I’ve got to stop by the Food Lion to make some routine purchases for the weekend, and I’m already dreading having to fight the “Oh, my God; we’re all gonna die!” crowd stocking up on bread and such because the world will be coming to an end with a few flakes of snow.
So I rewatched the video above, to get me into a mood for laughing at the situation…
Actually, no, as WIS reports…
That smoke you see or smell in the Midlands is likely coming from wildfires burning in western North Carolina and northeast Georgia.
One such fire has resulted in the evacuation of the areas near Lake Lure, NC.
A front moving through the area has picked up some of that smoke and has created some hazy conditions.
“Visibility is reduced and people with respiratory issues should be extra cautious outdoors for the rest of the afternoon,” said WIS First Alert Meteorologist Ben Tanner. “Until the wind speed increases mid/late afternoon, smoke will continue to be a problem.”…
So, we have this to contend with as well. I just pass it on, thinking y’all might have been as curious as I was…
Have any of y’all been to the beach since the hurricane?
My parents are there having some cleanup done around their house in Surfside — the house my grandfather built, and left to my Mom — and my mother sent me this picture, with the caption, “No sand dunes.”
Wow. The dunes we’ve had for the last couple of decades had been artificially restored, but over the years the sea oats had grown on them, and they had become at least natural-looking.
Below is a shot I took of some of my grandchildren playing in an extreme high tide that came all the way up to the dunes — which you can see at left — in July 2015.
So this is a dramatic difference…
A couple of post=hurricane stories from down on the coast are making me feel like I’m missing out, stuck here in the Midlands.
First, there’s this item from the Sun News about the million-year-old Megalodon shark’s tooth someone found north of Myrtle Beach. My whole family spends a good bit of their beach time with eyes down looking for sharks’-tooth fossils, and if any of us found anything like this, we could retire happy from the search.
Wow.
I also love the idea that ImagiNation Athletics of Myrtle Beach had of putting the awesome Jason Hurdich, the sign-language guy who got us through Hurricane Matthew, on a T shirt. It looks like Mr. Hurdich is giving us a double “shaka” sign — hence the interest taken by surfers — but The Island Packet reports that to signers, that means “now.”
I got a little bit of sun at the Fair yesterday, which was nice, but it looks like the place to be right now is the beach…
I’m just interested in collecting any stories you have of evacuating, or dealing with kids being home from school, or being prevented from doing things you had planned, or whatever.
My club was closed for breakfast this morning, so I made a smoothie and coffee at home. That’s about it for me personally.
My wife was taking care of all four of our grandchildren who live here into town this morning. They were having a good time when I left.
All that bottled water I bought Tuesday night is sitting there in my garage, probably to await the next emergency.
But then… the storm is still headed this way, and I don’t place absolute faith in those projections that say it will continue to glance off the coast. As I read the map, if it were to continue in the direction it’s going in right now, and not turn for the land or anything else, it would be coming straight at us, with the dangerous west side of the storm blowing straight through Columbia.
So I’m not ready to scoff at Matthew yet.
But how is it affecting you?…
Normally, I don’t. I tend to take what comes, and react accordingly. But with the governor talking about evacuating the entire coast starting Wednesday, for a storm that might (OK, probably will) hit us this weekend, I thought y’all might want to talk about it.
So talk… For starters, anybody out there making plans, or changing plans?…
Look at those beautiful green lines of flowing traffic!
The story on the front page of The State about flood-related traffic jams seemed a bit out of sync to me (although I understand plenty of others continue to have trouble), because I read it right after my easiest crossing of the river since the floods.
Opening Jarvis Klapman really made a huge difference. I left the house worried that I was going to be late because I had less than an hour to get downtown… and it was a breeze. I couldn’t believe how well things were flowing on Sunset, until I saw the reason why — cars whizzing overhead on the Jarvis Klapman overpass.
You really don’t appreciate a simple thing like having a 15-20-minute commute until you lose it for a few days. And I would never have thought that closing Jarvis Klapman — which is never particularly crowded — would turn Gervais, Meeting, Sunset, Knox Abbott and Blossom into parking lots at rush hour.
So I’m happy.
How are y’all’s traffic situations going?
At least, it is at Quail Hollow, which is all I can testify to for sure. (The Congaree, which I crossed a couple of times today, still looked fairly high — no doubt thanks to the Broad.)
