Deborah Hemingway removes items from her damaged car Monday at her home on Reynolds Street in Augusta. High winds and heavy rain caused the tree to fall on the 1997 Chevrolet Cavalier early Monday morning. A small shed was also damaged by the tree. BRANT SANDERLIN/STAFF

Flooding halts some activities

Web posted March 10, 1998

By Alisa DeMao
Staff Writer

Wading through the swampy mess in the Augusta-Aiken area has brought farming, construction, traffic, even schoolwork to a halt in some places. But for Susan Burnley, it has meant nonstop business.

Telephones have been ringing off the hook at Burnley Sanitary Sewer and Drain Service in Grovetown as area residents deal with soggy soil and water cascades that have flooded septic tanks. With more than 5 inches of rain the past five days, business has been almost too good, Mrs. Burnley said.

``This phone has been driving me crazy,'' she said. ``I'm almost ready to throw it out the door. This weather has been good for business -- excellent for business. There's just so much water in the ground.''

After the wettest winter in at least a decade, the weekend's rainfall of 5.24 inches flooded area roads and again saturated the already wet ground. Schools in some Georgia counties, including Burke and Emanuel, shut down Monday because of road conditions.

``We're knee-deep in some places, I think,'' Burke County emergency management chief Earl Porterfield said Monday evening. ``Of course, we aren't nearly as bad as we were when the rain was pounding on us. Crews are out now, trying to open most of the roads. It's still kind of a mess.''

Click on this image for a full-sized version of the graphic "Wet winters."Staff

The worst weather came at noon Sunday when clouds dumped 2 inches of rain in three hours, said Pam Tucker, emergency management director for Richmond County.

Water releases from Thurmond Lake into the Savannah River were curtailed at 10 a.m. Monday to avoid further flooding in the river, said Jim Parker of the Army Corps of Engineers. Once runoff from rainfall in Richmond and Columbia counties flows downstream, the dam will resume hydropower generation, and releases into the river will resume at 30,000 cubic feet per second, he said.

Although the soggy ground combined with high winds during thunderstorms to topple some trees and bring down branches, the area wasn't hit as hard as western Georgia or northern South Carolina, where flooding forced evacuations and fierce winds damaged homes.

Freezing temperatures expected later in the week, on top of the rain that has already swamped the area, were a bigger worry.

``Peach trees don't like standing water, and they're definitely standing in it right now,'' said Greg Henderson of the Clemson University Cooperative Extension Service in Edgefield County. ``But the biggest concern is the new predictions for this week from our meteorologist at Clemson. He's predicting low temperatures Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 26, 20 and 19 degrees, respectively.

``If it stays below 24 degrees for any extended period of time, we could get some damage. And there's very little that they can do to protect those peach trees.''

The wet weather has already posed problems for farmers planting early crops, such as corn -- which many planned to plant this year as a more reliable alternative to cotton. Ideally, corn should be planted by mid-March, but soggy conditions have prevented work in the fields.

Chilly temperatures could spell disaster for fruit trees and shrubbery in Augusta as well -- although they may have a silver lining for azalea lovers.

``Azalea blooms can take a lot of cold,'' said Clyde Lester of the University of Georgia's Cooperative Extension Service in Richmond County. ``This will hold back the blooms that were opening. With azaleas, you see the bark splitting when it gets cold. In June, we'll start seeing individual limbs die, and if you look, you see where the bark has split.''

Staff writers Rob Pavey and S.B. Crawford contributed to this report.