Neighbors pull together to help after Hurricane Matthew | Horry’s Angels

Hurricane Matthew ripped through the Carolinas in October, and Jim Martin couldn’t help but cringe as the 80-foot white oak, which was a selling point for the Martins who bought the home 30 years ago, came tumbling down on their one-story home.

“As soon as the tree fell, after I recovered from the shock, I get on the phone and figured I better call Allstate,” Martin said. “Within just a few minutes, our neighbor Richard Paugh was at the front door with his chainsaw getting ready to go up on the roof to help. The wind was still blowing 70 mph gusts and raining.

Martin figured he couldn’t let Paugh do all the work on the slippery roof by himself, so he called his brother-in-law Keith Lyons, and the two joined Paugh to help remove the heavy tree.

“He immediately came over with his chainsaw, and those two and myself went up on the roof and we started removing the limbs from the inside of our house,” Martin said. “The ones that had penetrated the roof, we tried to take the big pieces off to reduce the weight on the house and keep it from being crushed further.

“While we were up there, other neighbors were standing in the street saying that we were insane.”

The next thing he knows, Richard Perdue, another neighbor, is making his way up the ladder to help the three remove pieces from the roof and onto the ground.

As the hurricane left the area, many experienced the powerful back end of the storm that produced extremely strong wind gusts. Martin and his crew of good samaritans were no different.

“We had to repeatedly grab on to each other to keep from blowing off the roof,” Martin said, adding they put tarps on the roof to keep rain from getting inside the house and ruining its interior. “It got real spooky a couple times. It was pretty hairy, and I’ve seen some pretty hairy things back in Vietnam in the 60s. These guys were brave.”

Two neighbors, Bobby and Shirley Ferguson, were getting the pieces that were thrown off the roof and were rolling them to the curb.

As the storm began to weaken and the four on the roof began to talk, Martin came to a realization — all of the people involved in helping save his home from major damage were military members.

“Everybody was a veteran that was on the roof, and also Bobby and Shirley,” Martin said.

The Army, the Navy, the Marines, and the Air Force were all represented.

“It still gets to me,” Martin said, choking back tears. “That says a lot to me, and that says a lot for our neighbors. We’ve helped each other out through the years.

“I really don’t know what we would have done. Without those guys, we would have lost a lot of what we would have had in our house, including our hardwood floors.”

Hurricane Matthew may have caused a lot of damage, but in some pockets of the community, it brought neighbors together for those who needed help the most.

“They just saw somebody who needed help, and no matter what the risk, they just came in and jumped in on it,” Martin said. “I think that’s what America is all about.”

This story was originally published December 23, 2016 at 5:01 AM with the headline "Neighbors pull together to help after Hurricane Matthew | Horry’s Angels."