CARLTON FLETCHER: Albany will get through devastation — we always do

You just call on me, brother, if you need a hand. We all need somebody to lean on.

— Bill Withers

I have a tendency sometimes to try and find humor in situations that are not really funny, to try and lighten the mood when I can.

I can’t do that today.

After a 2 1/2-hour drive from my rural Lee County home to The Albany Herald building on Pine Avenue Tuesday morning, a trip that took me through a large part of this community, I find nothing to joke about. I saw the huge trees laying in the middle of some of the city of Albany’s nicest homes. I saw buildings laid to waste, huge trees and debris blocking roadways, people wandering around in a daze, shellshocked by the devastation.

To say that parts of northwest Albany and the central portion of the city looked like war zones Tuesday morning is not hyperbole.

When I drove down Philema Road into the city limits a little after 8 Tuesday morning, I expected there to be some traffic snarls. I wasn’t prepared for what I found, though.

When southbound traffic into the city backed up to the bridge on Jefferson Street, I made a U-turn and sought access to the U.S. 19 Bypass. I’d talked with Herald Editor Jim Hendricks, and he and librarian/reporter Mary Braswell, who come in on U.S. 82, had had little trouble making it to the office. So I headed that way.

But when I reached the end of the entrance onto 19, I saw traffic backed up again, so I turned and got back on Jefferson. I exited onto the Bypass going west and pulled off onto the Nottingham exit. I got onto Dawson Road, but again saw a traffic snarl, so I turned onto Lullwater. It was there that I saw unbelievable devastation.

Massive trees had toppled over all up and down the street, into the road, onto homes, onto vehicles. When I finally made it to Gillionville Road and headed into town, I ran into another traffic backup. I pulled another U-ie, drove to Westover and headed north. By this time, my wife had called and said traffic was moving on the Bypass, so I figured getting to U.S. 82/Oglethorpe might be my best bet. It was there that I sat for almost an hour (at least Rock 105 was playing amazing music), inching forward to the Blaylock Street exit.

Once I made it to Blaylock, it was a simple matter of crawling through traffic onto East Broad Avenue, only to find the underpass was blocked. Another U-turn, several blocks east on East Broad to Cason, over to Oglethorpe/82, and I finally made it to Pine Avenue. My daily commute that usually takes 15-25 minutes had eaten up most of the morning.

As I talked with Hendricks and reporter Jennifer Parks, who’d had her own one-hour wait in traffic to get to the office, the stories of devastation came pouring in. Homes damaged, traffic jams, thousands with no power. I listened to phone messages … reader James King called to tell about what he said was a tornado that touched down but spared his home while uprooting huge trees only a few feet away … City Commissioner B.J. Fletcher told of the heroic utilities crews from the city, working through the night in dreadful conditions to try and clear roadways and restore power.

City officials said Tuesday morning that they were assessing damages and will put together a plan of attack to try and get things back to normal as quickly as possible. And, as an aside, for those of you who do nothing but criticize your city officials: If you’d been at the Emergency Command Center in the downtown courthouse and had seen officials like Sharon Subadan, Michael Persley, Ron Rowe, Phil Roberson, Stephen Collier and many others working calmly to assess the myriad emergency issues their city faced to come up with that plan … well, I left feeling proud that we have these professionals on the job.

I have no doubt our city and our region will move forward. We always do. And I also have no doubt that we’ll put aside the petty bickering over race, politics, religious and sexual preference, and all the other meaningless junk that needlessly occupies so much of our time and we’ll work together to put our lives back in order. I’ve seen that pull-together spirit already in west and central Albany neighborhoods, where people were out Tuesday, helping neighbors clean up the storm’s aftermath.

If only we’d hold onto that spirit once the cleanup is over and we make our way back to “normal.”

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_Fletcher on Twitter.