For many Whitfield County residents, this weekend’s winter storm, which dumped to two to three inches of snow in most of the county, provided an extra day off from school or work, extra time to spend with family or a chance to play in the snow.
But the storm, which started about 6 a.m. Friday morning, also caused inconveniences and trouble for a number of area residents.
On Friday, about 50 people had to be evacuated from a neighborhood on Pine Oaks Drive in Tunnel Hill because of an accident involving a truck carrying propane, according to Whitfield County Emergency Management Agency Director David Metcalf. Meltcalf said that storm conditions played a role in the accident, which resulted in propane leaking from the tanks carried by the truck. Residents could not return until emergency crews removed the hazard.
“The evacuation started at 1:44 p.m and the last resident was dropped off (at their home) at 6:35 p.m.,” Metcalf said.
Metcalf said Friday night and over the weekend there were 38 reported motor vehicle accidents with no injuries, nine reported motor vehicle accidents with injuries, including one serious injury accident. But he said it isn’t clear how much of a factor the weather was in any of those accidents.
Things were more quiet in the city of Dalton.
“Anecdotally, I did hear that there were a good number of cars that had to be pulled out of ditches on Friday before roads were plowed off, but I don’t think there was anything too serious,” said Dalton Communications Director Bruce Frazier.
Dalton Utilities said it had no power outages because of the storm.
North Georgia Electrical Membership Co. reported some outages.
“Between Friday and Saturday, we had four outages throughout the county,” said Hannah Parson, the company’s manager of corporate communications. “The two largest included a 348-meter event northeast of Varnell, which took our crews just under an hour to restore, and a 38-meter outage off of Cleveland Highway, which took just over an hour to restore. All outages in the county were restored within an hour and a half after the time they started.”
“Considering the weather we have had over this last weekend, the impacts to the electric grid in our service area were minimal, and we are grateful,” she said.
Amanda Arnold, a media relations specialist at Georgia Power, said the utility could not immediately say Monday how many of its 6,300 Whitfield County customers lost power.
But she said that between Friday and Saturday the utility restored power to more than 7,600 customers across the Northwest Region of Georgia, which includes Whitfield County and has 178,000 customers.
On Friday morning, the Waugh Street hill between Shugart Road and Walston Street, Tony Ingle Parkway/Dug Gap Mountain Road, Houston Valley Road going over the mountain at Nickajack Road, and Old Dixie Road and Tilton Road near their intersection were closed. The Waugh Street hill was reopened by Friday and the others were opened on Saturday.
Locally, the storm brought a couple of inches of snow in most places. But it dumped 6 inches or more in parts of the South, according to the National Weather Service. More than 1,500 flights were canceled at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta on Friday and another 1,000 on Saturday.