I heard there was a tornado in downtown ATL

Fortunately my husband decided he had worked enough and came home a couple hours earlier than usual for a Friday night. He is on some crazy deadline and has been putting in a lot of time at the office.

This is where he works... (photo taken by mattlandia)

I was hanging out on the couch working on a project. The cable in the living room is not getting a signal, so the TV was off. My husband went into my son's room and briefly heard something about a tornado hitting the GA Dome and CNN, he asked me to look it up on the Internet.

For some silly reason I assumed if a tornado hit the CNN center it would be on the front page of CNN.com .... I was mistaken there was no news there. So then I logically assumed a weather story as huge as a Tornado in downtown ATL would be on  the front of weather.com - nope!

So I checked Twitter. That's right - Twitter. There I saw both Amber Rhea and Dave Coustan had posted  messages about some damage.

So I googled Atlanta, Tornado, GA Dome - and the first results were blogs and forum postings about the tornado.

I live in Alpharetta and we did not have any weather comparable to what was happening elsewhere, and I had not even begun to imagine what was happening elsewhere.

On Saturday, my husband and I woke up and began to work on all of the projects around the house that we had planned for this weekend - aka Spring Cleaning. Again, for the most part I was not following the news. My husband was, simply because he was a little freaked out that he could have been at work when the tornado hit. He kept telling me about the damage, but again I still did not catch on. My family who lives in FL called to check in and see if we were alright, I explained we barely had any bad weather, a thunderstorm, but nothing more.

Tonight I jumped on Twitter again to check in and JBrotherlove alerted everyone of the pictures that were up on Flickr. I jumped on and noticed that over 1900 pictures had been uploaded. Within the hour that it took my husband and I to go through the pictures, another 100 had been uploaded.

The pictures are amazing and some of the best coverage of any news worthy event. More than that, I get to see pictures by the real people who were affected, look at them at my pace on my time table and explore the events through the stories of the many various story tellers who were there.

Here are a few photos that really caught my attention:

Funnel Cloud by Perry W
Blown Away by Mr Wombat
Cotton Mill Lofts by Mary Lesh
Atlanta After the Tornado by Mary Lesh
Apartment in Vine City by Thomas Wheatley
ATL 2 by Krivec8
Untitled by Dave Fountain

There are two big forces at work, external and internal. We have very little control over external forces such as tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, disasters, illness and pain. What really matters is the internal force. How do I respond to those disasters? Over that I have complete control.

- Leo F. Buscaglia