High winds tear through Tunnel Hill

Local News

Discussion

Welcome to our online comments feature. To join the discussion, you must first register with Disqus and verify your email address. Once you do, your comments will post automatically. We welcome your thoughts and your opinions, including unpopular ones. We ask only that you keep the conversation civil and clean. We reserve the right to remove comments that are obscene, racist or abusive and statements that are false or unverifiable. Repeat offenders will be blocked. You may flag objectionable comments for review by a moderator.

comments powered by Disqus

March 12, 2010

Charles Oliver The Daily Citizen

Dalton — High winds and hail tore through the Tunnel Hill area Friday afternoon knocking down close to 100 trees and damaging several buildings.

“We had a couple of houses that were damaged,” said Jeffrey Putnam, Whitfield County director of emergency services. “We had one trailer that’s probably going to end up being destroyed. A tree fell on it and did some pretty significant damage. We had a barn roof taken off up there.”

Putnam said no injuries were reported but the damage stretched from the Dogwood Valley and Houston Valley area north to the county line. A field survey by the Whitfield County Fire Department and the Emergency Services staff found four homes with minor damage, one home with major damage and one barn with moderate damage.

“There was no rotation in the broken trees that we could see,” he said. “The weather service said they didn’t think there was any rotation. It was all straight-line winds. Typically, with trees that are uprooted or broken like that, we are talking about 60 or 70 mph winds.”

The winds swept through about 1 p.m. Downed trees closed several roads. Putnam said all the roads had been cleared by about 3 p.m, but there may have been some people without power.

Putnam said there were no reports of significant damage in other parts of the county.

“There was some minor flooding in the areas that typically flood,” he said.