Hurricane Matthew

[RetiredGypsy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by W2R Wow, what an amazing cone! You've probably seen this graphic, but if not look at the five day cone loop down towards the southwest!

Go home Matthew, you're drunk!

A block off the river, and no downed trees, no power outages that were anything besides momentary. No busted windows, no flooding, no exciting debris, no dead animals. Staying just offshore and dying down to a Cat3 seemed to keep this from becoming apocalyptic.

Hopefully it stays that way. As saturated as everything is, this thing comes back even as a storm or depression, things will probably get a lot worse.

[Teacher Terry]

It is supposed to circle back in a few days. So sad.

[pb4uski]

How are y'all doing out there?

[Fermion]

We found a Army Corp campground in the Florida panhandle and it is sunny, birds are chirping and about 4mph wind. Category -0.5

[JoeWras]

It is at its worse in Raleigh right now. A bit breezy, but the big problem is rain. We're at 3/4" per hour, with a total already nearing 3" for the storm. Flooding will be a problem in NC.

I wouldn't worry about the loop back, if it does. The ocean will be too churned up, which cools it off, to allow the storm to gain any significant steam.

P.S. if you want to see what it looks like, turn on ABC and watch the madness called football (NC State vs Notre Dame) in a tropical storm.

[Lucantes]

Our friends checked on our house in Cocoa Beach FL after they came back from Orlando yesterday (they did end up finally evacuating from Merritt Island in the end which is a good thing), appears to be nothing "major"....dock is gone and fence on one side is gone (shared with neighbor on that side) but we were planning on having both replaced prior to our ER in April 2017 so I guess maybe we saved some demo charges?!
Doesn't look like any other major damage to important stuff (seawall, windows, walls, doors and roof etc.). Will know more in a couple of days when the property management company can get there to inspect, along with the tenant who evac'd.
Friend's house and such is fine but they still don't have power as of right now.
All things considered we really dodged a bullet I would say.

[JoeWras]

Shortly after my post, we lost power. NC is a mess. Very bad flooding and many still without power (thank you to the crew who got us back running).

Way too much rain. Parts of NC are going to take a year to recover from this.

[ShokWaveRider]

We are in St. Augustine, I am sure you saw all the pics..... We are on Anastasia Island about 1 mile from the beach. They let us back on the Island at 5pm Saturday. What a mess...... debris everywhere, all sorts of unidentifiable projectiles in the pool.

Sunday we surveyed the Damage and we have a couple of loose roof tiles, no leaks, no water breach, however they have been talking that if the storm surge was another 2ft we would have been under water. There are a few trees down in the areas and clean up starts today.

Sooooooo the moral of this story is NEVER but a house made of wood in Hurricane country, you should see some of them here, ours is concrete and had no visible wind damage (other than the tiles mentioned). we will call in a roofer to do a proper check and get an estimate to fix the 2 tiles, but it probably and hopefully will not even be as much as the deductible to repair.

I am also assuming that when we sell the house we can say "Survived Hurricane Matthew" LOL.

[athena53]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ShokWaveRider Sooooooo the moral of this story is NEVER buy a house made of wood in Hurricane country, you should see some of them here, ours is concrete and had no visible wind damage (other than the tiles mentioned).

I knew an actuary who lived in FL near the coast and he said he had a bad time convincing the contractor for his new home to do all the "infrastructure" things that would make a house secure in a hurricane; the contractor was more fixated on kitchen appliances and countertops. He joked that if he'd had his way they'd have built a cement house with only small portholes for windows.

Dad has reported that their house in Myrtle Beach is in good shape except that the power is out and when he returns from his stay with my brother (5 hours inland) it's going to be a messy job cleaning out the rotted food from the refrigerator and freezer.

[Sarah in SC]

So we were 6 days without power, ran the generator some to keep the fridge cold and a few lights, but don't have the well pump rigged for aux power. I finally broke down and showered at the boss' house on Tuesday!
We had a fire burning in the backyard for about 4 days, mostly small limbs and branches. Lost 4 trees and one elm is leaning so we are trying to salvage that one. A 80-90 foot oak next to the house is also leaning, but we cut the house-side branches on it and are waiting a bit to see if (most likely) we will have to tackle taking it down.
The water in the creek was probably around 5-6 feet compared to a couple of inches. Backyard was knee deep from the runoff higher up.
Lots of quality chain saw time for DH, that's for sure.
Back to normal now, and glad to have escaped major damage. Getting the eyewall winds on both side of this storm was a reminder of Hugo back in '89, and most of our tree damage came on the backside, same as then.

