VALDOSTA — The recent assault by Hurricane Irma wasn’t the first time Mother Nature has dominated the headlines 

From blizzards to hurricanes to tornadoes and floods, the weather has thrown towns across Georgia and north Florida for a loop on several occasions.

The newspapers in the SunLight project area — in Valdosta, Thomasville, Tifton, Milledgeville, Moultrie, Dalton, Ga., and Live Oak, Fla. — look back at some of the storms that have made the front page in the past.

VALDOSTA

In early April 2009, a series of severe storms moving across Alabama, the Florida Panhandle and South Georgia produced the worst flooding Valdosta had seen in living memory.

“This was a flood of historic proportions,” Von Shipman, former city engineer, said at the time.

What was expected to be a minor irritation became a major problem when more than five inches of rain a day fell each day from March 27 through April 3, causing the Withlacoochee River to the immediate west of Valdosta and the Alapaha River between Valdosta and Statenville to spill over their banks with record flooding. 

At one point, the city was completely cut off as flooding caused all roads into the city to close. Then-Gov. Sonny Perdue declared a state of emergency across 49 counties.

The water that inundated Valdosta actually fell farther north, boosting the south-flowing streams.

“By the time it got here, the water was overwhelming,” Shipman said.

Some of the worst flooding in the city was in the Sugar Creek area, where a normally modest stream rose so high that the nearby YMCA building was flooded out, with up to two feet of water standing in the cardiac exercise room, while the Y’s parking lot, located in a “bowl’ near the creek, was under more than 10 feet of water. Residents of nearby homes were seen kayaking down flooded streets.

Boil-water orders were issued for people using private wells that might have been overwhelmed by floodwaters. Municipal water systems were not affected but a wastewater spill took place at the city’s Withlacoochee River treatment plant. Wastewater spills from the plant were once a regular occurrence, invoking the ire of Florida counties downstream, but have become fewer and farther between after the city spent millions in upgrades and improvements.

Floodwaters from the river topped a 28-foot earthen berm at the plant — even after an additional 20 feet was added to it.

A federal disaster declaration was issued by President Barack Obama, and Gov. Perdue toured the city while the Federal Emergency Management Agency set up shop in Valdosta to aid flood victims across 17 counties.

While no mandatory evacuations were issued, some people in particularly flood-prone areas chose to leave anyway.

Not Louis and Judy Castrinos on Little River Road.

“One of our neighbors left about three days ago,” Judy Castrinos said at the time, according to a past article in The Valdosta Daily Times. “Their house is almost completely under water now. … We have lived out here for 25 years, and the area has flooded before. But this is the first time the water has gotten up to the house.”

To the east of Valdosta, the Alapaha River rose far over its banks at the edge of Statenville in Echols County. In one neighborhood near the water, residents used boats to get in and out of their homes, Echols County Sheriff Randy Courson said at the time.

Among Lanier County residents affected by flooding from the Alapaha River was Lanier County Probate Judge Judy Mullis, who dealt with floors in her home that were damaged.

“I was raised in this house, which my dad built 50 years ago,” Mullis said in 2009. “We just weren’t expecting the flood to come as quick as it did. … I also just thank the Lord because it could have been a lot worse for us.”

More recently, a tornado that tore a deadly path through several South Georgia counties dominated The Valdosta Daily Times’ front page for days.

In the predawn hours of Jan. 22, a twister tore through 11 counties and killed 15 people.

County officials confirmed two deaths in Brooks County, while Berrien County Sheriff Ray Paulk said two more people died in that county.

In Brooks County, a mobile home located just west of Barney on Ga. 122 was picked up and thrown 100 yards, with shredded remnants of the building found along both sides of the highway. The elderly couple who lived in the mobile home were killed.

In Berrien County, said another couple was killed when in their sleep when a tree hit their house, crushing the bedroom, Sheriff Ray Paulk said at the time.

The county hardest hit by far was Cook; a trailer park near Adel was flattened with eight people killed.

Susu Van Brackell, a volunteer firefighter working the devastation at the trailer park, said at least a dozen homes had been “destroyed” there.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, this was a 20,” she said.

