DUBLIN — Hurricane Helene came knocking, but Angel Coney didn’t answer her door.
For a while, she didn’t so much as peek outside.
She huddled in her basement with her sons Travi, 10, and Mari, 9.
The roaring wind sounded like someone stomping on their roof.
”It was awful. It was loud. Like a bomb,” Coney said. “You heard everything falling.”
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
The storm, or at least its eye and the brunt of what remained of its once-Category 4 force, hadn’t been expected here this far east in Middle Georgia.
But around 3 a.m. Friday, when it slammed into Laurens County and its 16,000-population county seat of Dublin, 50 miles east of Macon, the power went out and trees crash landed on homes, cars, trampolines. Utility poles snapped.
Two people were killed, one in a weather-related tractor-trailer accident, another when a tree struck a house
”It hit Laurens County hard,” a man on a bicycle said as he cruised through debris littering roads and yards north of downtown. “It was scary.”
Symier Wilkins, 15, said, “It sounded like my house was about to blow way.”
His neighborhood off North Jefferson Street near Northview Cemetery and the Dublin Hunting & Fishing mart was pummeled by Helene’s fury. Jungles of electrical wires dangled like wild vines on sidewalks. Sagging, shredded cables resembled a collapsed trapeze.
Most traffic lights in town blinked red. No one knew when the rest of the lights might come back on.
In a social media post, Dublin Mayor Joshua Kight said crews started assessing damage at first light. They got to work clearing fallen trees and debris and activating generators for critical infrastructure, such as water pumps and traffic signals.
“Much of Dublin is currently without power,” the mayor wrote. “We are communicating with Georgia Power to identify fallen power lines and to provide any assistance needed to restore service.”
On North Jefferson, an oak tree dive-bombed Crishauri Ponder’s front yard. It landed on top of her Nissan Sentra, smashing its windshield.
”I knew something fell, but I didn’t know how bad it was,” Ponder, 27, said after the sun came up.
Across the street at Angel Coney’s place, she and her boys could only gaze at the surreal destruction in the daylight. Pecan leaves and branches littered the street.
Coney said her family spent much of the night praying.
”I’m glad we were safe,” she said.
Around the corner on Northview Avenue by the cemetery, Shundre Lowe said Helene’s powerful winds, perhaps gusting to 80 mph, blew open the doors on his house.
He thought it was a tornado. ”Like something out of a ‘Twister’ movie,” Lowe, 45, said. “It was pitch-black. It shook the house. All you heard was trees cracking. I was scared it was going to blow me out of my house.”
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