[Free To Canoe]

Glad to hear that you are safe and no damage to the house. I was surprised when friends from Moncks Corner said that they didn't even lose power. That didn't seem possible.

[JoeWras]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Free To Canoe Glad to hear that you are safe and no damage to the house. I was surprised when friends from Moncks Corner said that they didn't even lose power. That didn't seem possible.

Do they live next to a hospital?

The general rule around here in NC is that hospitals and nursing homes are right at the top of the list for power restoration. They also seem to pay more attention to proactive management, such as cutting away troublesome limbs more frequently or even burying power lines near such facilities.

If your neighborhood is close to a hospital, and is fed by underground supply, you may be good.

[harley]

Glad you made it through so relatively unscathed, Sarah. I was worried about y'all. Did you get to do much with your new rescue training?

[Walt34]

Sarah, so glad to hear you're okay.

Have you given any thought to a permanently installed backup generator that can run the whole house or most of it? They're a lot cheaper than they used to be. If I lived where you do and subject to the storms and power going out often I'd have one for sure. You'd want to have an electrician do a survey (if you can't do it yourself) and figure what capacity you need.

Not recommending any, just an easy list: Standby Generators - Generators - Outdoor Power Equipment - Â*The Home Depot

[sheehs1]

Sarah, so glad to know you made it thru. I was impressed with your governor Niki Haley with how she evacuated the coastal areas of the state including Charleston. It was hard to get info about South Carolina "after", here in south eastern Va., as much of the news was about North Carolina (Lumberton, Windsor, Winton, Goldsboro, communities around the Tar and Neuse Rivers , Nags Head, Manteo all of which were hard hit with the flooding. Even Va. Beach Virginia was taken by surprise with 14 plus inches of rain with many communities flooded for days. We even had flooding here, one hour inland.

Hurricane Matthew did not turn and that was the surprise. Although not sure why as with any hurricane once it hits land predictability is hard.

[meierlde]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Walt34 Sarah, so glad to hear you're okay. Have you given any thought to a permanently installed backup generator that can run the whole house or most of it? They're a lot cheaper than they used to be. If I lived where you do and subject to the storms and power going out often I'd have one for sure. You'd want to have an electrician do a survey (if you can't do it yourself) and figure what capacity you need. Not recommending any, just an easy list: Standby Generators - Generators - Outdoor Power Equipment - Â*The Home Depot

Actually if you have natural gas then if you buy such a generator run it on the natural gas. It takes serious flooding like New Orleans in Katrina to take the natural gas system down.

[Sarah in SC]

We've considered the whole house generator, but honestly would probably benefit most from being able to rig an outlet to the well pump (220V) to run it from the genny we have. It is a pretty good one, IIRC I had REWahoo help me pick it out a number of years ago. If I had to add up what we'd want to run next time, it is really just the well pump, the fridge, and the water heater, plus a few lamps.

The other issue with the whole house generator is that it would logically be put under the house next to the main incoming panel/meter, and that would lend itself to flooding concerns. Our house is on concrete piers, about 12-13 feet off the ground. The portable one was fine hefted up to the porch--I always figure that if the generator is closer to my ears than the neighbors, I'm less likely to run it too late or too early.

We don't have any kind of gas out here, as we chose not to have a tank in the yard, so all electric for us.

[Walt34]

Ah, I didn't know the house was up on piers. The only way around that would be to put the generator up on piers too, which would probably make the installation costs prohibitive. Or at least not make sense.

What I did was have a transfer switch similar to this one installed. This allows us to plug the generator into the house and then pick what circuits we want to use and leave others turned off for load shedding (the generator will not power the whole house) and also disconnects the generator from the utility lines. That protects linemen from electrocution from feedback from the generator. If you did that, then you could pick when to power the water pump and when to shut that off and run other appliances like a hair dyer or coffee maker that draw relatively high power. I think the transfer switch was ~$100 to have it installed 13 years ago or so.

[Koogie]

I noticed a few members in NC and SC aren't posting as much as they used too.
Hope that the cleanup from Matthew went well and everything is fine.

[FIREmenow]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Koogie I noticed a few members in NC and SC aren't posting as much as they used too. Hope that the cleanup from Matthew went well and everything is fine.

I am just north of the badly hit (flooded) areas in NC.

Your words "went well" should be "going well". It's taking, and will take, a LONG time for any sense of normalcy to return to that area.