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Helene, Two Months Later
Two months later, the town of Aiken and the surrounding area still have a long way to go cleaning up after Helene. Piles of tree trunks and branches still cover much of the roadside. For example, this is a picture of my next-door neighbor’s pile:
We also have a pile, but it’s much smaller.
Anyway, I went to the garbage dump this morning. As with the previous post-Helene dump trips, pickups filled to the brim with debris sat lined up several deep, waiting their turn at the household debris bin. Fortunately, it’s located at a different area from the household trash bins. Still, the trucks sometimes create a bottleneck, resulting in the line into the dump backing up onto the roadway.
One good sign I saw on the way was a pair of work crews beginning to tackle the cleanup. A fallen tree had been removed from the guardrail it mangled, and the rail had been pulled away from the road. The last time I went downtown to get a haircut, the piles of debris were still there. I’m going again in a couple of weeks, and I bet most of it is still around.
In the latest issue of our electrical coop magazine, they reported that due to Helene, they had “more than 1,500 poles down across our 5,700 mile service area.” (By “service area,” I assume they’re talking about length of total roadway.) The magazine also stated that the recovery was greatly accelerated by service crews and contractors from 15 states. If 4 days without power was “quick” for us, I can imagine how much worse the outage was for other families.
Needless to say, this Thanksgiving will include giving thanks to everyone who aided during and after the hurricane. We are planning on dinner for 11 tomorrow, maybe 13 if oldest daughter and her fiance have finished moving into their new house.
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!
Published in General
One thing I did like about living in Phoenix was knowing that any time there was such a disaster anywhere, trucks and crews from Arizona Public Service and Salt River Project (the two major electric companies) would be on the way, sometimes also fire department trucks and crews.
Thanks for the update, Stad. It’s slow, but at least there’s some progress.
It’s good news Stad to know that your neighborhood is starting to somewhat normalize. Although you were lucky to escape the death blows which other places have felt, I imagine that it is going to be a long while before everything around you is cleaned up.
Locals in the hard hit mountainous regions of Tennessee and western No Carolina believe the death toll in that area has surpassed 10,000 lives.
Authorities are quite willing to say that no one can add a name to the fatality list unless a body has been found and identified. The ID requirements focus on dental records, and on fingerprints. (Dental records of course attach themselves to dentist offices. Many of which may no longer exist.) I also imagine if a body is recovered close to where the person lived, and a relative is able to be at the spot of the recovery, the relative ID-ing the body would count for something.
Many bodies will never be found. In dozens of communities, cadaver dogs were able to go out and mark 200 spots in each locale. But the body they smell may be buried under 40 to 80 feet of debris. With limited man power there is no way at all to tear apart the debris to get to most of those bodies while they still can be identified.
Additionally, with people being inside homes swept away by mud slides, and flood waters, the fact is that a human body can be torn apart if repeatedly slammed by larger harder items. Once out in a rushing river, the bodies of victims were slammed by huge logs, semi trailers, refrigerators, propane tanks and crumbled but over-sized bits of buildings. So many of those people will never be identified, even if lucky enough to have a body part or two recovered.
And in NYC after 9/11 they were finding body parts under manhole covers etc, long after.
Absolutely! Thoses areas got the worst . . .
Is Aiken in SC Stad? Carol, where did the statistic of 10,000 lost come from – I had not heard that??!! Is that total across all states? Yes we are so thankful – still cleaning up much of FL too…..
Yes, we live in Aiken, SC. Actually, we’re in the county, but we’re about 6 minutes from the city limits . . .
The view from my picture window, 2 months after Hurricane Milton. My neighborhood with 10 permanent residents and 14 debris piles, this being the largest, was mostly escaped hurricane damage from the 2 we experienced this year. After the schedule for removal came and went, I appealed to my county commissioner. In my second letter to her I asked for an explanation of the delay and got this from the local solid waste department director – “It is estimated over 1000 semi trucks of debris will be picked up. The federal guidelines with debris management red tape leads to inefficiencies. Unfortunately we must follow FEMA guidelines to receive reimbursement which will be in the millions of dollars . Failure to comply will result in non reimbursement to the county.”
That all the stuff both here and in the OP is no longer scattered here and yon, would seem to be very significant improvement.
There is this video made by a man with the last name of Herms.
On edit – the below link is just the trailer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMyltyieFWQ
This link is the full movie: https://screwbiggov.com/hurricane-hell/
Right now it is still available to watch on youtube.
I found the sound quality to be difficult, so for those speakers who talked a bit too fast and too quietly I used youtube settings to make the film run at 75% and then I could make out what the difficult speakers were saying.
But what happened in terms of 10,000 dead is that there were cadaver dogs with their handlers who came in right away. The dogs were said to have marked 200 spots at each community. So assuming that there were 25 decently sized communities, with another 50 clusters of homes and businesses, the math adds up to be 10,000 people.
Again, officials are only counting people whose bodies allow them to be identified. The cadaver dogs were marking at places where the body might be under 40 to 80 feet of debris. With the vast numbers of bodies being marked, and the lack of workers and equipment to go and sort through the debris piles, it can be assumed that many o f these people will not ever be located. Or that if they are, it won’t happen quickly enough where fingerprints etc are possibly going to serve as identifying markings.
It was, and it was thanks to the neighbors gathering and piling debris immediately after the last storm to make sure all were okay and the street was cleared for traffic. This was NOT a heavily affected neighborhood. Only 1 house flooded in the first hurricane and part of 1 fence fell victim to an old tree in the second. The biggest concern now is that displaced wildlife from adjoining wetlands, to include venomous snakes, are finding winter refuge in the debris. The eyesore is no big deal, but most of us don’t move as quickly as the rattlers, water mocassins, or bobcats who are our new neighbors. At least the bears don’t seem interested. All were here first, of course, but that is why we do not pile brush where we live. In this part of Florida it seems FEMA is more hindrance than help for state & local recovery efforts. Many with more significant losses are being crippled further by unhelpful federal regulations.
The debris pile pictured seems to contain a lot of usable firewood.
We passed huge piles like that all over the part of FL yesterday near Sarasota that have not been picked up. Lots of fencing down, and clean up will take a long time. I imagine the FEMA budget is blown.
Looks like free wood to me. I’d cut it with a chain saw and throw it in the back of the truck.
My son-in-law took his chain saw to all the fallen trees in his yard. He was still left over with more wood they could use . . .
(I assume he gave some away to the neighbors.)