Helene, Part 2: Remembering Matthew & Dorian
1n 2016, a year after we bought our house, Hurricane Matthew passed 20-30 miles offshore of Tybee Island. At the time I had the impression it was Category 2, but when I research it now all the sources place it in Category 1. I read a wind gauge two blocks away registered 90 mph wind.
We suffered only minor shingle damage, ten brown paper yard-waste bags of small debris, a tree leaning toward the house that eventually served as a raccoon ramp to the attic above one of our dormers, and – under the house where 9 inches of water flowed from the tidal creek out back – a short-circuited hot-tub. (Designed to post-Andrew hurricane standards, the first floor is ten feet above ground level.)
The first Lighthouse Island book includes a scene, inspired by my Matthew experience, where Terry is awake all night monitoring a hurricane from her living room a thousand miles away in New York and wondering how Bob can sleep. After the storm, I traveled to Tybee with my sister. We saw many roofs, walls and fences cratered by uprooted trees and evidence everywhere of flooding. One memorable example was an ice cooler of the type usually seen outside gas stations in the middle of the causeway. We found it difficult to comprehend our damage being so light compared to what we saw.
Tybee was under a mandatory evacuation order for Matthew, but that doesn’t mean everyone left. Someone I know who stayed said he would never subject himself to that level of anxiety again. People I know who left said they would hesitate to do so again because it was stressful (and expensive) not being allowed back for a few days after the storm.
In September 2019, when I made my first solo trip to Tybee, I promised all my friends in New York I would leave for a mandatory evacuation. I got here a few days before Hurricane Dorian’s projected arrival and kept my promise. The storm turned or weakened and only had minor effects here. With no power at my house for four days, my hounds and I were probably more comfortable at my sister’s house near Atlanta, but I regretted losing a week of my month-long stay.
There were no evacuation orders for Tybee with Hurricane Helene. Its projected path was a couple hundred miles inland from here, and the forecasts didn’t call for anything worse than other tropical storms I’ve experienced. I expected it to be unpleasant, but not scary.
About 8:45 Thursday evening, two and a half hours before the storm made landfall 285 miles away, the first tornado siren sounded. I had never resolved where to shelter in a house that’s ten feet off the ground with no interior rooms. A ground-floor storage closet under the stairs is a possibility, but it’s on an exterior wall, and has no light source. It’s too small for me to stand, and a previous owner had discovered a rattlesnake in there.
Tybee is a small island, and the siren means a tornado has either been seen or detected on radar. All day we had been cautioned of the likelihood of waterspouts coming ashore. My house is about a thousand feet from the closest shoreline
“Round one?” texted my neighbor.