TIFTON, Ga. – Albany Area Assistant Maintenance Engineer Jerry Smith knew the black clouds he saw rolling across state Route 133 on Jan. 22 were a bad sign.

His first thought was “here we go again.” Georgia Department of Transportation maintenance employees were still collecting debris left behind by Jan. 2 severe storms and now a tornado had been reported in Albany.

“I knew it was going to be horrible, but I didn’t realize how bad it was going to be until I got to Mock Road. The store was demolished and all the traffic signals were gone,” Smith said. “That’s when I started calling people in. This was definitely an all-hands-on-deck situation. We worked through the night clearing roads. And when I say ‘clearing,’ I’m talking about making it passable. Our first goal is to get traffic moving down the road safely. We can always come back and clean up.”

From the first week of January through Thursday, Georgia DOT employees have removed more than 1,724 dump truck loads of storm debris from state routes in Baker, Brooks, Cook, Crisp, Dougherty, Mitchell, Thomas, Turner, Wilcox and Worth counties. Dougherty County represents the bulk of the total and that is where GDOT has currently focused its attention. Large trees have been collected and crews are now hauling off smaller debris. They expect to be finished by the end of next week.

Crews were faced with massive downed oak trees that were so large they had to be loaded by section onto a lowboy trailer. Georgia DOT has excavators, but had to rent a larger one to remove some of the debris, Smith said.

The tornado also caused an estimated $500,000 in damage to signs and obliterated traffic signals.

 “One of our big I-beam signs on U.S. 19 was twisted all the way around like it was a toothpick,” District Sign Manager Darrell Braswell said.

It was critical for driver safety to get one way, do not enter, stop and yield signs repaired as quickly as possible. Likewise, it was critical to get traffic signals up and running. District signal maintenance employees started working 15-16 hour days. In some locations all they found were signal pieces.

“U.S. 19 at Holly Drive (Albany) was a total rebuild. The devastation was amazing,” District Signal Engineer Brent Lupo said. What wasn’t missing was on the ground.

All signals have been repaired or replaced, though two locations are running on generators due to issues getting power restored.

District Engineer Chad Hartley praised the quick response of employees who were able to open the majority of state routes quickly to allow emergency vehicles access to damaged areas after the violent Albany tornado. The Jan. 2 and 22 storm recovery has required the work of 297 southwest district employees. Local Georgia DOT crews and those from the central, east and southeast districts have also helped clear local road rights-of-way in many of the counties included in the governor’s state of emergency declarations.

The National Weather Service (NWS) recorded 41 tornadoes across the state Jan. 21 and 22, a new record. Several tornadoes were reported Jan. 22 in southwest Georgia, but the largest touched down near the Dougherty/Baker County line and traveled more than 70 miles across Dougherty, Worth, Turner and Wilcox counties. The path, up to 1.2 miles wide, caused severe tree damage. In many spots, 90 to 100 percent of the trees in the path of tornado were uprooted or snapped, according to the NWS.