Fiction Writing and Other Oddities

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

After Irene

We live in North Carolina and braced this weekend for Irene. While it was bad, it wasn't as bad as we feared, although it did about $5,000 for us and more for a lot of others. A tree came down on our pole shed, we lost some shingles on our place at Sea Level, and the water blew out about 5-6' of our shoreline, so we'll have to get a couple more CAMA permits: 1) to replace the pier that is now completely gone (it's broken into three pieces, 1 in our yard, 1 across the street, and another in a neighbor's yard a little further down the street); and 2) to get a few tons of granite to reinforce the shoreline.


We spent the day yesterday at Sea Level assessing the damage and working with our neighbors to clear up debris. One of our friends ended up in the hospital with a stroke, unfortunately. But we're hoping he weathers it and is home, soon. There were a lot of trees down on phone lines and a lot of houses got flooded out again. Many of the homes between Moorehead City, though Beaufort, Stacy, Davis, Otway, and Sea Level had their doors and windows open with big piles of carpeting outside as folks tried to dry out.  The water came up to the fourth step of our house (about 2-3' up) but didn't make it into our house at Sea Level. We're hoping the waves didn't wash into the air conditioner unit, either, but we won't know how well that fared until the electricity comes back on. 

 We were sorry to see the Martin house next door blown down, but we're thinking of getting a new one and setting it up so that when the Martins come back next spring, they'll have a place to live.
 
 The power company guys were all over the place repairing lines. We really have to hand it to them, they are the greatest! We were only out power for half a day at our home. I expect it will take them longer to repair the lines to Sea Level. There were a lot of downed trees and trees leaning on power lines, but they were all over the area fixing lines. I'm just thankful that our power companies are the best of private industry and not Government-owned or they'd still be out there doing "studies" and "evaluations". LOL.
One of the more miraculous things was that, although it tore out our pier and gouged out our shoreline, it left our brand new screens intact. Pretty amazing. This last picture shows two pieces of our pier. I can't imagine the force of the water to rip it up and wash it across the street like that.

Hope everyone is safe and our prayers go out to those who are were hit harder. Be safe.

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