Gov. Nathan Deal, having already declared a state of emergency, surveyed the damage around Adel, while the White House approved federal disaster aid packages.

In Lowndes County, no fatalities were reported, but Val Del Road suffered significant damage.

THOMASVILLE

A sudden, torrential rain came down on Thomasville late on the afternoon of June 6, 2012. Flooded streets were blocked off. Ditches and lakes went out of their boundaries.

After the rain stopped, 12-year-old Ethan Nunnally and some friends were playing in mid-thigh-deep water in a ditch at the intersection of Remington Avenue and Lake Circle near Nunnally’s home.

“I saw a whirlpool, water spinning around,” recalled Nunnally, now a 17-year-old senior at Brookwood School and a member of the school’s football team. “I was going to play in that. I just disappeared.”

Nunnally was sucked — “folded over backwards” — into the whirlpool at the mouth of a drainage pipe. His body traveled through 100 yards of pipe under Remington. Nunnally was spit out into a creek.

“It was whitewater rapids,” Nunnally said, describing the rough water he found himself in. “I felt like I was traveling fast.”

The underwater journey had taken two minutes. About 15 seconds after going under, Nunnally realized he had been sucked underground, but he did not know where he was going.

“I thought I might wind up in someone’s toilet,” he said.

Grabbing a tree on the creek bank, which Nunnally thought was a river, he saw a vehicle pass by.

“I realized I was by a road. I realized I’ve got to yell,” Nunnally said.

He saw his father, Jamie Nunnally, run toward him. A man pulled the younger Nunnally from the water and carried him to an ambulance.

Nunnally was injured and covered in blood. He was in shock and did not realize he was hurt and bloody.

He suffered bruises, cuts and scrapes, but no head injuries.

Nunnally said all he knew was he was traveling through a pipe. His chest hurt from not breathing, but he did not focus on the pain.

“The entire experience was a total lack of thought,” he said.

In a flood many years earlier, in 1948, torrential rain fell on South Georgia and flooded much of the region. Many bridges were washed out, including several on the Ochlockonee River.

Communities to the north and west of the river were blocked from services and had no delivery of fresh bread. Flowers Baking Company used boats and small planes to carry bread across the river to waiting delivery trucks so communities impacted by the flood could have fresh bread and rolls.

Decades later, Jay Flowers and about 200 other men were “whooping it up and having fun” at the annual Ducks Unlimited banquet at the National Guard Armory in November 1985 when Hurricane Kate blew through South Georgia.

The men knew bad weather was predicted but they had no idea it would be as bad as it was.

“The the rain blew in the windows near the ceiling,” said Flowers, today a Thomasville City Council member. “The windows were rattling and making noise.”

Eventually, the men decided going home was a good idea.

Flowers, who lived off Metcalfe Road, encountered downed trees and electrical wires on the road to his house. Trees also were down on his driveway. Hearing trees falling around him, he parked his brand-new BMW among the fallen trees and made it to his house.

This was before cell phones became prevalent. The Flowers residence had no power. The next morning, he found a tree on top of the new car.

Thomasville resident Tom Berry, a former longtime City of Thomasville city manager/utilities superintendent, said the first time he saw it rain sideways was during Hurricane Kate in 1985.

Berry was the district operating supervisor for Georgia Power Company in Bainbridge, which included Thomas County, when Kate struck.

“I saw what it did,” he said, adding that Thomasville was on the right side of the storm center, the worst place to be.

Sustained wind was 50 to 70 miles per hour, with gusts of higher wind speed, he said.

“I would say it’s the worst storm that ever hit Thomasville,” Berry said.

Pointing out “significant changes” in how municipal electric systems operate today, Berry said cities and crews are smarter.

When Berry came to Thomasville Utilities in late 1986, some trees toppled by Kate were still down and Kate-related electrical construction had not been completed.

Not only does Thomas County have a lot of virgin longleaf pines, Thomasville has many overhead power lines that go through limbs of large, old oak trees.

During Hurricane Kate, a large pine on a plantation was downed by high wind and fell on a passing vehicle on Cairo Road. The driver was killed.

