The What Made Your Day Thread

[lhb412]

^ Oh my god! I'm glad you're okay. Hope you and yours have no further difficulties!

[Benjamin Haines]

^ Thanks. Now that we've been able to contact friends who live further away and catch up on news coverage of everything, it's become dauntingly clear just how incredibly lucky our particular area was compared to those at lower elevations with less sloped terrain. The biggest city in the region, Asheville, seems to have been hit the worst, with the devastation in rural areas proportionately greater the closer they are to Asheville. Many communities saw entire homes swept away by floodwaters or destroyed by mudslides, and the total loss of cell phone and internet communication across western NC just as the flooding began on Friday really hindered emergency response efforts at the worst possible time. The hurricane's death toll through the entire Southeast US is currently at 166, including 57 in Buncombe County, where Asheville is.

We really were spared from the worst of it out here. The local grocery stores still hadn't restocked since last week as of yesterday, and their shelves are mostly depleted but not entirely. Local gas stations ran out of fuel over the weekend but a couple of them were able to resupply on Monday. We still need to boil our water but we never lost running water or electricity, although some people in our county did, and our internet service was just restored early this morning. Hopefully this means that the rest of the region is back online too and people who might still be stranded anywhere will be able to reach out.