Back side of Hurricane Matthew: 10 '16

The back half of the storm was much stronger than the front half and lasted a lot longer (about 6 hours). It rained a lot harder in this half than earlier, and the winds were a lot stronger.  While the rain only lasted an hour or so, the winds went on late into the night.

Most of the heaviest bands of rain fell far inland, raising threats of flooding and broken dams all over the North and South Carolina midlands. Many of the communities adjacent to our South Carolina Rivers are still under flood watch today as those inland waters work their way down river to the sea.  In all fairness to our low country neighbors ,  everyone living South of us on the coast from Charleston through Florida had it much worse than we did (I will blog more about that in a later post).

We lost cable connection and cell phone connection about 2 pm, and all power at about 5 pm on Saturday.   We found out later that a large tree at the front entrance to the plantation had fallen on the community’s main transformer, and taken out all the power to the plantation.

We were not alone, more than 833,000 were without power in SC due to Matthew so we knew it was going to take awhile to get our power restored.

I had prepared several days meals in advance so we grilled some turkey -zucchini burgers and warmed some baked beans for lunch; for dinner we had some cold fried chicken and potato salad and fruit salad. 

We spent the evening playing with the cats, and listening to PBS on the NOAA  emergency radio.

A large ATT cell tower was also toppled in the winds..  

None of our utilities were restored until late Tuesday afternoon.  It was an inconvenience we were well prepared for, but we were still happy to have the power restored before the food in our freezer defrosted.