TIFTON

Vicki Hickman has been the Tift County Emergency Management Agency director since April but had been the deputy director for 11 years. She coordinated the response to Hurricane Irma, which swept through the area in September.

Asked about previous disasters, Hickman referenced the flooding in 2009 and 2012 and the tornadoes in 2016.

The tornadoes were difficult to deal with, since one was in Omega and one was in Brookfield, which are in different parts of the county, but they occurred within minutes of each other.

“That was challenging since we had to be in two different places at the same time.

“In Tift County, 2009 was probably the biggest event that I worked,” she said.

Every county in South Georgia had huge flooding issues, she said.

“We were evacuating homes because there was a thought at one point that the dam down at the Church of God campground was going to break, so we had to get everyone out (of that area).”

Water levels rose to above the bottom of the windows, Hickman said.

In all, approximately 100 people were evacuated.

Hickman said that she was standing near one of the flooding areas and remembered getting hit by fire ants. 

“They do not like water and they’ll come right to the top,” she said.

She said there was a series of weather systems that came through and caused the flooding issues. Tift County ended up with 21 inches of rain within a 24-hour period.

“We actually flooded twice,” she said. “We flooded on that Saturday and then the waters went down. Then we started getting everything from upstream so we flooded again that following Monday. Then a couple of days later we had one of the worst hail storms we’ve ever had.”

A damage assessment after the event recorded 82 homes and rental properties being impacted by the flooding, most of them uninsured for floods.

FEMA classified 20 structures as having minor damage, 44 as having major damage and 18 as being totally destroyed. The 18 were all mobile homes.

Some roads received extensive damage and the sewer system was affected as well.

“Anytime you have people who are displaced from their home and losing groceries because of power outages, thats a big deal,” she said.

She said that whether it was one family or one apartment complex or one neighborhood, it’s just as devastating for that one family regardless of scale.

“We can’t look at it on a scale,” she said. “If there’s one family affected, it’s bad.”

Hickman emphasized it is important for people to already have a plan in place before an emergency situation arises.

“They don’t need to wait on us to do it, they need to go ahead and decide where they’re going to go, how they’re going to get there and what they’re going to take,” Hickman said. “Have that plan done on a blue-sky day and not when the interstate is full and the radar is turning colors.”

MILLEDGEVILLE

While the summer humidity certainly doesn’t do local resident any favors, one good thing about living in Middle Georgia is a relative lack of natural disasters. 

Far enough inland to be insulated from most tropical storms and far away from any major fault lines, tornadoes have traditionally been the worst storms that Milledgeville residents have experienced. 

While tornadoes have struck the city several times, one stands apart from the rest in terms of damage caused to the city. 

On Christmas Day 1964, a severe thunderstorm swept through the Macon and Gray area, spawning tornadoes that killed two people and injured six others in a trailer park just south of Gray in Jones County. 

As the storm moved eastward late in the evening, the storm’s center passed straight through Milledgeville, where a tornado cut a several-blocks-wide swath of damage from one end of the city’s north side to the other. While no residents were seriously injured, the twister demolished a home and damaged several structures and nearby trees.

Although longtime Milledgeville resident Patsy Smith lived with her family several blocks away on Vinson Highway at the time, her father heard the noise of the storm passing through town clearly.

“It would have been toward the middle to the end of December, because my dad was at home recuperating from cancer surgery and I was staying at the house with them,” Smith said. “It used to be that the train ran through the center of town, and he told my mother that he thought he heard a train. She thought it was probably just the medication he was on or something — my mother wasn’t paying much attention to the weather because we hadn’t gotten any wind, rain, or anything. … My daddy had heard the tornado when it came roaring through town, because we weren’t so far out that you couldn’t hear something with that force.”

That same night, longtime Milledgeville resident David Newsome went to bed after a long day of opening presents and devouring Christmas dinner. Although his family lived too far away to hear the storm passing through, Newsome and his cousins heard about the damage from friends the next morning and drove to the area of Wilkinson Street to investigate.

“We rode downtown the following day and saw all these decorations laying down,” Newsome recalled. “It took the roof off of (Georgia College’s) Atkinson Hall and kept running up Wayne Street, and my great-grandpa’s best friend lost a shed and a dog up on Hopewell Road … the dog showed up three days later with no hair on his body.”

