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'I can't imagine the fear' | GEMA director surveys tornado damage

Assessing the devastation is the first phase of response, he says.

SPALDING COUNTY, Ga. — Roofs torn off of homes and buildings left in shambles marked where neighborhoods once stood whole -- these are the sights one of Georgia's top emergency managers saw from the sky Friday.

"It kind of takes you a second to absorb it all," Director James Chris Stallings said. Stallings, who prefers to go by Chris, leads Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency (GEMA).

Surveying the damage

Stallings toured areas hardest hit by Thursday's severe weather outbreak via helicopter with Gov. Brian Kemp and Lt. Gov. Burt Jones. The trio assessed the aftermath in Spalding County sharing photos of a destroyed Hobby Lobby in Griffin and a flattened building in the area on Friday. The National Weather Service confirmed an EF-3 tornado tracked through the area the day before and believes another twister spun in the area as well.

"The damage is widespread -- we only got to see a small portion of it," Stallings said. "I can't imagine the fear that was going through the folks that were dealing with being inside the homes at that time."

He said looking at the damage is just part of the job, stressing that he was only able to fly over Spalding County and parts of Butts County.

"As a matter of fact, my chief of staff here spent all day in Newton and Jasper counties out there trying to just help them absorb some of the loss they're dealing with," Stallings said.

Friday's response

GEMA is currently working with local emergency management leaders and the NWS to bring relief to devastated areas. He said he's been working with the Department of Public Safety and the Department of Natural Resources to utilize their chainsaw crews and aviation units to spot downed trees and get them out of the way.

"It was a statewide event," he said, adding that the governor's state of emergency made it easier to jump into action and removed some red tape. "We knew that there would be a lot of lives affected in this one," he said. 

Unfortunately, Friday was largely a day for damage assessment with Stallings expecting more repairs and cleanup to happen throughout the weekend. 

"Some of the rescue and cleanup missions couldn't start until power lines were disabled, so some of that is just now getting underway," Stallings said. "It's a tough scene out there."

What was damaged

Just initial reports show that it's going to be tough to put a price tag on the damage.

"I couldn't tell you a dollar figure because there's so many different types of damage," he said.

Stallings said pecan and cotton farms were destroyed by the tornadoes, adding that Friday revealed there was a lot of agricultural damage. Businesses were torn to pieces, people lost their homes and their cars, and thousands of people remain without power 24 hours after the storms moved through.

Who was impacted

He said that damage can be fixed -- but fatalities are a tragic loss that is hard to move past.

"We are actually devastated at the loss of the two," he said, speaking of a GDOT worker who was killed while clearing debris and a 5-year-old child who also died during the severe weather outbreak.

Ultimately, he said with the amount of damage two deaths are not what would typically be expected of a storm that brought this much devastation. He added that it's still too early in the damage assessment stage to truly know.

"There are still some folks out there that are severely injured -- they're in hospitals now. We didn't have any reports of critical damage to anybody, no critical injuries," he said. "Right now our hope is that the two lost lives are as bad as it gets for us -- you can't get much worse than that."

Watch Stallings' full interview below:

   

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