Tornado Relief Effort

Although we love living here in Georgia, there is a trade-off when it comes to the Weather. The Spring and Fall months are absolutely perfect, the summers are boiling hot and the winters are mild. However, we get more than our fair share of violent weather, storms, etc. here that regularly keeps everyone collectively on their toes.

A few weeks ago as many of you probably saw in the news, a string of Tornado's came through the Southeast and decimated a large amount of area in Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia. Although the overall extent of the damage in Georgia was not as bad as some of the areas of Alabama, there was still major destruction.

Our Stake was called to work on helping our brothers and sisters out in our area after these recent storms. This is the 3 time our Stake has been called to go serve destruction zones, the first coming after Hurrican Katrina, the second being the flooding North of Atlanta last summer and now these tornado's. So, once again we slapped on our Yellow Mormon Helping Hand T-shirts and went to work.

Being a couple of weeks after the storms hit, the majority of the work left to be done involved removing trees from people's property, etc. I've attached some pictures of us doing this work last weekend.



The main property that our crew worked on was this home of a 68 year old couple. Their story was so sad and frightening for them, their house is a one story home and when they heard the Tornado approaching, they crouched into a small crevice underneath a cabinet in their laundry room. The Tornado made a direct hit on there home and 10 seconds later, this is what was left of it (See the picture of the arrow to see the area this couple huddled in as the Tornado hit):



I did not have time to take pictures of the entire area, but there were dozens of houses that looked like this, all over the countryside. This a rural part of Georgia, the devastation is more than I can put into words.

Our Stake is being called back into action this coming weekend and likely more weekends in the future as well. Serving our brothers and sisters in their time of need is one of the greatest things we can learn to do in this life.