“Where the island is on North Jefferson Street where you turn off of Hancock, there used to be a huge, huge tree,” Smith said. “It totally uprooted the tree, and if I’m not mistaken, it blew roofs off of some of the buildings around town, but I just remember it blowing that tree because it was so big. … We’ve had tornadoes that have touched down since then, but I don’t think we’ve had any cause as much devastation as that one did.”

MOULTRIE

Some people would call the Williams family lucky on the night of Feb. 13, 2000, when a massive tornado struck their Camilla neighborhood, splitting their mobile home in two, with half of it tossed into a large oak tree and the other half never located.

Teresa and Freddie Williams, however, quickly correct the word “lucky” to “highly blessed.”

Freddie, who was launched more than 200 feet, received the most serious injuries in the family when the first of two tornadoes struck Mitchell County within hours. 

Teresa was thrown into a neighbor’s yard next door, while son Bryant, then 13, and his cousin Joe ended up in the back yard of the Williams’ Goodman Road residence.

“Freddie got thrown, they said, 250 feet,” Teresa Williams said. “He was out there in a field.”

The first of two powerful storms that struck Camilla that day, the second coming hours later and basically following the trail of the first, struck around midnight Feb. 14 and is referred to in the area as the Valentine’s Day Tornado. 

Ten people were killed when the F3 tornado struck the Goodman Road area, which included a large percentage of mobile homes. Brick houses across U.S. Highway 19 also were demolished by the powerful twister. 

On the Fujita Tornado Damage Scale, tornadoes are rated from F0 for twisters that have winds of less than 73 miles per hour with a maximum of up to 318 miles per hour for the most extreme F5 storms, according to the U.S. National Weather Service. 

An F3 storm has winds measured at 158 to 206 miles per hour and is able to tear walls off well-constructed houses, overturn trains, uproot most trees in their paths and pick up and toss around heavy cars.

An eleventh person died when the second storm came through at about 5:30 a.m. 

At the Williams’ home, Teresa had just got back from her job at a hunting plantation in the county owned by Cader Cox shortly before the first tornado struck that evening. 

“We went to go to bed. Freddie had bought me two Valentine’s gifts, a bottle of perfume and a bottle of wine,” she said. “I was sitting there looking at them.”

While there was heavy rain falling on Teresa’s drive home, neither she nor her neighbors were aware of the half-mile wide funnel cloud closing in.

“It felt like the wind picked up the trailer,” Teresa Williams said. “We heard the window pop. Freddie said hit the floor. It hit right then.”

The next memory she has is of being in the yard of neighbors who said she should not look for her husband but go immediately to the hospital and allow rescue workers to search for him.

“I didn’t feel anything,” Freddie Williams said in that brief moment before hearing the window pop and the train-like sound of the twister. “I just told them to hit the floor.”

Mitchell County Hospital acted as the triage unit for the nearly 200 people injured in the storm’s path of destruction that demolished 200 houses and damaged 250 more.

Freddie, who had a concussion, all of his ribs broken, a punctured lung and a fractured windpipe, was taken to Archbold Memorial Hospital in Thomasville, where he slept for nine days.

Amazingly, Teresa was unhurt, Bryant had a broken finger and Joe had some minor cuts and bruises.

“I was told the house where we were staying, the frame was wrapped around a tree,” Freddie Williams said. 

After 21 days, he returned home on a Saturday, and that night he was unable to breathe. He returned to Archbold and was rushed to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. The following Wednesday doctors diagnosed the trachea injury that had not been detected earlier.

They installed a stint and Freddie returned home again, but the first Saturday, he was home the stint fell in his chest, Teresa Williams said. He was returned to Emory.

“I almost died three times,” said Freddie Williams, who remembers nothing from the time he told the family to drop to the floor and waking up in the Thomasville hospital.

In all on that night and morning, four strong super cells produced cyclones that touched down, cutting swaths through the area that also included parts of Colquitt, Grady, Thomas and Tift counties. Six people were killed in Grady County, and one in Colquitt County near the Tift County line.

