Margo Pope: St. Augustine's Worst Storm

Posted October 15, 2016 12:02 am
By Margo C. Pope
The Record contributing columnist
POPE’S VIEW: Meet the new Dora

We never expected that we would be refugees after Hurricane Matthew’s fury a week ago.

We expected some wind, rain and perhaps minor flooding in our streets and our garages and being back to normal within two or three days.

But normalcy for many of us will be a long time coming.

Our Davis Shores neighborhood is part of what has now been called “ground zero” for Hurricane Matthew in St. Augustine. We found our house filled with nearly three feet of dirty and smelly water when we returned home on Oct. 8, about 48 hours after we had to evacuate Anastasia Island. It was devastating.

By Sunday, the trappings of our lives started piling up in our front yards, soaked beyond salvaging by a combination of river water and sanitary sewer overflow. In fact, our street was ground zero for Quarry Creek, one of the four water bodies identified by the city where its sanitary sewer overflow mixed in with river water. City repair crews worked fast to get that remedied. So did the cleanout of houses and garages.

Thousands of Anastasia Island residents and many in other areas around St. Johns County live near lakes, rivers and creeks. Some of us are now with relatives, friends, in hotels and short-term rentals, or even the family RV (we know of two instances where that is the case). We drive into our neighborhoods by mid-morning and drive out by dusk.

Until Friday afternoon, our street and others nearby were impassable at times with property recovery teams, insurance adjusters, city of St. Augustine public works teams, law enforcement (thank you to St. Augustine Police, St. Johns County Sheriff’s office and Florida Highway Patrol), homeowners still in disbelief, scavengers, and generous strangers, passing back and forth.

As more stuff came out of our houses and more dangling limbs, fallen trees, and scattered shrubs were cut up for pickup, our street became narrower because stuff, well, just settled into the street.

City police on Friday drove down our street, using their loud speakers asking residents to please remove their vehicles from curbside so the debris collectors could get through.

Good Samaritans continued to just show up and pull stuff out of our houses as they did all week. Those many hands reached out from all over our county, Duval and South Georgia. They came from churches, colleges, local schools, banks, real estate offices, grocery stores, community nonprofits, civic groups, and as individuals or groups of friends from communities miles away.

The American Red Cross disaster relief teams checked on our health and welfare as did Flagler Hospital nurses.

For many of us, this was our first time personally coping with disaster.

I was in high school when Hurricane Dora struck St. Augustine in 1964. It was “St. Augustine’s worst storm” for decades. Hurricane Matthew now holds that ignominious distinction.

Margo C. Pope was associated with The St. Augustine Record for 24 of her 42 years with Morris Publishing Group. She retired in 2012 as The Record’s editorial page editor.

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