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Last Saturday night, it felt like the entire county held its breath. The weather forecast was all too familiar for this time of the year but nonetheless scary: hail, severe thunderstorms and the possibility of multiple tornadoes.

The first two seem inconsequential when read next to tornadoes. Troup and its neighboring counties have a long and devastating relationship with these weather events. In recent memory, the 2023 tornados which destroyed homes, churches and businesses throughout Troup County.

The following morning, social media was filled with residents discussing the forecast, including predictions on whether another twister will actually touchdown, vocalizations of storm anxieties, and resources should those fears be realized.

Then in the afternoon, Troup quickly mobilized, opening up multiple storm shelters around the county. The Troup Emergency Management Department put out safety tips, resources and regular updates.

At LDN, like many residents we were glued to our phones and computers, covering the storm into the early hours of Sunday morning. There is a misconception in journalism, that we hope for the worst as the worst often makes the most read stories. However, at least for community outlets, like us, we held our breaths alongside you. We live, work and socialize with the community. We are a part of the community. A slow news day will always be preferable to one made busy by tragedy.

News came in quickly, that surrounding counties like Chambers in Alabama had a tornado touchdown. As the radar moved East we braced for the same severity in Troup County. Then, the Red Sea (or red color indicating severe storms on the radar) parted. While we received heavy rain and lightning, damaging winds and tornados seemed to be repelled by our county line.

At first light, we drove around the county and reached out to our first responder contacts to try to assess the damage. What we found was…nothing. Less than 15 trees were downed during a storm that had caused fatalities in the neighboring state.

It is rare in our profession to be surprised and even rarer to be pleasantly surprised. We were even more surprised to find the usual post-storm Facebook comments of the meteorologists getting it wrong or baffling anger that the storm wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be, were few and far between. Instead, it was largely residents giving thanks to emergency responders, weather services and God.

The lesson here is not to minimize tornado forecasts. But rather to prepare and hope. Troup County was amazingly lucky last weekend. Other parts of the Southeast were not lucky. It was not due to a lack of preparedness or lack of belief in a higher power. Our sister paper, the Valley Times-News is located in Alabama, where three lives were lost to that storm system. A tornado did scar those areas and in doing so scarred communities.

However, every time one of these events happens we are reminded of a balm: community. Before a storm, we saw communities acknowledging and calming the anxieties of each other, even opening doors and providing resources to minimize risk. After the storm, in areas where they were not as lucky as Troup, we saw strangers help with clean-up efforts, prayers and support given to families impacted.

It is the ties that bind us that allow us to weather storms.