Though Isaac was a storm that was clearly VERY far away, we found ourselves in the outer bands, experiencing rain at a rate of 2-3 inches per hour. I’m working on a weather station that will give us island totals for the future, but it seems that we had somewhere between 8 and 11 inches of rain on Tuesday and Wednesday last week. It was very localized– at one point the weather station at the Mount Pleasant airport (which was in the same band of weather as Dewees was) recorded 5+ inches of rain in a two hour period, but that rain didn’t begun to fall in inner Mount Pleasant near Charleston until two hours later. The newspapers had photos of people canoeing the streets of downtown as many of the roads were closed or flooded.
However much rain it was (and if you were on the island and reading a rain gage, please comment in with your totals), we have some very saturated ground. The canoes were somehow left upright, and they were filled with water, and full moon high tides have filled the impoundment to the highest levels I have ever seen. Even now, some four dry days later, the road to the Chapel Pond dock and our driveway are still filled with standing water. We were glad to see the mosquito plane on Friday!
The top three photos were taken with my iphone in a lifeproof case, which I love. And speaking of Isaac, if you are at all interested in hurricanes, you should read Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History. I couldn’t put it down!