Residents in Tyrone and South Fulton County are still cleaning up after a rare January tornado came roaring through the area Monday night.

During Thursday night’s Tyrone Town Council meeting, Councilman Mike Smola thanked all the government agencies for offering immediate response to the situation.

“I think this is the worst disaster we’ve ever had in Tyrone,” Smola said.

Preliminary damage from the twister is approaching $2 million and the tornado cut a seven-mike path along Ga. Highway 74 in Tyrone to South Fulton County. One of the hardest hit areas in Tyrone was the River Oaks subdivision, where several high-priced homes were damaged.

It looked more like a war zone than a rural countryside Tuesday morning in South Fulton County. At Johnson and Gullatt roads east of Palmetto and along Bohanon Road south of Fairburn the aftermath of the F2 tornado that struck late Monday afternoon became all too obvious as the Sun rose to reveal the damage left in its wake.

It was a surreal setting. The familiar look of normalcy was all gone everywhere the twister touched down. Trees by the hundreds were blown down in every direction, often taking power lines with them. Some homes were miraculously spared though surrounded by fallen pines and oak. Others sustained minor to moderate damage while one was decimated as its owners huddled in thankful safety in the basement. In many locations small puffs of insulation once hidden inside roofs and walls filled the empty branches of nearby trees, looking eerily like some kind of pink snow in the warmer than usual sunlight of early January. And the trees that remained became the temporary home for an odd assortment of items deposited in their branches, items as foreign in their new lodging as the small limbs driven through exterior walls of one house.

Twelve-year-old Edgar Ayala warned a house full of relatives assembled for a family reunion at his family’s home on Bohanon Road to take safety in the basement. It was a wise suggestion. The tornado struck the house seconds after they assembled downstairs, leaving open holes in the walls, cracked support beams and toppled portions of the ceiling upstairs and down. Even in the basement, a part of the ceiling fell on the families gathered there.

“Some of us were praying, some were crying, some were quiet,” said Edgar’s sister, 17-year-old Laura, of the 30 people huddled downstairs. “Everyone was worried.”

And though one of the basement walls cracked and the ceiling fell, the pictures on the walls and the statuettes on the mantle on kept their place. The few injuries that resulted from the onslaught, said Laura, required no medical attention.

Surveying the damage Tuesday morning, Laura and Edgar were undaunted by the devastation around them. Laura’s upstairs bedroom had a new view of the countryside thanks to the large, gaping hole left in the wall. The contents of her bedroom, as in some of the areas of the house, were strewn about, pawns in the path of the 150 mile-per-hour winds.

Outside their home, Edgar and Laura pointed to the small pine and oak branches driven deep into the home’s exterior walls. Standing in another part of their large yard, the place where the barn once stood, they pointed to the mass of debris that littered the surroundings. Though two of the walls remained standing, the entire roof with rafters attached was found 1,000 feet away, across Bohanon Road, upside down in a pine thicket. And a few hundred feet down the road their rolled up sleeping bag hung by its small cloth handles on a branch of a leafless tree some 15 feet off the ground. It took the appearance of an out of place Christmas ornament that had been gently placed there by careful hands.

Laura and Edgar took it all in stride with smiles, saddened but determined to make right the devastation around them. Before the week was out, Laura would find herself functioning as interpreter with insurance adjusters and other damage assessment personnel, accurately understanding and relaying the intricacies of policy provisions and liability limits that would have many adults baffled.

Cleanup crews, power company trucks and busy homeowners dotted Tuesday’s decimated landscape all along the portion of Bohanon Road near the Fulton/Fayette line. Further west, at Gullatt and Johnson roads, the convention of boom trucks and dump trucks continued. More trees, hundreds of them, lay torn and scattered, like so many match sticks, snapped in half and blown away. Yet in most cases the homes in their midst suffered only minor damage. But such was not the case for Ernie and Janie Rochester. The Rochester’s home, one lot down from the intersection, is virtually gone.

Ernie and Janie were watching the television news when they heard the wind rapidly intensifying outside. Their other family members away at the time, the two descended to the basement before the tornado struck. What they found after the storm was a portion of the interior and exterior walls still standing. The majority of their home had been swept away. Ernie stood Tuesday afternoon near what had been a storage building in his back yard. He pointed to the vacant space on the ground and to the pile of debris yards away that only a day before had been the storage building of his next door neighbor. The small buildings and a large part of his home lay visible off in the distance in the rear of his property. They took the form of nearly unrecognizable debris, torn and shredded by the power of the winds that swept them away. As on Bohanon Road, the leafless trees of early January were filled with what looked like pink snow.

The look on Ernie and Janie’s faces Tuesday mirrored those of the many friends that came to lend a hand. From those helping to salvage what was left of the home’s contents to those making sandwiches or making quick work of the debris around the property, there was an obvious sense of appreciation and gratitude that the most important things had been spared by the tornado’s fury.

“Material things don’t mean anything to me, but family does,” Ernie said, the smile on his face and the look in his eyes impossible to miss. “The good Lord took care of us.”

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