By Delayna Earley
The Island News
One week ago, Beaufort was very lucky.
Hurricane Idalia hit the coast of Florida as a Category 3 hurricane on the morning of Aug. 30, before heading north toward Beaufort.
Looking at the trajectory of the storm, local governments, schools and businesses erred on the side of caution and closed for Aug. 30 and 31 with Beaufort County, the Town of Hilton Head Island and the state of South Carolina declaring a state of emergency.
Beaufortonians braced themselves to get hit by Hurricane Idalia as a Category 1 hurricane, but thankfully the storm began to slow down and weaken, eventually weakening to a tropical storm.
But even as it appeared that Beaufort would be spared the worst, there was still flooding with which to contend.
Along with a higher-than-usual storm surge coupled with a high tide, a super moon was affecting the waterways in and around Beaufort.
While most fared well during the tropical storm, thousands of Beaufort residents lost power and one shrimping family experienced significant flooding during the night.
Gay Fish Company, which has been a staple business in northern Beaufort County for decades, saw storm surge flood their unloading dock and their processing area, but thankfully it did not get into the indoor area where they sell locally caught seafood to customers.
“Thankfully it wasn’t as significant as [hurricanes] Matthew and Irma,” Cyndy Carr with Gay Fish Company said. “With Matthew we had a lot of damage done to the dock because of wind. Irma had a little bit more water to it and we had significantly more flooding inside of the building with Irma.”
Carr continued to say that this is not anything that they have not seen before and it “just takes a little bit of elbow grease” to get cleaned up.
Members of the community banded together to come out and help the business by donating their time, resources and food to those who were cleaning.
Gay Fish Company was able to get everything cleaned up in time to reopen on Friday, just in time for the holiday weekend, a busy time for them.
The Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office received more than 160 storm-related calls between 5 a.m. Wednesday and 9 a.m. Thursday, according to spokesperson Maj. Angela Viens.
More than half of the calls came from northern Beaufort County and began to pick up around 4 p.m. on Wednesday, just hours before the tropical storm made its way through Beaufort.
Most of the calls were regarding downed trees, and according to Viens, there were no storm-related injuries reported.
As previously stated, Beaufort got lucky that Tropical Storm Idalia was not as bad as earlier anticipated. With hurricane season barely half over and entering peak season, hopefully we will continue to be lucky.
Delayna Earley lives in Beaufort with her husband, two children and Jack Russell. She formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She joined The Island News in 2022. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.
