Tropical Storm Helene socks Clarke County community

ATHENS, Ga. — Jim Hanna says he was fast asleep when it happened.

“I heard a bang,” Jim said. A big bang. “And I thought it was thunder or something like that.”

It turned out to be a tree. A tall tree downed on Rollingwood Drive in Athens. 

Eugene Foggie lives across the street. 

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“I heard the boom about 4 o’clock this morning,” Foggie said to Channel 2′s Berndt Petersen.

But it wasn’t the only boom and not the only tree. What was left of Hurricane Helene hammered the Cedar Creek community. 

Stately old oaks, 100 feet tall and some of them more than 100 years old were ripped out at the roots. 

They blocked street, after street, after street. 

When the trees went down, they took power lines with them, bending them like rubber bands. Many of those lines were still hot when crews arrived to turn off the juice to most of the neighborhood.

Power couldn’t be restored until the downed trees that fell on the wires were reduced to logs. That work began around 3 p.m. on Friday. 

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Once the trees were out of the way, the wires could be put back in place, and the switch flipped. 

Eugene Foggie says it was all because of a tropical weather system that made landfall more than 300 miles away. 

“I thought we would get something, but nothing like this,” Eugene said.

Residents said if the silver lining is that they didn’t see any trees down on homes and no reports of injuries.

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