Damages in Mitchell County were estimated at $20 million. The Grady County twister also destroyed eight poultry houses, killing an estimated half-million chickens

All of the deaths occurred in mobile homes, and in the rebuilding of Camilla, efforts were made to get survivors into more sturdy structures. Among those helping in that effort were the Camilla Housing Authority and Habitat For Humanity.

Teresa Williams’ boss helped by donating money and taking up a collection from hunters who visited the quail plantation. The family was left only needing to borrow $5,000 to build their three-bedroom house about two streets from Goodson Road.

“Mennonites came in and they built it,” she said. “We bought the materials. They didn’t charge anything. In five years, it was paid for.”

Both said they can handle a certain amount of stormy weather these days.

“As long as it’s raining, it don’t bother me; when the wind blows …” Freddie Williams said, not completing the sentence.

“It shakes me up a little bit,” Teresa Williams said. “It’s an experience I don’t want to go through no more.

“I feel like God was trying to get our attention. He got mine. We’re blessed to be here.”

In one of those oddities of tornadoes, the storms frequently take the same path on multiple occasions.

Codell, Kansas, for example was hit by tornadoes in 1916, 1917 and 1918. More amazingly, the twisters hit on May 20 each of those years.

So it was for Camilla, after the two powerful twisters tore through on Valentine’s Day, a little more than three years later the same Goodson Road neighborhood was demolished again. The storm also destroyed the chicken houses in Grady County that replaced those flattened in 2000.

The storm from which it grew moved northeast from the Florida panhandle, as had its predecessor three years earlier. As an F3 twister, it again destroyed dozens of homes and damaged more than 150, according to the National Weather Service.

“Unbelievably, another F3 tornado followed nearly this same track back in February 2000,” an agency report on the weather event said. “Some residents in Camilla rebuilt homes destroyed by the tornado three years ago, only to find their new homes damaged or destroyed by this tornado.”

Four people in that area were killed in this tornado, which was on the ground for 25 minutes along a 19-mile path, while two were killed in Worth County. 

Mitchell County Administrator Clark Harrell, who was a sheriff’s office investigator in 2000 and emergency management director in 2003, said better-built houses and better warnings helped make the second storm less deadly.

“In September 2000, we started working with emergency management, started looking at ways we can better inform citizens,” Harrell said. “At that time we had (programs) where we gave weather radios away.”

Nowadays, cell phones are ubiquitous and nearly everyone seems to have a weather alert application on theirs, he said.

“Also, the Weather Service has gotten much better over the years,” he said. “Before 2000, severe weather was just common. A tornado watch was just common. I certainly didn’t respect the weather as I do today.”

DALTON

In North Georgia, the anticipation of even an inch or two of snow can cause schools and government offices to shut down and cause panic buying of groceries and gasoline.

So it’s no wonder residents who lived through it still talk about “The Blizzard of 1993.”

On March 12, eight days before the first day of spring, it started snowing. And snowing. And snowing. By the time it ended, the storm had dumped more than 20 inches of snow on the area, and some of those living on the area’s many mountains and ridges got almost three feet of snow.

Schools remained closed for several days. Many residents went without power for more than two weeks. A Dalton school bond referendum scheduled for March 16 had to be postponed to June.

Whitfield County Sheriff Scott Chitwood was barely three months into his first term in office.

“The volume of calls was extremely heavy,” he said. “The bulk of the calls was for welfare checks. People calling to have us check on their parents, elderly neighbors, those who were handicapped. The problem was that there was 24 inches of snow, if I remember correctly, on the road. The National Guard brought some Humvees in and we were riding with them. Fortunately, a lot of our employees had four-wheel drive vehicles as their personal vehicles, and they were using them. We were backed up four and five hours on calls.”

With the roads frozen and covered with snow, even those sheriff’s office employees who could be released from work could not get home.

“We ran low on food pretty quickly but a National Guard helicopter dropped food for us in a field across from the jail, where the police department building is today,” Chitwood said.

Chitwood said one of the few bright spots was the “standard calls” of crimes dropped to almost zero.

Chitwood said since that time the sheriff’s office has obtained several SUVs and other four-wheel drives for its fleet.

