TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF HURRICANE IVAN IN THESE MOUNTAINS

Market was slow today but I am thankful for the order I had and the few things I did sell.  I had plenty time to visit with the friend who was standing in for the neighbor down the isle again.
After market I added a few stops to my regular routine errands. I went by the historical museum to purchase a couple books about the history of the community I live in, then stopped by Steinmart, a clothing store to check out their sales as I had a couple coupons I needed to use. I found a couple really good deals in there.  My final non-regular stop was at the meat market to pick up some fresh beef roast to have for our Sunday lunches.
This market is now under new ownership and I thought the prices had certainly increased. We will have to see if this meat is that much better than Aldi or the Ingles meat to see if it is worth the higher price.
After stops at Aldi and Walmart I made it home at 4:30. I had things for daughter and Rebekah and got everything unloaded and divided up just as hubbie came in from work.
Rebekah picked me up at 5:00 to go out to the volleyball game that daughter coach's in.
D-in-love and g-son were already there.
You can tell daughter is not happy with the play of her team.  The JV lost in 3 sets and the varsity won.

 Little Evy loved watching the game with all the action as d-in-love and her mom talked.

We left after the varsity made quick work of the first set as it was Evy's bedtime and my chore time.

This will be a long picture laden post tonight and it will get my decade photos out of order but today is the 10th anniversary of  when Hurricane Ivan came through these mountains.  He entered the coast of Alabama on September 16 as a catagory 3 storm, causing 13 deaths.

Only 10 days earlier we had been dealt a flooding blow by another Hurricane named Francis. She hit Florida and crossed it as a catagory 4 storm causing major damage there before turning up our way.

We got a lot of rain and flooding with this storm but the winds weren't bad, we felt lucky to be able to clean our fences off and get them back up after the 8-12 inches of rain from this storm.

We were not so lucky after the added 6-10 inches of rain and flooding of Hurricane Ivan as you can see in these pics the fence is gone. The ground still saturated from the floods of Francis  just couldn't absorb anymore when Ivan came through.

This was the worst flood we had seen in years or have seen since.  The water was so high and so swift you couldn't stand in it knee deep without getting your feet swept out from under you.

As usual someone thought they could drive through the water and got their car swept away into the trees and caused a swift water rescue from the rescue squad.  They launched their boat through the neighbor's gate on the other side of the road from our driveway. 

Hubbie and #1 son talk with a neighbor's daughter as they watch.

 #1 son watches.

 In this picture you can see the blue car which only had one occupant thankfully who was successfully rescued.

 This was the car after the waters receeded which was very lucky to have caught in these trees instead of swept further down the flooded bottoms and probably flipped over.

With this storm also came strong winds which blew down power lines and put everyone in the dark for days.  We were without power for 5 days as workers got overloaded with all the outages.Lucky for us we had a generator for some small appliances.

We had many trees blew over around our farm but luckily none fell on anything. That wasn't the case everywhere as a man that we knew on the other side of town was killed when a limb came through his roof and hit him as he layed in bed.

#1 son surveys the damage.

After the waters started going down hubbie and I recovered this water tank and hubbie got to ride while I pushed it.

During this storm Snowball our milk cow delivered a bouncing baby boy as if nothing were happening on the outside.

It took many days to get things around the farm cleaned up and all the fences put back up after that storm. We bought telephone poles to hopefully hold on to our fencing if these floods get this bad again.
There was a land slide in Macon county which killed several folks and destroyed many homes on a mountain side over there with all the rains from these storms. All Western NC saw flooding where there had never been flooding before, even the Biltmore Estate suffered major flood damage.
This is some pics form the Biltmore area of Asheville  and the Swannanoa river.

And the devastating land slide in Macon County.

Prayerfully these kind of rains don't come around very often but when they do they cause a lot of damage in these mountains where houses occupy many of the mountainsides.
Praying God doesn't have it in His plans to send us this much water again anytime soon, but also recognizing that He has a grand plan and He will guide us through it with His love.
Good Night and God Bless.