Snow bypasses Middle Georgia, but storm leads to fatal wreck, water rescue and scattered power outages

Instead of snow, most of Middle Georgia got off with chilly rainfall Friday night and Saturday morning. Temperatures are expected to steadily warm up this week until they reach the low 70s on Thursday and going into next weekend.

A state of emergency remains in effect thought midnight Sunday for 78 counties. The action by Gov. Nathan Deal includes Baldwin, Bibb, Butts, Crawford, Greene, Hancock, Henry, Jasper, Jones, Lamar, Monroe, Putnam, Taylor and Upson counties in Middle Georgia.

Most of the freezing rain and wintry precipitation Friday night and Saturday morning happened further north of Macon, said meteorologist Ryan Willis, with the National Weather Service’s Peachtree City office. The south Atlanta metro area and counties including Henry and Spalding saw freezing rain, while the north Atlanta metro area and northern parts of the state saw snowfall from a couple to several inches.

The most snow reported was 6 to 7 inches in the mountains of northeast Georgia. Putnam County had a dusting of snow Saturday morning, a dispatcher with the sheriff’s office said.

The precipitation is done for now, and the weather will stay dry and cold into Sunday and Monday, with highs in the 40s and lows in the 20s.

“For anybody that might be heading up toward Atlanta, the roads once you get up into the Atlanta area do have some icy patches,” Willis said. “(You) might want to put off traveling up this way.”

Fatal wreck

Few wrecks were reported Saturday morning, but icy road conditions contributed to one fatality. Malik Jordan, of Albany, was killed in Forsyth just after 7:15 a.m. Saturday, according to Sgt. Lawson Bittick, public information officer for the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office.

The 20-year-old was on his way back to Georgia State University in Atlanta. He was driving his Lincoln Navigator northbound on Interstate 75 near mile marker 188 when he struck a patch of ice on the bridge over Ga. 42. Jordan lost control of the vehicle, went off the road and hit a tree. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Speed was also a factor, and witnesses said the car was going more than 80 mph. This is the first fatal wreck in Monroe County this year.

High winds

High winds Saturday morning created choppy waters on Lake Juliette in Monroe County. Three young duck hunters and a dog had to be rescued from the lake after their jon boat filled with water and overturned.

The teenage boys couldn’t swim and hung onto the side of the boat, said Monroe County Emergency Management Agency Director Matthew Perry.

They called for help on a cellphone at 5:30 a.m. and communicated with dispatchers until the phone battery died, said Monroe County Fire Department Battalion Chief John Johnson. Emergency workers in boats used surface water rescue techniques to locate the teens in the middle of the lake. The rescue was delayed because of low visibility due to extreme fog.

The teens were in the water for more than an hour, Perry said. All three were wearing hunting/fishing waders, and water had poured into one of the boys’ waders, weighing him down and submerging him up to his chest, Johnson said.

He was taken to the Medical Center, Navicent Health, with extreme hypothermia and has a very good chance of survival. The other two were evaluated at the scene and released. None of them lost consciousness or were unresponsive at any point.

Duck hunters “live for” days when the weather is like it was Saturday, said Macon resident Paul Pancake. He goes hunting every weekend in his canoe and saw emergency crews searching for the boys early Saturday.

Hard northeast winds and northern storms often push new birds into the area. But, the rough waters can be dangerous for even seasoned hunters if they’re not prepared, he said.

Power outages

Heavy winds and downed tree limbs caused scattered power outages across the state, Willis said. Georgia Power restored power to 50,000 customers throughout the storm, said Georgia Power Spokesman John Kraft. As of 4 p.m. Saturday, 2,600 customers remained without power, most in the Atlanta area.

Georgia EMC had 1,500 customers without electricity in north and central Georgia, according to its website.

“We’ve been planning for it all week, and we had crews ready to go,” Kraft said. “We really saw very little (outages) in mid-state.”

This story was originally published January 7, 2017 at 5:08 PM with the headline "Snow bypasses Middle Georgia, but storm leads to fatal wreck, water rescue and scattered power outages."