Southport braces for Hurricane Matthew

A shop owner on Howe Street in this riverfront town left a message on the plywood that covered the front window Friday night: Scat Matt.

But Hurricane Matthew came anyway, with the first bands of rain and wind arriving Saturday morning, flooding low-lying areas, sending the Cape Fear River splashing across a bulkhead in the city’s waterfront park, and tossing tree debris into the streets.

Conditions are expected to worsen considerably through the afternoon and evening, and the National Weather Service is calling for rain through Sunday. As much as 15 inches total is possible here.

 

“We’ve never been through a hurricane before,” said Mark Guard, who with his wife, Jan, traveled from Paducah, Ky., to tend to their 38-foot sailboat moored at the Southport Marina. They spent most of the day Friday double-tying the boat, taking off the sails and securing anything that could get tossed around on their retirement transportation. They finished up this morning and went to stay with friends in town to wait out the storm. Wind rocked dozens of sailboats in the marina, jangling their rigging against the masts to make a sound like a symphony of wind chimes.

As the couple left the marina, a dock worker came in to shut off the power.

“They have to,” Guard said. “This will probably all be underwater later.”

Flash flooding is a concern in Southport, which sits barely above sea level. In addition to the heavy rains, the town is subject to tidal surges from the Cape Fear River. The low-lying area around the Old Yacht Basin was underwater at high tide.

As high tide approached around 2 p.m., there was a traffic jam of onlookers along the waterfront. Between squalls, people jumped out of their cars to shoot video of the crashing waves or to snap selfies.

There was little else to do at that point besides sit in the house. Nearly every business in town was closed.

“We just came down to check on the store, and as soon we opened the doors, people started coming in,” said Nani Patel, who own’s Bob’s E-Z Way, a convenience store on Howe Street. “So we thought we might as well stay open and help people.”

A couple of hours later, the snack rack was down to a few bags of chips and some oatmeal pies. The lights on the beer coolers remained off; alcohol sales were cut off Friday night as a result of the state’s emergency declaration.

David Hedrick didn’t really need anything, except to get out of his house.

“It’s called boredom,” Hedrick said, stepping inside the store. Like dozens of others, he had been out riding around town. His two shitzus were riding shotgun.

“They were getting antsy,” he said, “from being in the house.”

Hedrick said he might stay out through the afternoon, even though wind speeds of 45 mph are predicted, with gusts up to 65 mph possible.

“It depends on how bad it gets.”

This story was originally published October 8, 2016 at 4:34 PM with the headline "Southport braces for Hurricane Matthew."