After Winter Storm Izzy battered Habersham County Saturday night and into Sunday, causing downed powerlines, trees, damage to homes, days-long power outages and unsafe road conditions, County Manager Alicia Vaughn took time at the Jan. 20 county commission meeting to thank county personnel and community members for their support during the storm.
“I have never been through something quite like what we went through,” Vaughn said. “I know many people in this room have probably have multiple times. This was my first time going through a big winter storm, and I couldn’t imagine having gone through it with a better group of people than I did. I was humbled every day by the hard work and dedication of our staff.”
Vaughn recognized county employees and local restaurants for their dedication to helping staff as they worked day and night through the storm.
“The amount of support that we have in this community and the way that we come together when we have big challenges like this, I feel blessed to be here,” Vaughn said. “I’m so glad this is going to be my new home.”
She presented plaques to Dairy Queen, Papa Johns, Wolf Creek Barbeque and Commissioner Bruce Palmer for providing free or heavily discounted meals for the public works and safety departments who ran calls to keep the community safe during the storm. Palmer cooked meals for the workers.
Aside from the people who fed the county’s workers, Vaughn also wanted to thank former Habersham County Emergency Services Director Chad Black for serving in the director’s capacity through the weekend after his retirement on Friday, the Habersham County Sheriff’s Office and HCES for helping clear roads and run calls, and the public works and road departments for working nonstop to open roads.
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“Our public works department cleared 95 county roads of fallen trees throughout the storm,” Vaughn said. “Three of those roads had two to two and a half miles of fallen trees.”
Vaughn wanted to recognize Public Works Director Jerry Baggett, as well as several other workers from the road department, but many of them were out sick after working through the weekend and into the week, clearing roads during the wee hours in freezing temperatures.
“We’re a big county, but that public works group consisted on average about 18 to 20 workers,” Vaughn said. “That is not a lot of people, folks, to be out cutting down all those trees. It was nonstop for them. And I just can’t say enough good things about our public works department.”
According to Habersham County Public Information Officer Carolyn Gibson, the county had about 80 personnel working county-wide throughout this week to provide emergency public works services. She said that of those personnel, 25 were with the road department and 11 were contracted employees. The county had to bring in those contracted employees due to staff shortages.
“I can’t say enough about our public works crew, our public safety people, my directors,” Vaughn said. “I mean, the list goes on and on and on. And we learned a lot. . . there are a lot of things that we can do better, and we’re going to be having a meeting after this to talk about some of those things.”
She says one thing that they couldn’t have done any better, though, is receive better support from their community.
