Just hope to god the grocery store is open tomorrow. Water might look like hell but we can boil it. Wine we gotta outsource.
Here aretwo brands of hand-pump water filters. They’re designed for backpacking in the mountains, where you can pump water a liter at a time from lakes and streams with all the dirt and microorganisms filtered out.
Something like this could be useful to people who are facing nasty water. Hope this helps somebody, and sorry things are going so badly down there 
This all starting to sound worryingly Biblical. Please do let us know if the Rapture gets rolling in South Carolina first. Pre-planned looting is always better than that spur-of-the-moment stuff ( Hit the Costco or Target first? Analysis paralysis can easily set in ).
I’m a couple of hours south of the worst - just some muddy roads and dreary skies. But I remember the last time I evacuated with a little one, when Floyd was threatening and forecasts were less accurate and four states were leaving the coast. No fun. Zsofia, if you need to get out? Come on down if you need. We can make room for a few days. Got potable water and reliable power and terrible internet service if you need it. PM me here if you need to escape. The digs aren’t luxurious, but they’re above water level.
Tamerlane, it’s worse than you can imagine. We don’t even have a Costco.
Lacunae, thank you so much for the offer - we’re okay now, and I think we will continue to be okay as long as the trees stay vertical.
Mom reports something unusual happened yesterday. A break in the clouds allowed a blue streak to appear in the sky. The water stopped falling from the sky. And then for a brief moment a bright light was visible. :rolleyes:
Reassuringly the clouds cover returned and they are back to dreary skies.
Bright glorious sun today! The weather guy on WISTV show a shot from a traffic cam of bright sun on the downtown buildings and he got so choked up he had to step back out of shot and gulp a bit.
Still scary and sad shit goin’ on out there though
Sitting here this morning drinking my tea, listening to the local news live stream and checking FB.
JUST as I’m reading this shared post
I hear on the news that they’ve found the body of an 82 yo man who’s car had been one of those sitting submerged on a flooded street.
.
Yeah, this morning we are experiencing another catastrophic weather anomaly. The life giving water has ceased to fill the air and my newly acquired gills are gasping and fluttering. A ball of fire has appeared in the sky, and I think the apocalypse must be at hand because when I went outside I was followed by a dark spirit-twin. Everywhere I went it was right behind me! It got larger and smaller but I couldn’t shake it until I returned to the house! We will continue to shelter in place and maybe tape up the doors and windows in case it tries to get inside.
I know we have a few more people - Earl Snake-Hips Tucker for sure - I’d like to make sure everybody is okay.
Things are definitely getting better if you like balls of flame in your sky, but I’m still getting notices on my phone that say things like “Flash flood warning issued in Richland County. Upper Windsor Lake dam has failed.” It isn’t over here in Columbia, and I’ve got a bad feeling about what happens to all this water when it goes downstream to Charleston. They’ve already had insane rain there and it’s not like what’s flooding our roads out is just going to disappear - it’s going somewhere.
We’re getting all the press because most of us have power and smartphones and such, and reporters can get in and out. Clarendon County is evidently a literal island at this point, but nobody knows where that is so I doubt it’s hitting the national news. The thing is, the people getting flooded out of Lake Katherine, I feel bad for them, I can’t imagine what that’s like, but they’re going to be fine. They can cry themselves to sleep on a big ol’ pile of money. There are a lot of very poor people that are in very bad trouble, though, and they’re going to need a hell of a lot of help.
I once saw a job ad for a librarian in Clarendon County. It paid something like 20K and the title was “Adult/Youth Services Librarian” and the description was essentially “run this library kthanx”. It sounded like the description for a reference librarian, children’s librarian, and library director all rolled into one. At the time I was in library school and we all joked that the benefits included a cot in the back and a pig a year, but you gotta kill the pig yourself under “other duties as assigned”.
We fared pretty good just south of myrtle beach, and the plant where I work had to shut down until yesterday morning.
Bad part is, it’s in Georgetown, and the surrounding areas down there got hit pretty bad. One of the women in my Lab lost her home, and just about everything in it. No flood insurance. She’s talking with FEMA today.
And all that water upstate is now headed our way.
We’re still possibly losing dams - there’s one I got notices all night about “EVACUATE EVACUATE” and in the morning it was “it isn’t a matter of if but when” but now “eh, looks like it might not go after all, y’all can come back”. There are a TON of smaller dams in the area and they cascade.
Jeez, I was in Columbia when Hugo roared through, but at least it came and went in a hurry. This flooding makes Hugo look like a picnic by comparison.
A friend of my wife’s from her college days at USC got flooded out of her house a day or two ago; I think she (my wife’s friend) lives near the Lynches River. The house is raised up on stilts so that floods would pass underneath, but the water went even higher than the house was raised. Fortunately, she’s renting the house, but everything they had to leave in it will surely be ruined.
They finally re-opened the section of I-95 that I live on, so I can at least get to work today, and pick up my wife who has been stuck in Columbia since Friday.
There is still a major detour off of 95 between Florence and Manning, apparently some of the rivers under 95 between those points undercut the highway badly.
Getting on 95 North anywhere south of exit 119 still requires ID and proof of residency or employment.
Yeah, that Beaver Dam that was about to collapse feeds right into the lakes with already damaged dams in Forest Acres and Acadia. That would have been bad.
A friend’s grandson was out doing demolition volunteering at the Old Mill. It is GONE. Absolutely destroyed. This is going to bring a lot of attention to our incredibly neglected dams.
We were open yesterday but everybody off desk pretty much did nothing but helicopter watch. We see them all the time, of course, between Fort Jackson and the ANG and Sumter AFB, but we don’t usually see the big Chinooks. They’re lifting one ton sandbags into the canal breach. Evidently they were considering sinking a barge but instead they’re trying 750 giant sandbags and then seeing how that goes. It’s quite something.
Of course the news all said the canal has never breached before, and the Friends of the Congaree Swamp immediately posted a photo from the flood of 1908 with a canal breach. I spent a few minutes on SC Historical Newspapers and found some fun articles about that one - maybe today I can jpg those and post them here. All the old timers were arguing over whether it was worse than the one from the 40’s (the 1840’s.)
So there’s a news story that’s acting like its a normal news story and not like a hilarious news story.
They caught some looters.
One of them is named OBryan Cabbagestalk.
Potable water returned to my house yesterday! As I said earlier, we missed the flooding and our problems were certainly minor compared to others, but it is great not to have to boil all our water.
Dam…
Both the Brew Pub and Creekside seem to have plans to reopen. I really hope so, I like both of them and the whole building. The dam breach was impressive!
We’re pretty much dried up here (not that anything really important got wet). I’ll be glad wet the lake at the bottom of my field and across the neighbor’s driveway is gone though and I can get my pasture back and not have traffic up and down my driveway. The neighbors are nice and all but geeze they are always driving somewhere!
We’re still boiling water. As far as I can tell we are going to be boiling water for the rest of our natural lives.