Well, I had big plans for the past weekend but Helene changed all that. Friday morning she swerved and hit Greenville head on. Reminded me of Hugo but with milder winds. You could tell when the eye came over, then the winds started coming from the opposite direction. Our power went out almost at once, so we woke up to the downpour in the darkness. My roomie and I came downstairs just to be on the safe side. About 7:00 am, I heard a god-awful clatter from the back of the house and the roomie said the deck had collapsed from the winds. At that point, we relocated away from the windows.
Once everything had died away, I started contacting people to see if Columbia had power and if the conference was still going on (I paid for those Master Classes darn it, and I wanted that critique!). Word from the board was that everything was hunky-dory in the capital city and the conference was a go.
One of my chapter colleagues had a tree fall on her car, so she needed a ride. I tried to make it out of the subdivision around 10am, only to find an enormous oak blocking the entire main highway out.
Tried again around 1:30 and they had cleared enough to allow one lane of traffic through at a time (this shot was later, when they had gotten the whole road clear). Managed to meet my friend at the local grocery store. None of the traffic lights were working on the way out, so I just crossed my fingers and followed traffic.
We passed a lot of devastation on the way to Columbia. Trees on houses, power lines in the streets, traffic lights randomly working or not. Even on the interstate we had to dodge downed trees, though we could see the road crews working diligently to clear the way. Once we got to Columbia, however, we found the board had exaggerated things. The hotel had no power and was operating on an emergency generator (which meant no overhead lights, no AC in the rooms, and most importantly, none of the meals we were promised). We hooked up with another chapter member and found an open Cracker Barrel restaurant to have dinner and caught the one keynote speaker of the evening (they didn’t even offer the cash bar they promised, alas).
At 6:00am Saturday, the board sent out the word they were canceling the rest of the conference. This was unfortunately too late for many of the coastal people, who had a 4 hour drive and had already left for the middle of the state by then. The three of us hooked up again and returned to Cracker Barrel for brunch, then gassed up at the open station across the road before heading home. The interstate on the drive back was clear, though the streets we had to traverse to get back to my friend’s home were partially blocked in spots, as was my street.
Sometime Sunday, the highway department closed my street entirely due to a sinkhole caused by a very small creek that passes underneath the road. The following picture is NOT that sinkhole, but one further along on the same street, closer to the next town over.
This shows what even a small creek can do with a hurricane’s worth of water flowing along it.
As it stands now, we have a power line down at the entrance to our subdivision, a sinkhole blocking the secondary entrance, and the power company anticipates a Friday night return of power to us. We’re hoping they are overestimating things and we will be back online sooner than that! I’m camping in a library that has power, charging up the laptop and phone for later. I do have a car charger for the phone, but it won’t charge the laptop unfortunately. I’m going to upload a few posts before they kick us out this afternoon, then use the laptop to work on my story plot lines.
Be back ASAP…
