TS Alberto came ashore nearDestin, Florida on July 3. Crawled slowly through SW Georgia on the 4th, and stalled South of Atlanta on the 5th. As I recall, we had about 22 inches of rain in about 48 hours in my county, about 100 miles due South of ATL.
There was a 125 HP tractor in a low spot in one of my fields. Water was over the tops of the rear tires. For two weeks, some neighbor boys would row a boat out to the tractor and climb on the roll over bar and dive into the water. We lived on higher ground, but roads were washed all around us.
My wife and daughter were in Los Angeles at a convention. Wife called me and wanted to know what was going on; there were pictures of a flooded Americus, Georgia on the front page of the LA Times.
All of Middle and Southwest Georgia was hit hard. Hundreds of coffins were literally floated out of cemeteries near Albany. That city was literally cut in half by the Flint River. Macon was without drinking water for 17 days. There were 31 fatalities in Georgia, 11 of them in Sumter County, where quickly rising creek waters drowned people in their beds.
I always thought that with that many fatalities, the name Alberto should have been retired, but there has been at least one more storm named Alberto.
The picture is at the intersection of Pierce Avenue and Riverside Drive in Macon, about 500 yards from the pawn shop I worked at. There was a mark in the building (it was a bank in 1994) that marked high water. It was about five feet over the floor.
There was a 125 HP tractor in a low spot in one of my fields. Water was over the tops of the rear tires. For two weeks, some neighbor boys would row a boat out to the tractor and climb on the roll over bar and dive into the water. We lived on higher ground, but roads were washed all around us.
My wife and daughter were in Los Angeles at a convention. Wife called me and wanted to know what was going on; there were pictures of a flooded Americus, Georgia on the front page of the LA Times.
All of Middle and Southwest Georgia was hit hard. Hundreds of coffins were literally floated out of cemeteries near Albany. That city was literally cut in half by the Flint River. Macon was without drinking water for 17 days. There were 31 fatalities in Georgia, 11 of them in Sumter County, where quickly rising creek waters drowned people in their beds.
I always thought that with that many fatalities, the name Alberto should have been retired, but there has been at least one more storm named Alberto.
The picture is at the intersection of Pierce Avenue and Riverside Drive in Macon, about 500 yards from the pawn shop I worked at. There was a mark in the building (it was a bank in 1994) that marked high water. It was about five feet over the floor.
