It had all the makings of a perfect Saturday night until Mother Nature crashed the party.
Allen and Lisa Jordan and their friends, the Dunns, were enjoying dinner at a restaurant in Milledgeville, and then were planning a leisurely ride in the Jordans’ pontoon back to their house where they would sit around a fire in the yard and watch some college football.
“We were at Taylor’s Cove and the wind was kind of blowing a little bit and it felt good so were sitting outside eating and just enjoying ourselves,” Allen Jordan described. “Then we paid and were getting in the boat to come back home and neighbors on both sides of us started calling and saying ‘y’all’s place is gone.’” I said, ‘What the heck happened?’ and they said, ‘Your house is gone.’”
“He was going so fast in the boat to get to the house that it bent the Bimini top on the boat,” his wife, Lisa, added.
The Jordan’s weekend house, located on the shores of Lake Sinclair along Clubhouse Road, was struck by what is believed to have been a microburst, according to Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills, who also serves as the county’s EMA director.
Other residential yards on Clubhouse Road had trees down in them, and a couple of houses had portions of trees hit the house. All of the trees were still standing in the Jordans’ yard, but the tin roof was completely torn from the back side of their composite wood house and back porch. Large portions of the roofing hung in a large hardwood tree in their front yard, and other portions were scattered around the yard and in surrounding neighbors’ yards.
White spray foam insulation covered areas of the front yard, a big tree, and the road, looking like snow had fallen instead of rain. Debris and household and lawn items also got scattered outside.
The roof had previously covered the front and back porches, which stretched the entire width of the 1,500 sq. ft. house. The back porch still had remnants of what was once an outdoor kitchen area with a Big Green Egg grill.
“It moved the Green Egg, which I’m surprised because those things are heavy,” Lisa Jordan said.
“And some things are still missing, we haven’t found them yet. If this were our everyday home, we would really be struggling right now, but everything happened in the best-case scenario,” she added, referring to the fact that they were not home when the storm hit.
“The thing I’m thankful for is I’m glad that nobody was hurt,” Allen added. “I’ve said it so many times today, I’m glad nobody got hurt. I’m not even worried about this place, I don’t care about it, I’m just glad nobody was hurt. This place isn’t that big of a deal, as much as we love it and love coming here. I’m just glad nobody here or anywhere in the cove was hurt.”
The Jordans, who live in and own a garage in Lilburn, have owned their Lake Sinclair home since 2005. They both said they were so overwhelmed when they first walked up from their boathouse to their storm-damaged house that they didn’t know what to do. But before they had time to worry, their neighbors jumped right in.
“We had so many people help us and tell us what we needed to do, what we needed to salvage to be safe, and they were very good help,” Lisa said.
“We didn’t call anybody, they called us and said, ‘We’ll be down there in the morning,’ and they showed up with a big truck the next morning and loaded everything,” Allen added.
The interior of the house was completely emptied of furniture Sunday afternoon, but visible signs of the storm were plentiful. The sheetrock ceilings were bowed with the weight of the rainwater they held, puddles continued to form on the floor even though it had been swept out many times, light fixtures dripped water, and in one place, the light switch cover was still attached to the wall, but the switches were either missing or bent.
The couple continued to praise their neighbors for all the assistance, noting one neighbor even welcomed them to sleep in their house.
“Everybody has been great and made this so much easier for us to handle,” Lisa said. “Spectrum and Tri-County came out and had all the neighbors back on as soon as they could, and I mean before midnight (the storm happened around 7 p.m., they said); and then the first responders, fire department, sheriff deputies, they were so good, so good. The deputy (Hollie Collins), took a picture of the house and gave it to us and gave us a claim number, and we weren’t even thinking about that, but she already had it done.”
Allen Jordan said the house was insured, and they plan to rebuild as soon as they can.