We’re snug and dry, although we couldn’t leave the house if we wanted to and I’m getting really nervous hearing the wind pick up (mature tree neighborhood, soaked ground). We have no water, so tomorrow we must venture forth in search of it, but we do have power and our house is completely safe from the flooding (except for the living room circuit breaker and a suspicious wet spot on the plaster near the chimney).
Well and I’m really hoping the hall door is suddenly sticking because of humidity and not because anything has moved.
All in all I feel very lucky. Things out there are scary as hell. Places flooded today I’ve never seen standing water in my life. There was footage on the news of cars just straight up getting swallowed. Intersections I’ve traveled almost every day of my life are rivers.
I know we have several others here - is everybody all right?
Where I’m from there was a massive hubbub about it being the “next Sandy”, people buying up all the flashlights and sand bags they could carry, mothers sacrificing first-borns to the sun gods, all in preperation for . . . a light mist. Better to be safe than sorry, I suppose.
Stay safe in your more calamitous locale! Hurricanes are definitely scary, to understate.
Zsofia, I’ve been seeing pics of flooded areas of Columbia. Absolutely ridiculous amount of water, I’m glad there wasn’t a home game this weekend or I might have been stuck down there!
We’re not in South Carolina but rather at the beach on the Outer Banks of NC(Avon).
Drove down from DC on Saturday with sun most of the way. Some standing water once you hit Hatteras Island. Rain started at noon on Saturday and has continued off and on and will until tomorrow. Strong winds all day and night.
Various beach communities hit hard. But nowhere bad like Charleston, Myrtle Beach, Inland SC and Inland NC. Just too much rain for those poor people. My hopes for all of them.
We’re racing the bathtub full of toilet flushing water against the city’s ability to restore water service to the entire downtown area. I only had the idea to put out bins to collect rainwater from the roof today so I’m not sure what to do when the bathtub loses the race. All I can think of involves a shovel.
Mom lives in the upstate, so not in the worst of it. But she says it is raining hard.
There is a creek at the back of her property in the woods, but I think there is enough of a slope to the property that the house will be fine.
But the shed down by the woods, just a short distance from the creek…? That would be the shed with my miscellaneous junk stored in it…? Not so sure about the shed.
The dam on the neighborhood pond was topped yesterday. Somebody’s storage shed washed down to the creek. We are high and dry. Most creeks are back in their banks on my side of town. River flooding will continue for days. We have power and water, but have to boil water. No water at two large hospitals downtown.
Not too bad, considering. I’m one of the many who have no water, ironically, but I didn’t get flooded, and I do have power. And I have easy access to the grocery store a mile away. I don’t think many people anticipated just how devastating this storm was going to be.
Well, there goes Iggy’s shed
Seriously, I’ve heard reports of 2 feet of rain. I can’t even fathom getting that much rain in a short period of time. We had flooding around here (southest Michigan) a couple of years ago. Our street flooded literally right up to the walls of my house, but by a miracle my lower level didn’t flood.
Look, you have cockroaches because you are nasty and dirty and a terrible housekeeper. I, on the other hand (or more accurately my mother) have Palmetto bugs because they come in from the outside.
The canal has been breached. Most Columbians don’t realize that that isn’t just a cute park to run in - that’s where we get our water.
We now are able to flush. The thing is you can hardly tell because what’s left in your toilet is still brown and nasty. I don’t feel good about boiling that. They’re opening emergency water distribution - I feel bad about using it because we do have something coming out of the taps this afternoon. But it isn’t anything good and we do have the baby.
Checking in from Lexington, SC…just outside of Columbia. No real damage for me, and I consider myself very lucky. I kept a weary eye on the creek behind my house. It crept up into my yard, but my lot is sloped enough to keep it from rising too far towards me (I hope).
I get to work from home today, since our office building in Downtown Columbia was closed, due to having no water. I’ve been watching local news coverage all morning, and the images are just shocking.
The devastation in areas so close to where I live is just mind boggling. Homes and businesses destroyed; it’s just heartbreaking.
My grandmother’s house is in Irmo - we were down there for the weekend for a party in Lexington Saturday night, and we got back to the house around 1 am. We showered, laughed at the pouring rain, and went to bed.
They closed three of the roads into the neighborhood around 2 am, because it’s surrounded by creeks, and they crested at 3:30 am (about 6" of water above both bridges - they’re both usually about 10 feet up from the surface of the water) and the power went out around 3:45.
The emergency radio alerts on our phones were going off every 15 minutes or so to add time or area to the flood warnings, and we had to keep an eye on them because there is always the slight chance the Lake Murray Dam would breach (realistically no way in hell, but seriously that was a lot of water, and when it’s dark and raining buckets and three of the four ways out of the neighborhood are closed off, you get a bit jumpy). We were tired from the party, all the little cousins were screaming because there were no nightlights, and the stupid alert kept going off just as either adults or kids managed to drift back to sleep. It was not a fun night, so we all slept in the next morning.
Woke to no power, no water - luckily my sister had put buckets out to catch the rain when she came back from the party with the kids. So we had water for the toilets, and played the “if it’s yellow” game. We let the kids out to play in the puddles. Went down to the bridges and watched the waters recede a bit (they were already down about 2 feet from the crestmark), and took pictures of all the houses that had knee-to-waist high waterlines on them.
We headed back home (Upstate) around 4 pm, and my sister headed down to Charleston to in-laws down there, and they closed the interstates behind us as we fled.
Well the canal WAS for transporting goods up the river where it wasn’t navigable. Now it’s for a nice park and water. Well, was.
Small dams keep breaching and there’s a new evac area that’s absolutely enormous. Evidently it’s sort of a domino effect and Forest Acres is gonna get it again. It isn’t over, not by any means, and it’s getting more dangerous as it goes on, not less.
I’m southish of Columbia in Gaston. We got about 15 inches of rain in not quite 48 hrs.
All the important stuff is high and dry, but my new barn has flooded stalls and run-in shed, and the bottom of my front field (and also the neighbor’s yard and driveway) are a lake. There’s no pond or stream on the property or anywhere near, it’s all rain and runoff.
Today we cut a hole in the fence separating the properties so they could come across the field and side yard and get out our driveway. They had one truck seriously stuck, another on it’s way to being stuck, and had already lost a van to the initial flood.
Fortunately this is pretty much a sand bank, so once it stops raining and the sun comes out it should dry pretty quickly. I am just gutted though for those poor folk with houses underwater, and businesses lost. We got off very lightly, and I’m thankful for it.
