Local Hazard History
Metro Atlanta's headline hazards are tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, and rare-but-paralyzing winter weather. On March 14, 2008, an EF2 tornado tracked directly through downtown Atlanta — damaging the Georgia Dome and CNN Center and making Atlanta one of the few major U.S. downtowns to take a direct tornado hit. In January 2014, two inches of snow during the Snow Jam storm refroze on untreated roads and stranded thousands of drivers and schoolchildren for up to 24 hours, exposing how thin the region's winter-weather infrastructure is. Just two weeks later, Winter Storm Pax (February 2014) coated north Georgia in heavy ice, snapping trees and leaving hundreds of thousands without power for days. Atlanta also catches the remnants of Gulf and Atlantic hurricanes — Hurricane Irma (2017) knocked out power to over a million Georgia customers, and Hurricane Helene (September 2024) brought damaging winds, tornadoes, and outages deep into the metro.