A day at the beach - when a hurricane comes along

I didn’t have to be on Tybee Island which, as it turned out, came closer to the hurricane’s eye than anywhere else in Georgia and suffered perhaps the worst damage. No editor ordered me here; some advised against it. It was my choice to witness what, at the time, was a Category 3 storm with top winds of 129 mph.

I’ve no death wish. I’m not an adrenaline junkie who needs to scratch his inner Jim Cantore. I’ve got a wife and two kids.

But the chance to become intimate with the first direct hurricane to hit Georgia in 118 years proved too journalistically cool to pass up. What is it like to sit in the dark as the winds howl, the waters rise, the house shakes and a beloved corner of Georgia comes under attack?

I wanted to find out.

Everything pointed toward disaster

I’ve covered a handful of hurricanes. Charleston looked like a war zone after Hugo in 1989. Floyd destroyed tiny Princeville, N.C., a decade later and sent caskets floating down the streets. Charley killed 17 across Florida in 2004.

Always, though, I was safely outside the immediate hurricane zone. I would wait for the storm to pass, then head to the hardest-hit areas to report.

This time, at the moment the storm struck, I would be standing a few feet above sea level on the northern end of Tybee. The northern end juts out into the Atlantic.

Matthew was projected to hit St. Marys, Brunswick and the Golden Isles first and hardest. But I had a hunch about Tybee. It is Georgia’s easternmost point. It floods frequently even during high tides. The wind, rain, storm surge – all pointed to a disaster.

On Wednesday, Oct. 6, Tybee’s mayor ordered the island’s 3,000 residents to leave within 24 hours. I arrived Thursday after lunch. The town was emptying out, boarding up. Winds from the west were picking up. Whitecaps topped waves.

A few TV trucks broadcast from the pier parking lot. A couple of “hurricane tourists” walked the beach. Phones blared automatic hurricane warnings every half hour or so.

Ultimately, three-fourths of Chatham County’s 285,000 residents fled Matthew. Only 100 remained on Tybee.

‘But you have to feed the cats’

I’d stocked up in Atlanta on peanut butter, crackers, apples, granola bars, a case of water and a six pack of Hop’Lin IPA. I’d rented an SUV, a hurricane necessity.

I checked on evacuation efforts in Savannah on Friday. On the way back out to Tybee, U.S. 80, the only route onto the island, was blocked by a state trooper at the Bull River bridge. I expected a hassle. But the trooper asked whether I had a place to stay and warned me that no police or firefighters would answer my emergency calls. He let me pass. I was on my own.

Sort of. I had no lodging lined up, but some friends and sources offered homes. Most had left Tybee; Paul Wolff was staying.

Wolff, 65, is a former city council member, B&B owner and avid environmentalist. He’d spent Thursday “bullet-proofing” his north-end home, covering windows with 85-pound home-made shutters and plywood. He offered his girlfriend’s million-dollar, three-story house a few blocks away and within a football’s toss of the beach.

“But you have to feed the cats,” Wolff said.

Bella, the mama cat, had recently given birth to Merlin, Rowena and Bubba. With their owner out of town, the fur balls stayed in a second floor bedroom, which proved fortuitous for all.

Tybee was a ghost town. No TV trucks today; I would be the only reporter dumb enough to welcome Matthew here. A siren wailed through the business district, but few were around to hear it.

Sonja Edleman did. She’d just fed the fish at the Sunrise diner where she works and was taking a roundabout way to her small, wooden home a block off the beach. She wasn’t leaving.

“Everybody thinks I’m crazy,” said Edleman, who has lived on Tybee 45 years. “It’s like an adventure to me.”

Cut off from the mainland

At 11 a.m., the last sheriff’s deputy left the island. The rain and wind had picked up considerably the last 90 minutes. Palm fronds were flying. The weatherman expected 14 inches of rain on Tybee. Tornado watches were posted, a dusk-to-dawn curfew imposed. Tidal gauges – at low tide — registered a four-foot storm surge off nearby Fort Pulaski with predictions of 11 feet early Saturday.

Initial reports of Matthew’s brush with the Florida coast sounded bad. It was downgraded to Cat 2 after making landfall, but the weatherman in Savannah was still predicting winds up to 110 mph for Georgia’s barrier islands beginning at 2 a.m. Saturday.

The power went out at 6:13 p.m. Maybe that’s how a hurricane announces itself.

I sat in the darkened third-floor living room listening to the wind rise and the rain fall. I was apprehensive, but bored. I played with the cats. I ate a can of Deviled Ham. I tweeted.

At 8:15 I went for a drive. Roads were flooded, impassable. So was U.S. 80. Tybee was cut off from the mainland. The rain vacillated between bucket-of-water deluges and sprinkles. The super-fast wiper setting didn’t help at times. A seagull, tired and confused and sitting in the middle of Butler Ave., looked up too late to see my SUV coming.

