I remember the night of April 8, 1998 well. I was living in Dunwoody, Georgia at the time. My ex-girlfriend was (if I’m not mistaken) in New Orleans, at a “group meeting” for her job. Since New Orleans is an hour behind Atlanta, and since her boss had treated everyone to a fancy dinner that night, it wasn’t especially unusual that she called me a few minutes before midnight to tell me about her day.
I remember the weather being bizarre that night. It was raining like I’d never seen before, there was so much lightning that it almost seemed like daytime, and it was windy… so windy, in fact, that the rain was falling sideways! The whole thing was so unusual that when my ex called I went out on the covered porch by the bedroom to describe it for her. We then continued talking for a half hour or so as I sat on the porch, watching leaves and small branches fly every which way. I remember bringing up the weather several more times in our conversation.
Although the weather was bad, I didn’t think anything of it… until I turned on the TV the next morning to catch the headlines before leaving for work. Not more than two miles away from me, this happened:
It’s now known as the “1998 Dunwoody tornado”, and it was so bad that it got its own Wikipedia page several years after the fact. The tornado itself wasn’t especially powerful, but when it hit Dunwoody it hit its greatest strength (an F2 on the Fujita Scale) and expanded to 800 yards across. Yes, the tornado was as wide as eight football fields!
I drove through the area pictured above the next day, and I know people often use the phrase “it looked like a bomb went off”, but in this case, it really did look like a nuclear bomb had gone off. Tress were ripped out of the ground and thrown hundreds of feet. Many houses were simply gone, and some of them were absolutely, completely gone. As in, there was only a concrete foundation left, and the yards where those houses once stood were completely empty of any debris. Not a single 2×4 or sheet of siding was seen anywhere.
It was surreal. It was depressing. I couldn’t believe that it’d happened.