The above photo was taken at 5:31 p.m. today from approximately the same angle as the one below, taken at 10:41 a.m. Monday.
See? I told you there were tennis courts under there…
File photo: Samuel Tenenbaum at the HQ of Columbia’s operation to help Katrina evacuees in 2005.
Concerned about this Facebook message from Inez Tenenbaum, as of Monday evening:
Our home on the Saluda River is flooded and the renovations will probably take six weeks or more. If any of my Facebook friends know of a place we can rent (with two dogs and four cats) please let me know! Thanks so much.
I called and talked with Samuel. I knew how close their house was to the river. You know those pictures I keep showing of the pool and tennis courts at Quail Hollow? They’re like that close — although the house is on stilts.
Samuel says they’re doing OK. They’re in a Quality Inn Suites in Lexington that takes pets, which I found amazing. There are plenty of other flooded-out folks with pets staying there. The dogs are with them. The cats, who as we know fend for themselves, are back at the house with plenty of food — and Samuel is anxious to get back to check on them.
They evacuated on Sunday, just minutes before the Lake Murray floodgates were opened. Good call, since they are very close to the dam — they live in a rural area off Corley Mill Road.
There was already five feet of water in their driveway — not from the river, but from nearby creeks feeding into it. The water was moving too swiftly for a boat to come alongside to pick them up, so Samuel put Inez and the dogs into a kayak and pulled them, wading through the water himself. He told himself while doing so that any snakes in the water had already had the sense to abandon the area.
“Now I know what it’s like to be homeless,” he said — if only temporarily.
This is especially ironic because Samuel ran Columbia’s response to Hurricane Katrina 10 years back, heading up the operation to accommodate refugees from that disaster.
As he sees it, he’s following that protocol: “We established the plan 10 years ago. We put people in motels.” And that’s where he, Inez and the dogs are.
“It’s a bummer, it’s emotional. Here you are, 72 years old” and you have to deal with this. But he’s dealing with it with typical aplomb: “It’s a bummer, it’s emotional. “My name is Noah T-baum,” he’s telling everyone.
As for longer-term rental accommodations, the Tenenbaums have a line on a couple of places, although nothing is set in stone. So pass on any tips you have…
I thought these were pretty cool images shared by the National Weather service yesterday evening, which I just saw. Here’s the caption info:
Drone images of the Lake Murray Dam Spillway. These floodgates have not been used since 1969. Photos courtesy of Ebben M Aley.
Technically, have those floodgates ever been used? Wasn’t the dam rebuilt a few years back? Of course, maybe the floodgate part is original equipment; I don’t know.
Finally, I can see the thing that caused the flooding in my area.
Here’s hoping letting off that pressure did the trick, and the dam remains strong.
Speaking of which, in my household we got to contemplating this passage in The State this morning:
SCE&G operates the lake originally built for hydropower 85 years ago but now a major source of recreation and drinking water for the Columbia area….
Which raises the question — are those good enough reasons to have those millions of tons of water poised over us? Couldn’t we get drinking water some other way?
Needless to say, you and your recreation seem kinda low priorities to me at the moment.
Well, this is encouraging.
I went down to check the river this morning (8:53 a.m.), and the water had receded to about where it was Sunday evening. The Quail Hollow pool was now visible, although full of filthy river water, and garbage bins that had been floating on Monday were on dry land. Well, not dry land, but merely soggy land.
I apologize for the dimness of the pool and surrounding area. There was this strange yellow thing in the sky that was too bright to look straight at, giving off an intense radiation that caused a backlighting problem.
Anyway, things are looking up in Quail Hollow.
Meanwhile, I’m working from home today. The twins are here because their school is out, and I just didn’t want to spend the day on the other side of the river from them and J. I don’t think there will be further trouble, but who knows. The edges of the road into our subdivision doesn’t look too great…
Monday morning, 10:38.
There was the picture I took of the Quail Hollow pool — which is normally right next to the Saluda River — at 1:09 p.m. Sunday.
Then there was the one I took at 5:18 p.m. Sunday.
This morning at 10:38, the pool was no more to be seen.
Now, let me put this in perspective — especially for my kids in Thailand, who are worried about us: This represents a rise of a couple of feet in about 17 hours. It would still need to rise two or three yards to reach the street, which is the lowest-lying road in Quail Hollow — which is what, 50 feet or so from the high ridge that we are on.