A burglar alarm wailed on Tybrisa St., but nobody cared. Palm trees did the limbo. . I sat in my car, well away from any building, and texted a short story to my editor in Atlanta. I noted that the next high tide was expected at 1:21 am. – just as Matthew was expected to hit Tybee.

“That’s when the fun begins,” I wrote.

‘This is the worst of it’

The storm built steadily all night, getting louder as roof tiles, branches, window screens and other projectiles rocketed through the air and smacked the house. The winds had shifted. Earlier, they came from the west in a counter-clockwise pattern. Now, as Matthew neared, they came from the south and east.

The house, sturdy and built to code in 2005, had no shutters. I decided to sleep in a second-floor bedroom at the back of the house. Fewer windows. Plus, the cats in the room next door could keep me company.

I dozed, pretending to sleep. It was stuffy without AC. Around 11:30, with the winds raging, the house began to shake. Wolff texted 45 minutes later: “The house is rockin,’ but Mother Nature’s just knocking.”

Unable to sleep, I roamed the darkened house. I played with the kittens who, despite being babies, seemed to know this wasn’t normal. They mewled as loudly as possible. Earlier, they’d just purred. I went downstairs to check on my SUV. Eighteen inches of water had flooded the first floor and garage and was climbing the stairs. High tide. I couldn’t reach the SUV and worried it wouldn’t start in the morning.

At 1:58 a.m., I tweeted, “This is the worst of it on Tybee.”

It wasn’t. The house shook repeatedly with each new blast of wind. Flashes of lightning illuminated the sky; the rain, though, kept visibility to about 20 feet.

I hunkered down in the bathroom surrounded by four sturdy walls with a bathtub if things got really bad. I’ll admit I was scared. But there was nothing I could do about it, so I didn’t freak out. I hummed a few Grateful Dead tunes, “Till The Morning Comes,” in particular. I yelled over to the cats that all would be cool. I sent a couple of texts, though none to my wife. No sense worrying her.

I was glad, in a way, it was dead of night. I didn’t want to see funnel clouds, trees flying or water creeping up houses.

At 2:33 a.m. my editor Shannon asks if I’m OK. She says the storm appears to be on top of Tybee, though the center is likely 20 or so miles east into the Atlantic. I ask for wind speed, thinking the storm must be a Cat 3 again. Shannon says 105 mph sustained, still a Cat 2.

Durn, I text. I wanted a 3!

But the storm wouldn’t relent. On it went at top speeds until 5 a.m., when the constant blowing halted for a few seconds before returning in force.

The sky lightened around 6:45. The rain slowed. The bursts of high winds were less frequent. I slid a curtain open on the third floor to inspect the damage. It was, as expected, bad. But it could’ve been worse.

Dawn reveals the destruction

“Hey all OK?” Shannon texted at 7:19 a.m.

And then she asked me to go out and take some pictures to post online. I told her it would be a while. The winds were still too strong. Stuff was still flying by.

When I ventured out a little while later, the windward side of my SUV was pockmarked with small dents. Marsh grass and muck were plastered on all sides. The wind was still strong enough to make it hard to open the car door. Inside, an inch of water slogged around my feet. But the SUV started.

Downed pine, palm and oak trees, or their branches, blocked roads. Other trees had sheared in half. A house on the main drag was bisected by a pine. Two condo buildings in the middle of the island lost chunks of their roofs, exposing living and dining rooms. Sides and roofs were stripped bare. Power poles tumbled, their lines snaking dangerously along the ground.

Entire neighborhoods remained under water, particularly on the southeast corner of the island. The park behind City Hall was now a pond. Awnings, fences, street lights, aluminum siding, bicycles and more were blown blocks away. Docks on the Back River were twisted and destroyed.

The winds lifted old railroad ties and tree stumps from the marsh and deposited them on U.S. 80. An ice cooler, like you’d find outside a convenience store, sat sideways near the Lazaretto Creek bridge. But there was no convenience store nearby. Just the cooler.

I spent the morning interviewing the few residents who ventured out and checked on Wolff, Edleman and others. Evacuees, friends and friends of friends asked me to check on their homes. Most were intact, though I couldn’t discern water damage.

Police, fire and rescue workers returned to Tybee by 1 p.m. They set to patrolling neighborhoods, clearing roads and keeping residents from downed power lines. Without electricity, I couldn’t file my Sunday story. The Tybee Fire Department cranked up their generator just for me. I wrote sitting on a fire truck.

Hurricane Matthew killed four Georgians, but none on Tybee. More than 15 inches of rain fell. The tidal gauge at Fort Pulaski set a record, though the low tides kept the flooding from worsening.

I had couple of beers with Wolff after I filed my story.

“Given the storm’s intensity,” he said, stars peeking through clouds, “we were extremely fortunate. We should be counting our blessings.”

I went back to my house, ate a block of cheese, played with the cats and crashed.