OT: Weather.... hurricane Matthew

[Archie]

normally this is a four-hour leisurely drive - all 231 miles of interstate ... this time it took more than 10 hours ... I-95 around Fayetteville and Lumberton, NC is totally under water in some places ... reports are that the highway won't be fully opened for at least a week - maybe more

I left Orangeburg yesterday afternoon heading toward Columbia and saw the East bound traffic at a crawl. I'm sure that was everyone heading back to Charleston which means there was at least a 75 mile backup on I26.

 

[rkicklighter]

Things are slowly starting to get back to normal in my neck of the woods. Finally got power back last night but there are still many people without. Prognosis is 90% power back on by Wednesday afternoon with all returned by Sunday.

Power is just one thing, our rural area has weeks of cleanup. There are trees down everywhere and most of them are big trees. Some of us can do our own cleanup but many cannot and it's going to take time. One family not far from me has at least 7 huge oaks uprooted and laying in the yard. Years worth of firewood!

 

[rdrast]

Just back to the office today.

We made it through okay, thanks to having purchased a generator to power up the house two years or so ago after an ice storm, and luckily I stocked up on gas, since just about every station was closed over the weekend. Some local stations went the generator route on Monday.

We finally got utility power back late Tuesday night, but there are still 10's of thousands without in my service area.

Florence, Sumter, Manning, and Summerton were hit particularly bad from what I saw and have heard from friends.

The roof on my house if fine, but the back porch peeled up on the lake side, going to have to get up there and take a look.

Only lost one Dogwood tree, and that was a slow-motion fall, literally, it took about 6 hours for it to go from vertical to laying on the ground. The whole time, birds stayed at the feeder. Go figure.

On a drive around Sunday, we saw tons of downed trees, snapped utility poles, cables on the ground, and unfortunate people who either had trees in their houses, or severe flooding.

And this wasn't even much of a storm by the time it got here, I still have nightmares about Hugo.

 

[geniusintraining]

I still have nightmares about Hugo.

Glad your OK

We moved to SC a couple years after Hugo hit, the summer we moved here we drove to the beach and asked some people why all the pine trees were all bent over on the way down... they said Hugo, it was the strangest thing I ever saw, they are back upright but it took years for them to correct themselves

 

[rdrast]

Hugo... Ugh. I purchased the house down here 30 days before Hugo hit. I got it insured two weeks before it hit.
And it needed the insurance.
To this day, I have no idea where a live oak with a 2 foot diameter trunk went to, but it vanished, roots and all.

 

[Tharon]

I was only around 6 or 7 years old when Hugo hit, living just outside Charleston. I remember we stayed with friends in-State around Columbia when the storm came through. When we went back to our house, there was still about 2 feet of water in the road, and half our roof was laying in the back yard, a tree through the kitchen, and another tree crashed through the front door.

I remember news crews filming me and my little brother cutting branches off the downed trees in our yard. I'm not sure how helpful we were, as my dad and his friends were all out with chain saws clearing the roads around the neighborhood, but I'm sure it was just something the local news wanted to have footage of, a couple little kids trying to "help out".

I had some weird dreams during the storm. Like "waking up" and looking outside to see nothing left of civilization, only vast open fields, downed trees, and for some reason dinosaurs roaming around stomping everything. Then I remember actually waking up and glancing out the window and not seeing anything but trees and fields and thinking my dream was actually real.