CORDELE — For the better part of three days it was as if South Georgia had been dunked in Cool Whip.
Everywhere you looked was bright, blinding white, a sight to behold in the form of confection conjured by the atmosphere and scarcely seen in these parts.
Locales from Camilla to Cordele and other stretches of Georgia’s lower half saw 7, 8, even 9 inches of snow where a flake rarely flutters. Much less a wintry blanket like this one that has lingered long enough to start wearing out its welcome.
On Thursday, a speed-limit cruise down I-75 from Middle Georgia was a Sunday drive through a countryside surreal. This corridor, ordinarily a vacationer’s route through nondescript, flat farmland to reach Florida’s pearl-sand beaches, has this week presented travelers a bleached-white, dunes-like landscape. It was as if the Emerald Coast had blown 200 miles inland.
The South Georgia roadside wore a shawl of snow. Peach orchards peeked through like wine glasses on linen tables. Pecan trees shouldered their newfound, cottony garb with style, upstaging billboards for gas, grub and restrooms that are usually all there is to catch one’s eye.
At an I-75 rest area in Dooly County, an Athens-area woman was bound for what she’d hoped would be warmer climes in Florida. “It’s like driving in South Dakota,” Judy Barrington of Bishop said. “The further south you go, the more snow you see.”
In Vienna at the Pig Jig Food Mart, which takes its name for the renowned annual barbecue-cooking contest nearby, one customer on his way to work at a chemical plant took time to soak in the view.
“You can see green trees and white snow,” Anthony Hardwick said. “You usually just see all brown this time of year.”
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Winter Storm Enzo, which barreled through Tuesday, also has been dubbed an “upside down” storm because it dumped most of its snow in the southern half of Georgia while barely dusting Atlanta and the mountainous northern part of the state.
And while the snow and ice had largely decamped from Atlanta by Thursday, despite a continued statewide cold snap, Georgia’s lower regions were still trying to slip and slide their way back to normalcy.
In coastal Savannah, recipient of 3 inches of snow, icy roads will keep schools shuttered Friday. In Glynn County, home to Brunswick and the Golden Isles, about 4,000 electricity customers were still without power Thursday afternoon. Saturday’s annual Brunswick Rockin’ Stewbilee has been postponed.
Credit: Joe Kovac
Credit: Joe Kovac
Far inland, in Cordele, barely 100 miles north of the Florida line and just off I-75, snow started falling on the self-proclaimed “Watermelon Capital of the World" on Tuesday at 2:03 p.m.
The Crisp County Sheriff’s Office was ready. The county has no snow plows or salt trucks. But Sheriff Billy Hancock saw the forecast and late last week ordered seven sets of tire chains just in case.
“Every hour, there’d be more and more snow and we kind of became giddy in the operations center,” Hancock said. “There were some snowball fights and then we had to start working.”
The cold blast, despite sticking around, has turned out to be more curiosity than calamity. Residents for the most part heeded warnings to stay off the roads. There were just a handful of wrecks.
“It’s been fun,” said Hancock.
Credit: Crisp County Sheriff's Office
Credit: Crisp County Sheriff's Office
Hancock’s staffers built a 3-foot-tall snowman, which the sheriff put a campaign hat on and jokingly swore in as a deputy, dubbing it “Crisp Nine” in honor of the area’s 9 inches of snow. The city’s previous record, 3.5 inches, was logged during the “Great Southeastern Snowstorm” of 1973.
This week’s storm was almost a relief compared with the havoc wreaked last year when an April tornado walloped the Lake Blackshear community and Hurricane Helene in September brushed Cordele as it hammered more eastern reaches of the state.
Around here, the occasional howls of winter are often remembered fondly. For Hancock, the fabled snowstorm of 1973 came to mind. A foot and a half of snow fell on Macon and other pockets of the state. The event was so unforeseen that after skies cleared and the sun came out, civil defense officials issued “snow-blindness” warnings for locals to be careful looking at it.
Credit: Joe Kovac
Credit: Joe Kovac
At lunchtime Thursday, a rock-hard patch of ice half an inch deep was still frozen solid beneath a canopy at the Circle K gas mart in Cordele. Next door at the Chick-fil-A, where a frosting of snow still clung to the awning, customer Luke Owens was eating a sandwich and reflecting on the extraordinary view out the window.
Snowcapped shrubs dotted the landscape at eateries and businesses along U.S. 280, the main drag into downtown Cordele.
“Out in the country, it’s beautiful,” said Owens, who lives up the road in Pineview. “It makes your trees come alive, all of your yard, everything. It has that zap. I think people need something like this every now and then.”
Downtown, mail carrier Al Mitchell navigated icy patches in alleys and shady spots. After emptying a mailbox outside City Hall, he said the snow was pretty enough to look at.
“But I’ll be glad to see it go.”
— Staff reporter Adam Van Brimmer in Savannah contributed to this report.
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