“Most of the SUVs and pickup trucks we buy now are four-wheel drives, and many of our Ford Tauruses are front-wheel drive and are very adaptable to the weather,” he said.

Former Dalton Fire Department Chief Barry Gober was then a lieutenant. He recalls the weather forecast calling for snow.

“If I recall, we (were) told it would be six to eight inches,” he said.

That would still be a massive snowfall by the area’s standards.

Firefighters spent the night putting chains on half of the department’s fire engines.

“Now, they have automatic chains. You just push a button. But back then it was a slow, methodical thing,” he said. “And you can only drive an engine with chains about 25 miles per hour.”

They left half the engines without chains just in case the forecast was too dire. By morning, it was clear they would need to put chains on all of the engines.

Gober said the volume of calls the department handled during the next four or five days was massive.

One problem was that fire suppression systems in many commercial and industrial buildings froze and burst, setting off automatic fire alarms.

The number of medical calls rose, with people trying to clear snow and having medical issues or running improperly ventilated generators and getting carbon-monoxide poisoning.

At first, all of this had to be handled by the firefighters who happened to be on duty Friday night.

“A lot of guys couldn’t get out of their neighborhoods at first. They came in as quickly as they could, but a lot of them were trapped for a day or two,” he said.

Gober recalled that then-Capt. Scott Millsap brought his mother, who lived alone, to the station to make sure she was safe.

“She made sure we were fed. If we could scrounge something up, she cooked it,” he said. “A lot of times we had just 15 minutes between calls, but she made sure we had hot soup or chili or something. She was there probably two or three days, maybe four, and she worked hard.”

LIVE OAK, FLA.

Suwannee County residents awoke to historic flooding June 25, 2012. Live Oak had 20.13 inches of rain.

According to the National Hurricane Center, Live Oak’s flood levels along the Suwannee River were the highest observed since Hurricane Dora in 1964. A portion of U.S. Highway 90 was closed and remained closed for nearly two weeks.

“It was just unbelievable that that much rain could fall in such a short period of time,” City of Live Oak Mayor Sonny Nobles said. “I was completely shocked and horrified when I saw what happened.”

Nobles said it took the city, county and residents a long time to recover.

According to Suwannee County Emergency Management, the cost to the county for Tropical Storm Debby was $2.6 million, not including residential homes. It included the cost for building repairs, road clearing and repairing, emergency response, overtime pay for county employees and numerous sinkholes.

A 160-foot sinkhole in the middle of downtown formed under two buildings on U.S. Highway 129 and the corner of Pine Avenue. The buildings ended up being demolished. The land is now a park.

John and Debbie Rice, owners of The Frame Shop and Gallery, said they are grateful their building, a few doors down from the sinkhole, did not have to be demolished.

The Frame Shop and Gallery was open in the 1970s by John Lawson and purchased by the Rice family in 1995.

“We had four inches of water in the shop,” John Rice said. “We lost some inventory but did not lose any customers’ work.”

Rice said Debby was devastating but it did force them to reconfigure the shop to better suit their needs.

The floors and some walling had to be replaced.

Rice estimated it took six months to get the shop back to normal operations.

“Tropical Storm Debby was hard to comprehend at the time,” Rice said.

Live Oak Jewelry had approximately two feet of water in its store on U.S. Highway 129.

The business was established in 1946 and is currently owned by Bart and Jon Boggus.

“I kept thinking the rain had to stop soon,” Bart Boggus said. 

He added the ground was already saturated with rain from that week.

The week of Tropical Storm Debby, Live Oak Jewelry received a shipment of boxes and wrapping paper that was ruined.

“I don’t know how many jewelry displays, boxes, papers and records that were ruined,” Boggus said.

They lost all of the records for 2012 up to the storm because the water also got into the safe.

Live Oak Jewelry had to get new flooring.

Boggus said it took six to eight months for the store to get back to normal operations.

The SunLight Project team of journalists who contributed to this report includes Terry Richards,  Eve Guevara, Jessie R. Box, Patti Dozier, Charles Oliver, Natalie Linder and Alan Mauldin.

To contact the team, email sunlightproject@gaflnews.com.

Terry Richards is senior reporter at The Valdosta Daily Times.