So we’re fine. Our neighbors who spent the night with us because they were told to evacuate checked on their house this morning and there’s no water anywhere near it.
We’re fine.
In fact, watching this slow rise of the river through these images is sort of reassuring. If not regular and normal, it as least has a slow, plodding predictability to it. So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.
These are the tennis courts at Quail Hollow in West Columbia on Sunday a little past midday.
They’re right next to the Saluda River, which you can see rushing in the background. I guess technically, all of this is now the Saluda River.
That loud buzzing is an alarm coming from a transformer that’s right next to me. I don’t know what it means, but I’m being careful not to touch the water.
Our house is one block from the river, but way up a steep hill.
We drove around the neighborhood a bit more, and then, as we returned to the house at 1:30, the sun came out. Don’t know whether that means the worst is over, or not.
More pictures below…
We were talking about good songs for this rainy, flooded weekend on the last post, and no one mentioned the most appropriate song of all, Randy Newman’s magnificent “Louisiana 1927.”
This one’s got it all — Newman’s irony mixed with pathos and sympathy for the common man, his orchestral sensibility, history, and his inimitable touch with lyrics. This is, of course, from his wonderful “Good Old Boys” album, which kicks off with the one truly brilliant Newman song that you will never, ever hear on the radio in this country — “Rednecks.” (If anyone overhears you listening to that one, and that person lacks a sense of irony, watch out. But I do recommend it, long as you’re not one a them college boys from LSU who went in dumb, come out dumb too.)
I prefer the original album version, which is below, but I used the one above for the pictures.
The song, of course, is about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which Wikipedia calls “the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States” — although we seem to be trying to give it a run for its money this weekend.
A Facebook friend of a Facebook friend, Curtis Rogers, spotted this on the Weather Channel’s page and grabbed it before they could take it down.
Looks like we’re in for some shifty weather. Millions of people are going to be in deep shift. Apparently, the shift is really going to roll downhill here in the Carolinas. And so forth:
I keep seeing alarmist reports such as this:
An early season winter storm is aiming for the Carolinas & New England. Full update: http://t.co/ffNka8rvO1 pic.twitter.com/JY4Pe9eLg8
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) October 31, 2014
Which seem a bit off, since my weather apps don’t show our temps going below 34 over the next few nights.
But should the Southland actually be plagued with the white stuff this weekend, might we also be treated to another disaster report from Buford Calloway on SNL?
I like this picture that the WashPost posted yesterday showing a really cool weather phenomenon off the coast of Baja California.
The absence of clouds over the islands is explained thusly:
The clouds form over the ocean because the chilly Pacific water creates a layer of cool air at low altitudes. When the air is heated just above the ocean surface, it cools and condenses into clouds and fog forming the so-called marine layer (which is held in place by a temperature inversion, in which the air – divorced from the cool sea surface – warms with altitude).
But over the islands, the layer of cool air required for these clouds to form is often absent since land masses and the air above them heat up quickly (thanks to the low heat capacity of land versus water). And so, unless there is wind to push the marine layer over the islands, they’re bastions of sunshine….
I’m enjoying my new Digital Premium subscription to The Washington Post…
The unappealing mix of ice chunks and slush collecting beneath the eaves of my house.
There are these chunks of ice, about an inch in length, up to maybe half an inch in breadth, raining down onto the icy coating covering my lawn. At first, it appears to me yet another variety of precipitation. But it’s coming from the trees. The steady clatter these things produce on my roof is accompanied by a liquid drip from the eaves.
It’s 34 degrees Fahrenheit, and the melt has begun. Which always imparts to me a sense of loss. There was all this solid, stable beauty that forced us to take note of it, and now, far too soon, it’s disappearing.
That may seem perverse. It may sound like a guy who doesn’t want to go to work. But I can do most of my work from home, as long as there is electricity. That’s not it. Anyway, I’ve never experienced winter weather severe enough to prevent me getting to the office if I really need to. And during all my years working at newspapers, I always did go to work. But I still felt the sense of loss when the snow and ice started melting.
I think I’ve just not had enough ice and snow in my life to ever feel like I’ve had enough of it, to get to the point that I’m ready for it to go away.
Usually in my life, it has melted away before it even begins to stick. And then, on the rare of occasions when it does stick — and this is twice so far this season — you hardly have time to say, “It’s winter!” before the drip starts from the eaves, and the solid beauty has begun to die.
