Cleanup underway in Atlanta

As sightseers snapped pictures, emergency workers picked through the rubble Saturday in downtown Atlanta after a powerful tornado ripped through the city, snatching roofs, popping windows out of skyscrapers and hurling chairs and luggage onto the streets.

No fatalities were reported downtown, but about 30 people were injured, and scores of local landmarks -- including the Olympic torches at Centennial Park and the CNN Center -- were damaged.

Faced with the first recorded tornado in downtown Atlanta’s history, Mayor Shirley Franklin declared a state of emergency Saturday morning and urged residents to stay away from downtown as the city braced for more tornadoes.

The 135-mph tornado hit Atlanta at 9:45 p.m. Friday with only eight minutes’ warning. A meteorologist with the National Weather Service said it moved southeast across the city, cutting a path 6 miles long and 200 yards wide.

Some of the worst damage was in the historic Cabbagetown neighborhood, where the top floors caved in at a onetime cotton mill, now converted into lofts. Behind the towering brick complex, centuries-old elm and oak trees crushed wooden bungalows.

When the tornado hit, thousands of visitors had converged in downtown Atlanta for basketball games, a dental convention and a home show.

The NBA’s Atlanta Hawks were playing the Los Angeles Clippers at the Philips Arena. At the Georgia Dome, Mississippi State and the University of Alabama had just gone into overtime at the Southeastern Conference men’s basketball playoffs when part of the fabric roof was ripped off by the tornado. Metal siding and insulation fell into the 70,000-seat stadium, sending players darting to the locker rooms and fans to the exits.

A couple of blocks away, water poured into the atrium of the CNN Center, where the cable-TV news network is headquartered. Windows in the CNN.com newsroom shattered, and a computer was sucked outside. Anchor Betty Nguyen held up a large chunk of construction material Saturday morning. “This is part of the ceiling that caved in,” she said.

The college basketball tournament resumed Saturday at the smaller Georgia Institute of Technology stadium, but there was not enough room for all of the nearly 20,000 fans to attend.

Scores of other downtown events, from the St. Patrick’s Day Parade to the local Collins Hill High School prom, were canceled so that emergency crews could clear debris and restore power lines.

But that did not deter hundreds of people from ambling through downtown streets littered with shards of glass, mangled billboards and downed traffic lights.

“Man, that window is going to pop any minute,” said local resident Richard Jackson, 40, as he craned his neck to look at a glass window blowing in and out about two-thirds of the way up the 52-story Georgia-Pacific office building. Below the skyscraper, a cluster of men sat on a balcony, drinking beer, as emergency workers tried to cordon off the sidewalk.

By lunchtime, boards had already replaced the smashed windows at Ted’s Montana Grill downtown, and Tennessee football fans sat munching on fries and bison burgers.

Around the corner, Marty Schwartz, 52, pointed his tartan umbrella at a row of cars wedged under a collapsed metal billboard on Luckie Street. “That’s my BMW,” he said quietly.

Across the street, bellhops from the damaged Omni Hotel hauled carts piled high with luggage across Centennial Olympic Park to other hotels, and families lingered to snap pictures of the downed replica Olympic torches, which lay on their sides next to overturned garbage cans and food carts.

“You have to exit the danger zone,” a voice announced from an Atlanta police patrol car circling the park. “You have to exit the danger zone. More tornadoes are on their way.”

There were hailstorms but no more tornadoes in Atlanta on Saturday. Thunderstorms killed one person in Polk County and another in Floyd County, both in northern Georgia near the Alabama line.

In Atlanta on Friday night, the tornado built up strength as it moved southeast of downtown. It tore the roof insulation from the Prince Hall Grand Lodge on historic Auburn Avenue.

It also hit the historic Oakland Cemetery -- the final resting place of thousands of Confederate veterans, as well as local luminaries such as golfer Bobby Jones and Margaret Mitchell, author of the 1936 novel “Gone With the Wind.” Scores of residents perched atop a brick wall Saturday to photograph oak trees that had crashed down over marble headstones.

Shirley Lipscomb, 38, who had cowered in her closet, praying, as the storm tore off the roof of her Jackson Street apartment, stood on the sidewalk Saturday morning, thankful to be alive.

“I started hearing a whistling sound, like a train,” she said. “Then the dresser started moving and things started flying around the room. I was like, ‘Oh, my god. I’m dead. I’m dead.’ ”

Her sister, Juvanda Anderson, walked up, chewing chicken wings, and Lipscomb hollered out, “You see my roof?”

“Oh, my god!” said Anderson, 27. “Girl, look at your apartment! You exaggerate, but that roof really is off.”

Farther south, search-and-rescue teams combed the top floors of the Stacks loft complex at Fulton Cotton Mill -- roofs throughout the complex had been partly or completely torn off.

Behind it, the streets of Cabbagetown -- a quaint neighborhood of old millworkers and hipsters -- were lined with overturned trees and dented cars.

On Iswald Street, Christal Carlson, a 38-year-old waitress who had been listening to Ziggy Marley when the storm blew in, was in her front garden Saturday looking for her fat black cat, Zoe. “I think she was swept off the front porch,” she said.

On Gaskill Street, Samantha Olken, 24, stood outside her tiny duplex in pink satin ballet pumps, sweeping shards of glass from her neighbor’s table off her front porch.

Around the corner, birds and squirrels hopped in a disoriented state around their former home -- a 175-year-old elm tree on Berean Street. The tornado had toppled the tree, cracking the foundation of Gabrielle Martz’s house, and sucked clothes from her wardrobe through the windows.

“My friend Jason just called and said, ‘I think I’ve found your jacket in my yard,’ ” she said.

On Powell Street, elderly residents sat outside in rocking chairs staring blankly at a row of three oak trees that had toppled three bungalows like dominoes.

By midafternoon, Betty Harper, 72, still wearing her blue pajamas, plucked up the courage to walk into her home for the first time since the tree had crashed down on top of it.

Wooden ceiling beams had collapsed into her living room, blanketing her sofa, TV and tables with white insulation foam. As she tried to open her refrigerator, bricks tumbled down onto her tile floor.

“I never seen anything like this,” she said, her hands shaking as she picked framed photographs off her mantel. They were unscathed.

“The Lord is with us,” she said.

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jenny.jarvie@latimes.com