Recovery efforts continue in Albany, Dougherty County after Sunday’s tornado

ALBANY — Dougherty County Emergency Management Agency Director Ron Rowe vowed the community will recover from the devastating storms that ravaged the county Jan. 2 and over the past weekend while providing an update on recovery efforts during a news conference Wednesday morning.

“I think it is important, first and foremost, to recognize how many partners we have here locally that are helping the city of Albany and Dougherty County recover from this horrible January of 2017,” Rowe said. “We have a lot of partners here in town participating in this effort, such as the local fire department, EMS, Albany Police Department, Dougherty County Police Department, the Dougherty County Sheriff’s Office, our IT department, our transportation department and the local Red Cross.

“We also have Christian Aid Ministries here, Samaritan’s Purse is here, our Georgia Emergency Management Agency all-hazards incident management team is here helping us out, and there are many more. So, I want everyone to understand that we have a huge collaborative effort here to try to help us mitigate and recover from this horrible storm that we have had.”

According to Rowe, many of Albany’s industries, big and small, have been negatively impacted by the January storms.

“The Marine Corps Logistics Base has had horrendous damage,” he said. “Procter & Gamble, Coats and Clark distribution center, the Georgia State Patrol Post 40, Southern Ag, as well as a lot of agriculture, and a lot of other small businesses in the area have been affected.”

Emergency shelters are currently housing hundreds of citizens who have been displaced by the storm, according to the EMA chief.

“We have a lot of shelters open at this time,” Rowe said. “We are currently sheltering citizens at the Albany Civic Center, which is our local Red Cross shelter, First United Methodist Church, First Baptist Church of Putney, Friendship Baptist Church, and, of course, our local hospital, Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, is also sheltering people.”

Many roads have been closed, according to Rowe, due to cleanup and recovery efforts, and much of the utility infrastructure has been damaged in the affected areas.

“We do have some road blocks and closures,” he said. “Holly Drive from Moultrie Road all the way to Radium Springs Road is closed, as well as Honeysuckle Drive and Radium at Red Bud. In the area of damage, there are three separate utility companies that have territories there: Albany Utility, Georgia Power, as well as Mitchell EMC. They all three are working diligently to restore service to the initial 8,500 people that were without power, and we are down to about 1,750 without power now.”

Rowe provided a map detailing the path of Sunday’s tornado, across which was a wide green stripe stretching completely across Dougherty County, from the southwest to the northeast.

“I want you to look at the map over here,” he said. “This is the path based on damage that we plotted as far as where the tornado traveled through Dougherty County. We have over 340 square miles of land area. It entered our county on the southwest side and traveled about a mile or mile and a half-wide path all the way through our county to the opposite side on the northeast and then traveled further into other counties.

“It has devastated a large area of land and a lot of residences. Between the two storms, the Jan. 2 storm and the Jan. 22 storm, our estimate is that 50 percent or better of our population has been affected from these storms. A lot of times people look at things that are more than 50 percent damaged and call them totalled, but I am here to tell you that we are not totalled and we are going to make it. We will recover.”

Rowe predicted that all search and rescue efforts would be completed by Wednesday evening or early Thursday.

So far, according to reports, an unknown number of injuries occurred, four fatalities have been confirmed and one 2-year-old boy is still missing.