LinvilleGorge

I was fortunate I never lost water. We were on a boil advisory until just a couple hours ago we got the alert it was lifted. My folks lost water for three days but they're under a different municipality. As soon as they lost water I bleached all the bathtubs and filled those bitches up. We've just been dipping water out of the bathtubs. If we'd ran out of that I was gonna start boiling creek water instead of boiling whatever sketchiness was causing the boil advisory. I assume sewage contamination. Nah, I'm good. I'll drink creek water.

And I'll play for league minimum and no one on that sideline will ever want for a cold Gatorade or a fresh towel

Because they're basically shut off. You can get to Spruce Pine but beyond that you pretty much need a helicopter.

We need helicopters. There's a ton in the air but not enough and I'm not sure how many are doing S&R. There's so many roads washed out and/or hopelessly blocked by down trees that about of isolated mountain communities literally aren't accessible any other way. Cutting your way in with chainsaws really just isn't feasible. It's absolutely pathetic that five days after private helicopters are still outnumbering government by probably 10:1.

Being poor means a LOT when it comes to being able to potentially evacuate.

It's relatively sparsely populated but the way the river flows through there I think it's gonna be BAD. Most of the people through there are dirt ass poor too.

The area I'm most concerned about is basically following the forks of the North Toe. Spruce Pine heading north up 19 and Burnsville/Bakersville along 80. I honestly think that's going to be the worst hit area.

Just got off the phone with my sister. She works for a company specializing in social services in WNC. They have 67 employees unaccounted for.

That's all well and good but a lot of deaths are gonna be from houses getting crushed by falling trees not flooding. And honestly, it's hard to blame people for getting caught in a flood in areas they've never seen flood before. The media over hypes so much stuff these days it's hard to take a lot of the warnings seriously. Boy who cried wolf syndrome.

It probably was on some areas.

Honestly, mountain floods are the worst. Water runs down hill and all those mountains funnel the water into the valley's and due to the slope the water runs off fast and hard instead of soaking in. You're not just dealing with flood water you're dealing with flood water running hard and fast. I lived in the mountains of CO when they got hammered like a decade ago and that was bad but nothing like this.

The people I know in WNC are largely outside of Boone and Asheville and .gov is nowhere to be seen, per usual.

Sadly I'm not surprised. I was up around Linville and Spruce Pine yesterday and it's a wreck.

I just got a text from a buddy that they need help in Old Fort. I have a load of car seats to bring back to the Hickory airport and then I'm headed to Old Fort.

There's only so much I can load into a 4runner so I drove down to Hickory to load helicopters. I figure that's just a more efficient use of what I can do.

One thing that needs to be said here is that virtually all of this aid I'm seeing pour in isn't coming from the government. It's just coming from people. Roads are getting cleared by people like me with a chainsaw and a pickup. All this heavy equipment coming in is private industry stepping up. The vast majority of the helicopters constantly flying overhead delivering aid are private. I don't ever want to see another politician gripping and grinning anywhere around here.

Google has been pretty good about removing the major highways that are out from the options. Get off the major highways though and it's a total crapshoot.

Carolina football might not be delivering wins but they're delivering aid to my people Not a race fan, but I saw a lot of race teams trailer rolling through today bring aid too

It's just the whole acting like a Cowboy fan thing. Chirp real loud all off-season, chirp real loud on the off chance things are actually looking good for a couple weeks, then act like you don't actually care when it all inevitably goes to poo.

Remember when Colorado got their ass whooped by Matt Rhule? You acted like you were a UNC fan all along and how oh well, Colorado sucks again so I'm not interested anymore. But let them win a few games against bad teams (like UNC did) and oh yeah, you chirpin' again. LOL

Guess what , UNC isn't anything special in football. Yeah, Howell and Maye are the best QBs we've ever had. And those guys won a helluva lot more games than your Deion clown troop. Of all people, your bandwagon jumping ass can't be talking about any other college football fans making anything look bad.

I remember him at VT. Good player. Big corner.

The amount of help coming is just unbelievable. I drove up to the Linville area to help a friend cut some trees off of his workshop/utility shed thing and coming back down the mountain it was just convoys of dump trucks after backhoes after the biggest damn bulldozers I've ever seen after water tanker trucks after pickups towing cargo trailers after race teams with their trailers packed full of aid. Just amazing to see. Hard not to choke up seeing it. We swung by to check on a job we just finished up on a house addition and unfortunately found out that the roofer on the job was crushed and killed by a tree that fell through his house. He seemed like a really good guy. The death numbers are going to go up a lot and I think a lot of people will probably remain forever missing.

Yeah, it's a gigantic money laundering scheme.