The Joys of Natural Desaster

As you can see from the title of this post, I am talking my incident with Hurricane Matthew.
Let me start with a quick run up of what happened.
When we first got news of Hurricane Matthew, Everyone wasn't to stressed out about it here in North Carolina. We never get hit. We'll get rain and that's about it. So we all stocked up on water and food. Since we expected the power to go out.
The original route of Hurricane Matthew was suppose to go back out to sea after it got to South Carolina. However, it made a sudden and sharp turn into North Carolina.
My husband and I were actually not home when it first hit. We were in a separate town further west of NC. Enjoying the quiet weekend. While we were in this town, the rain hit. Then came the wind.
We knew it was getting bad so we headed home. When we arrived home, we both practically flipped out.
On October 8th, 2016, North Carolina was hit by Hurricane Matthew.

About a week or two prior to Hurricane Matthew, we had received a lot of rain. and when I say a lot of rain, I mean a LOT.
This was Downtown Fayetteville, from that rain storm.

So naturally, the ground was still full of water.
At this time I had two ponds next to my house. When we returned home one pond over flowed and washed out my driveway. My husband and I had to take our shoes off and wade through rushing water to get to our house. Hubby immediately got his keys out of the house and drove his work truck out of my yard and parked it up at my neighbors' house.
In the meantime, I was in the house packing a suitcase of clothes and loaded everything we'd need over night into my truck. Including my two furchildren. My husband and I both had a nagging thought that we needed to grab our important paperwork. Birth Certificates, SSCards, ect.... so we did.
After packing and loading restless doggies into the truck, we fought against the water and by some miracle we got the truck out. We drove over to my in-laws to stay the night.


The next morning we rescued my neighbors by cutting down a tree that blocked them from getting out. So after being covered in sawdust and sweat, we loaded into my husbands work truck and drove down to the house. Only to be greeted by this sight.

I started to cry.
This was the TOP of my driveway (I lived down in a valley) and I knew what this meant.
I had lost my house.
The Cape Fear River, by this time, had over flowed and submerged my house.

My husband and I stressed about what to do. Both of us work full time jobs and we hardly had anything to fall on at this point. We lived with my inlaws, in a tiny spare bedroom, for the next 2 months.
Three days after the Hurricane passed, my husband and I spent our 2 year anniversary at my inlaws house trying to figure out what our next steps were. We didn't really celebrate it, since we had other things in mind.
The next weekend, a friend of ours came to town and helped us go down to our house and start going through what was left to see what we could salvage.

Hubby in the front door of the house.

What was left of the bedroom.

As you can imagine, it wasn't much.
So over the course of the next couple of weeks, we turned in some applications to try and get some help.
My insurance decided that they weren't going to help me at all.
There is a foundation where I work that helps the employees and families in need. The did not want to help me.
There was also FEMA. They didn't want to help either. I argued and fought them for what little they decided to help me with.
In the end, my parents (who live in Alabama) set up a GoFundMe page to help us out. All my friends and family that donated, blessed my husband and I more than the government would.
On November 23rd 2016, my husband and I moved into our new house (my neighbor's house that wasn't touched at all.)
We are slowly but surely getting settled in, since our jobs keep us busy. But it's nice to have our own home again.
I have two authors who I know, they are wonderfully helping me restore my lost books. Family and Friends who gave us furniture and clothes.
In the end, we made it out of this tragedy. We're okay, alive and unharmed (well, minus an infected cut I received at the lost house.) but we mainly have each other.
I was shown once again that my crazy town has a heart. While my hubby had to work crazy hours trying to get the cable/internet back on all over the surrounding counties, people gave my hubby and his coworkers food and drinks for working all day. They received many thanks and prayers.
So thank you Fayetteville, for sticking together in this crazy world and helping each other. You gave me a reason to be proud of being from Carolina.
  Jenny