… a huge flurry of chunks just came down onto the roof just over my head. My home office is in and upstairs room…
I began life in South Carolina, and lived in Charleston and Bennettsville and Columbia until I was kindergarten age, when we moved to Norfolk. After Norfolk, we were in New Jersey for a year, and there I had a good bit of winter weather. I can remember walking to school — it was just across the street from the apartment complex where we lived — when the snow was nearly to my knees. But I was pretty short then.
We went to Bennettsville for Christmas that year, so I missed my one chance at a white Christmas. The closest I would some was when we had that snow on Boxing Day in 2010, the day before we left for England — and missed that blizzard they’d just had there.
I’m sort of the opposite of Rob McKenna the Rain God in Douglas Adams’ So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish — the lorry driver who is always driving through the rain that follows him everywhere. The snow generally avoids me. When it deigns to visit, it leaves before its welcome wears out, always. You might think of it as excessively polite.
It stayed away from me in most of the places I lived, as you’d expect — New Orleans; Tampa; Honolulu; Guayaquil, Ecuador. We got some in Jackson, TN, but it was always a big news story when we did. It was fairly routine in Wichita, but not so that I got tired of it. And I left Kansas as soon as I could for reasons unrelated to the weather. Although the incessant wind may have played a role in my eagerness to leave.
So anyway, here it is already above freezing, and it’s going away. And odd as it may seem, I hate to see this.
The icy debris that fell from trees, littering my sidewalk.
While typing my last post, I was listening to Nikki Haley’s live presser about the weather. Occasionally, I would glance over, and was struck by how the gov had adopted the standard Chris Christie disaster couture, with the dark blue windbreaker and everything. (Although she added a stylish white turtleneck.)
I’m telling myself this doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean she’s going to stop lanes of I-20 going through Kershaw County just to punish Vincent Sheheen or anything. And so far, it doesn’t look like she’s packing on any unhealthy pounds.
Apparently, this has become the national standard for a governor wanting to show that he or she is in Complete Weather Disaster Command and Control Mode. Like a general getting out of Class A’s and into fatigues — or rather, like what that would have meant decades ago, before generals started going to the office every day in BDUs.
Anyway, it just struck me as an interesting visual. Increasingly, we think in visual symbols rather than words, don’t we?
And are we next going to see Gov. Haley walking alongside President Obama, showing him the devastation wreaked on our state? Probably not… although I see she has sought a federal emergency declaration, which I found ironic…
I had already made the comparison between the recent weather-related apocalypse in Atlanta and “Walking Dead,” but I had somehow missed this post providing photographic evidence.
Whoa. It even includes “survivors” shuffling through the wreckage, in images very like those from everyone’s fave zombie TV show. Check it out. The main visual difference is that in the real-life shots, everything is icy, while it seems like it’s always sweltering summer on “Walking Dead.”
And today, I look out around me, and except for the presence of shuffling undead, this could indeed be the end of all we knew. My iPad just chimed to tell me that “Nearly 52,000 SCE&G customers [are] without power.”
Right now, I’m listening to Nikki Haley’s live briefing. She says T-Rav’s Daddy’s bridge is closed again…
Days such as this remind me of a dream I used to have, decades ago. All you Freudians, prepare to take notes…
I would dream that I was in a house that was seemingly miles from any road or sign of life, with deep, deep snow covering everything. Nothing but whiteness could be seen, for miles and miles of softly undulating, hilly landscape. There were no tracks in the snow. Most of all, there was no sound whatsoever. I was seeing all this not so much from inside the house, as I was seeing the completely snow-bound house set in an all-white background.
The memorable thing about the dream, the thing I wanted to go back to after I awoke, was the utter peacefulness of it. There was nothing to do, and nothing to worry about. Worry and stress was a thing of other times and other places. There was just the snow, and the quiet.
All the Freudians are now going “death wish!” But keep in mind this was in the context of me being a newspaperman. I had to go to work no matter what the weather, and go to great trouble to generate boring weather stories. Sitting tight in a warm house looking at the pretty snow was just not a part of my life.
I think maybe the dream just had to do with wanting a day off like other people. Even though I always scorned those wimps who stayed at home because it was a bit slippery outside, on some level I think I envied them. A perfectly pedestrian impulse. Although I’ll admit there was something mystical, something unearthly, about the peacefulness of that dream.
But I digress…
