Heavy Rain — Fulton, Georgia

2012-03-03 · near Alpharetta, Fulton, Georgia

Event narrative

Numerous media outlets reported that an 83-year-old woman perished as an indirect result of the heavy rain. Family members indicated that she thought her interior closet unsafe in the event of a tornado, and that she wandered off just after midnight Saturday morning in search of a safer location. She sought shelter in a drainage ditch outside her home and was unable to escape when heavy rain caused the water to rise quickly. Her body was found after daybreak Saturday morning, hundreds of yards away in a nearby creek.

Wider weather episode

The cold front that stalled across central Georgia on March 1st began advancing back north as a warm front the morning of March 2nd. A secondary, and stronger, cold front moved across the Tennessee Valley late on Friday, advancing into Georgia Friday evening and into central Georgia early Saturday morning. Very warm and moist air ahead of the cold front provided for sufficient instability to produce widespread strong to severe thunderstorms across the region. One supercell produced two tornadoes in north Georgia - an EF3 in Haralson and Paulding Counties and an EF1 in Cobb County. Large hail, damaging winds, and flash flooding also occurred with these storms.

View location on OpenStreetMap → (34.0829, -84.2908)

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event_id 365191. Narrative written by the NWS forecast office that issued the report.