It was supposed to be a once-in-a-hundred-years storm. We’ve heard that before. Ivan was supposed to be a once-in-a-hundred-years storm, and by the time it reached us, it was some light wind and a bit of rain. So we were probably all a bit skeptical about what would happen when Helene rolled through.

As with Ivan, we canceled school (rather, it was an “e-learning day,” which means little work in a practical sense). I thought it would be a relatively easy day with few stresses.

And then Helene rolled through: winds up to 70 miles per hour. Eight inches of rain in our city. It was, in short, a disaster. There are trees down by the thousands throughout the city.

The adventure began last night: I stayed up to make sure the rain was not getting too heavy and flooding our basement. I kept checking our sump pump in the crawl space, and every time I looked, it was dry.

“Maybe we’ll make it,” I thought.

This morning K got up early for work and when she saw the basement was still dry, she did some yoga, ate some breakfast, and checked the basement one last time. That’s when she came to wake me up. Surely she envisioned the normal routine: shop vacs going like mad in a desperate but ultimately doomed effort to keep ahead of the flood. That’s surely what she was thinking as she came to wake me up.

And then the power went out.

We spent most of this morning, as a result, trying to get water out of our basement with towels, buckets, and brooms. We worked for hours and seemed to get nowhere. The water in the backyard continued to rise, reaching its highest level ever: a good bit over our trampoline. Still we fought. Eventually, the rain slowed and then stopped, the water went down in the backyard, but we still had water coming into the basement. Around eleven this morning that finally stopped, too.

We went out for a ride to see if anything was open and to see how the town looked. Not good.

Especially Conestee Dam. Conestee is our favorite local park, but it has a dark side: the dam that makes the lake (though now it’s more a swamp with the sediment that has gathered there over the decades) holds back untold tons of toxic waste that textile mills upstream dumped into the Ready River a century ago.

The century-old dam’s structural integrity has been a topic of much discussion locally and in the state capital, and the powers that be have finally taken the first steps to solving the problem. But when I saw what was happening there today, I feared it might be too late.

In the early evening, we saw power company trucks working on our street, and within a few minutes, we had power again. But it’s spotty: the houses on the street that intersects ours are still without power. In the neighborhoods around us, some streets have power and others do not.

Other areas have gotten it worse, though. Asheville, where we used to live and where Cocia M and her daughters live (although the oldest now lives in Charlotte during the school year) got pounded: