Hurricane Florence Post-Mortem

Early Morning Before Landfall of Hurricane Florence

With a lot of threat and bluster, a Hurricane named Florence churned and turned and grew out over the Atlantic Ocean and tracked a path that promised a destructive broadside on North Carolina unlike anything we'd seen since the infamous 1954 landing of Hazel. Even though we're over four hours inland, it was clear we'd best make ourselves ready for it, and boy howdy was the water pretty much cleared out of all the grocery store shelves! At the Roediger House, I tied all the trash and recycling and yard waste carts together around the basketball goal:

...and brought in the furniture from the upstairs porch:

In the days leading up to landfall, though, the direct hit that was predicted for Winston-Salem once Florence began her land journey was recast as a broad sideswipe once she began tracking a little more to the south. By Friday night, on September 14th, we started to get rains from the outer bands of this enormous storm:

Then Saturday was just dreary but uneventful, and it wasn't until the system made its turn that we had the really full day of rain on Sunday. What that showed, though, was that I've still got a problem with leaking around the center dormer up above the upstairs porch door, because the water was definitely coming through the second floor sitting area ceiling:

By the time it was all said and done, we very fortunately didn't get a direct hit, nor did we get even a hellacious sideswipe, and around here the rains created at best localized moderate problems. Not so for the eastern end of the state and definitely not true for the Chesterfield [VA] area where several tornadoes were spawned as the remnants of Florence moved northeast. It's almost like Florence went around her elbow to get to her thumb so that Winston-Salem was largely unaffected.

I'm glad we were ready, and I'm glad we were spared, and I hate it (of course!) for the hard-hit areas. And by Monday evening, I welcomed the clearing skies and promise of a return to normality as I looked out the west-facing kitchen window after supper: