I think out of all of this, what happened to Chimney Rock hurts me the most. Of course, that could be because I’m distracting myself from my own problems.
The power came back on yesterday evening so I can kinda-sorta pretend there’s some normalcy. No internet yet so I can’t see what my work situation is. I’m 99% sure my department is closed for the time being but I haven’t gotten word. I’m pretty sure there’s something sitting in my work email which I can’t access at the moment for obvious reasons.
This morning I tried to go out and get fuel, which is very difficult with so few stations with gas. While in the long gas line I turned my car off and on several my car to conserve gas. After several such times when I tried to restart the car, it would not turn over. My battery is fine and I am not out of gas so I am guessing the starter is gone. The car had been making a weird whisting whizzing sound when I tried to start it all week…but there had been no time to worry about that. Some friendly folks helped me push the car into an abandoned parking lot in Black Mountain. Not sure what I am going to do now because I am guessing auto repair shops are not going to be up and running around here any time soon.
The first photo shows what Lake Lure looked like a day before the storm hit. My son’s family has a cabin there and he and I were up there until Thurs. a.m. It was raining then, but not hard. Really tragic to see what that amount of rain can do to an area. I’m just happy that we got out in time.
Hopefully when things are rebuilt people can take potential events like this in consideration in anticipation that there may very well be another time–and another…
The house in Montreat made it. The road is washed out in front, trees and power lines are down in the yard, but otherwise no damage. I am of course very relieved as this home is my favorite place on Earth.
But it is hard to feel much relief without guilt when I see just how many other homes were severely damaged. The houses to the immediate left and right seem Ok. But then there are three straight houses where falling trees crushed into the roof, two with the insides of the homes exposed. They may be total losses. On the higher street behind our home several houses are crushed under trees. They were all probably someone’s favorite place.
Most every bridge over Flat Creek is gone, though they have somehow opened one so that people can get out of the east side of Town. If your home is on the east side of Flat Creek, you must always cross a small bridge somewhere to get in or out. There is just that one bridge on Lookout Road that I can see still viable.
I saw some new video of Lake Lure on the local news tonight - local disaster response is starting to corral all the debris that ended up in the lake, but man, that is going to be one big job.
I’ve never seen anything like that video above. Just devastating. My sister is in Charlotte and her family has gone to Lake Lure for years. She calls it her happy place. She is heartbroken for the community.
Note river on left, steep mountain on right. Where are they going to put the new road? According to what I read in the paper this morning, it took 15 years to build that section of road the first time around.
Oog. Does appear to be plenty of room to the right to move the road over 30 yards tho, albeit with a ton of backhoes and dump trucks to level the terrain there.
If you move the road 30 yards right, you need to remove another 30 yards of shoulder / runout to have clearance to the cliff. But you need to take that 200 to 500 feet straight up to remove all the cliff above.
Plus you might want to build the road better = more resistant to river washouts. Not only right there, but along its entire multiple-tens-of-miles length alongside that river. Which will keep flooding regularly now that AGW is really taking hold. Despite what the nice Reactionary Wacko Traitors in TN & NC might prefer to believe.
I haven’t been able to find a copy of this video of these suicidal idiots outside of Facebook, but the big bunch of crap in this Tennessee river gives an idea of hiw Lake Lure in NC ended up like it did.
I had a geology professor in college who had a saying: Whenever you’re going to build a road, ask a geologist. He used that stretch of 40 as an example because it was put next to a very crumbly mountain.
In other new, I got my internet back last night so I don’t have to burn up the data on my phone anymore.
