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‘Only in Alabama would that happen’: Athens businesses weigh in on tornado, snow storm impacts

By Paige Meyer

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    ATHENS (WAAY) — Businesses in Downtown Athens are working to recover from not only an EF-1 tornado, but this past weekend’s snow storm.

Business owners on the downtown square say they never could’ve predicted these two events happening within the span of two weeks.

“Only in Alabama would that happen,” owner of Crawford’s Gifts, Regina Crawford, said.

Crawford says the past few days have been nothing short of challenging for her small business.

“With the storms, whether it’s the tornado or the ice, just not having revenue coming in is always a challenge,” Crawford said.

With other stores still unable to open due to tornado damage, Crawford says her shop still sees the effects.

“If everyone is not open and a few of the streets close, it does hurt people not to come downtown,” Crawford said.

But one shopper who drove from Huntsville to Athens Monday could not be stopped from supporting local.

“A lot of times we just click to get things off Amazon but that’s not really supporting local businesses,” Pauline Williams said. “It makes me feel good that I can come out here to Crawford’s and support small businesses.”

UG White and High Plane Coffee also had to close their doors for the tornado and the snow storm. The manager says although the storms did not impact their business as much as others, everyone downtown is seeing the impacts.

“We did not sustain any damage from the tornados but it has, you can tell, affected business downtown,” Heather Kiel said. “It’s been a little bit slower business wise due to the storm damage.”

Kiel says its not just the businesses themselves that have been impacted by the severe weather.

“You’ve got employees that are depending on a paycheck, so it does affect both your employees and your business as a whole,” Kiel said.

At the end of the day, businesses in Downtown Athens know people will return to the beautiful and soon to be bustling square.

“Once everyone is back up and running officially, that’s just going to be fantastic and bring more traffic to our stores,” Crawford said.

As of right now, a majority of the businesses on the square are back up and running, but a few remain closed as they continue to clean up the tornado damage

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