I trudged through knee high murky brown water to get to Amy Knoch house in Pepperhill a neighborhood in North Charleston, about 20 miles inland.
“My house had about 14 and change inches of water in it,” She said.
Knoch was standing, staring at her home in shock. Almost exactly one year after her house was destroyed by flooding the first time.
“I promised my five-year-old that this would never happen again. My five year old was devastated last year when this happened and she till talks about losing her house last year on an almost weekly basis. She gets in the bath and says mommy is our house going to flood again and I tell her no,” Knoch said through tears. “Now I’ve lied to my child. I am not going to lie to her a second time she is not going to lose a thing this time. It is not going to happen.”
Once she realized water was coming in her home again, Knoch and her boyfriend spent hours throwing whatever they could into rubber bins and putting them in on top of tables, beds and furniture in their one story red brick home that backs up to a drainage ditch. She had just moved back into her newly renovated home.
“Last week I just finished unpacking the last of those Rubbermaid bins,” Knoch said. “They were all still stacked in my front room waiting for us to take them to storage or sell them off.”
She said over the last year she spent more than $100,000 putting in a new kitchen, walls and ceilings all have it destroyed again in one night by Hurricane Matthew.
In downtown Charleston city crews were out cleaning up all the fallen leaves, trees and debris.
Some of the water near the Battery had receded but remnants like mud, debris and oyster shells were still on the grounds at White Point Gardens.
People sawed trees and branches that were knocked down during the storm. One the Southwestern side of the peninsula Burrow Hill was still cleaning up. He was removing wine bottles, dirt, leaves and branches from sewers to allow still standing water to drain.
His house is elevated nine-feet so water didn’t reach his first floor but it did soak his heating and air conditioning equipment stored underneath his home. He didn’t evacuate. He stayed at home during the storm looking out the window.
“There is a freezer off to the left that floated by, there is a surfboard,” Hill said.” We think that somebody’s shed in their backyard got opened up so all of these things are floating by.”
Hill is used to some flooding living on low lying land so close to the Cooper and Ashley Rivers. He says there was similar flooding last year during the October 2015 rain event.
“Unfortunately it is not new. But to come up this high is new,” he said. “Prior to that, we are talking all the way back to 1989 with Hurricane Hugo.”
The National Weather Service reports the water level in the Charleston Harbor was the third highest it has ever been.
Most of the water from the east side of the city had been drained by Sunday, October 9th. Director of City Public Services Laura Cabiness said that is in part thanks to a pump station. It was installed some years ago. It pushes water out of the streets and back into the river.
“We kept it running all night long it was able to keep the water levels down. I think it made a huge difference Calhoun and East Bay Street used to flood to almost three feet in that intersection,” Cabiness said. “While we had some water in places it was substantially lower than it could have been.”
Charleston officials think it could take weeks to get everything cleaned up and back to normal. A few days after the storm there are still hundreds of thousands of people without power across the state.