Fiction Writing and Other Oddities

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Hurricane Matthew in Coastal North Carolina

I really should be writing about a contest I'm sponsoring to win a free Kindle Fire and fifty (50) Regency Romances from several participating authors (including myself), but we got hammered by hurricane Matthew so you'll forgive me if I babble about that, first. It's really what is on my mind at the moment. We live in coastal North Carolina, between Wilmington and Lumberton and we back up to a swamp.

Here's a video showing what was going on when things began to get hairy. It was scary. My video just missed the downing of a huge, old White Oak behind the house. We lost over half a dozen huge trees, but thankfully, none of them hit the house or our cars.


We lost power Saturday evening and were starting to worry by Monday since I'd only filled 3 gallons of drinking water. I'd put out buckets for "other" water and we boiled that to use. What a lot of "city folks" don't realize is that if we folks out in the country don't have electricity, we don't have water because we rely on wells with pumps. We had a generator and used that to keep our refrigerator and freezer going, and we had plenty of food, but you really miss that running water.

Monday evening we got water back, hurray! But then I realized that we were (and are) not out of the woods (or in our case, the swamp) yet, because so many roads have washed out around here, and so many stores are flooded, that there is no place to buy anything.

We're kind of pseudo-preppers, though, so I have a pantry full of canned food, I bake bread, and had bought things before the storm, so we'll be okay for a while, but even so, we're going to eventually run out of things like cleaning supplies, butter, milk, and perishables. I can only hope that our tiny local grocery store does eventually get resupplied (the place they get resupplied from is under water right now). I really worry about people who didn't stock up.
One of the White Oaks that we lost, just a few feet from the house.

Another view - I have no idea how we're going to fill the huge holes left by all the trees that came down. This is just one of many...


Unfortunately, we weren't the only ones affected by the devastation. This beautiful male Rose-breasted Grosbeak died. We found it in the yard. These birds usually only pass through our area during migration, so I was really sorry to see this one perish on its way south.
We have one hummingbird that hung around and was feeding right through the hurricane from our feeder. Fortunately, it survived and is still hanging around, though it really needs to go on down south.

Our driveway and front yard. The water stopped before it came too close to the house, though. Thank goodness.

And I feel sick about the people around Lumberton who have lost everything. I just can't imagine how horrible that must be. It's bad enough here, but we still have a house, electricity, and water. Our friends who are in law enforcement said they are using depth finders to locate cars under the water, and hopefully, they are empty. I pray that they are.

So...if you are able to do so, please give to the Red Cross and other agencies already starting the work of supporting the survivors who lost so much. It's a terrible tragedy, and I know all our thoughts are with them.