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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!
Discussion (15)
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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.
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Thanks for the update, Stad. It's slow, but at least there's some progress.
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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.
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And in NYC after 9/11 they were finding body parts under manhole covers etc, long after.
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Absolutely! Thoses areas got the worst . . .
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