Yesterday everyone was accepting the fact, I assume, that we’ll be without power for some time. That was what I was thinking. “We’ll be without power a couple of days, maybe three,” I thought. And I was so pleasantly surprised when we got power back yesterday evening. In the back of my mind, though, I thought that perhaps lots of people would be coming back online today. I knew it was unlikely, but what we know to be the case and what we want to be the case often come into conflict, and we like our cognitive comfort, so we choose the easier, less-likely alternative.
This morning passed as every Saturday morning in the house, which only reinforced that thinking. K Skyped with Babcia; I spent some time grading papers; the kids slept. The only real difference was that we were all using cellular data as the internet had gone out overnight. Most of our late morning and afternoon was just like any other Saturday as well: K worked in the house; I worked in the yard.
The main difference: my yard work consisted of cleaning up the mess Helene left behind. And she did leave a mess. Branches were everywhere, of course. But because of the severe flooding in our back yard, all the debris from our yard washed into the back left corner of our yard, trapped by the fence and the debris itself. This meant that that entire corner of our yard was a mixture of previously-mulched leaves, new leaves, old rotting leaves, twigs, branches, and some old logs. It was a mess, and cleaning it up will take more time than I spent today. “A few weekends” I would normally say, but it turns out we have a bit more time than that.
We received a phone-blast from the school district informing us that schools would be closed on Monday and Tuesday. They posted essentially the same thing on the district website:
Greenville County Schools will be closed on Monday, September 30, and Tuesday, October 1. With widespread power and Internet outages, eLearning is not possible. Once we have better estimates of when power and Internet will be restored, we will announce plans for Wednesday.
So we’ll have at least two more days to work on the mess in the backyard. I only segregated everything into piles: wood we can eventually burn on the firepit, brush that we need to take to the roadside, and twigs that fall somewhere in between.
The website message contained details missing in the short phone message, details that make me think it’s all but certain we’ll be out for the entire week:
Stable power and safe transportation are the main factors necessary for resuming in-person school. Once power is restored, cafeteria food supplies must be restocked, which will take a minimum of 48 hours. While clearing roads is necessary, transportation cannot be provided safely with so many traffic signals not working. As it is safe to do so, we are physically checking our locations and prioritizing repairs. We currently have at least 90 schools and offices without power and Internet, with inconsistent power at the other locations.
There are so many trees down that officials have been unable even to reach our school to check on its condition, I learned. Given all the challenges facing us, I doubt we’ll be back in school the following week.
After dinner, we took a walk around the neighborhood and saw how lucky we were. We have a literal forest in our backyard, and all the trees were sitting in completely saturated ground for hours, with the prevailing wind blowing straight through the trees to our house. That not a single tree fell in our yard is almost shocking.
Others were not so lucky. During our walk, we heard chainsaws in the distance, and as we made our way up a curved hill, we saw what was going on: several men were working on a roof, cutting the branches off an enormous tree that had fallen right in the middle of their house. And their neighborhood still has no power, and will likely not have power for a week according to Duke Energy’s estimates.
And that’s to say nothing of the folks in Florida who lost everything. We have family in just that situation: K’s brother’s brother-in-law and family, whom we visited this summer. Their entire house was completely inundated, and just as they’d finished renovating after the last catastrophic loss.
It puts our slight flooding in an entirely different perspective.