequent damage, and the female talking head in the studio (sorry, didn't catch her name, nor did I recognize her, but I don't normally watch CNN anymore either - just some anonymous brunette with lots of makeup and big hair) actually said "Cottagetown" instead of Cabbagetown. And she didn't catch herself, nor did anyone correct her. I'd expect as much from an out of town news outlet, but from Atlanta's own CNN? Cottage Town? And when they showed the clip of the stairs with water rushing over them like a man-made waterfall of sorts, at the World Congress Center, she called it an escalator.

She also tried to give her own narration of the overhead shot of "an apartment complex" with roof blown off, saying the man in one of the kitchens there was "cleaning". Her off-kilter perceptions and misrepresentations in the guise of "news reporting" were too bizarre for me, so I went back to Channel "OMIGOD, WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!" 2, and Glenn Burns, and simultaneous tornado sirens here in Cobb County, and seriously considered grabbing my cats and heading for the bathtub. But I watched Glenn instead - his weatherterrorcasting is mesmerizing.

My neighbor Tom has posted a Flickr set with some impressive pictures from last night and today.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomhaney/sets/72157604123859300/show/

Enjoy! And cringe of course.