‘Don’t think it will be as bad this year’: North Myrtle Beach preps for Hurricane Dorian
Few houses are boarded up or lined with sand bags in North Myrtle Beach Wednesday ahead of possible impacts from Hurricane Dorian, a Category 2 storm on track to continue north, hugging the East Coast.
Folks bracing for the storm were calmly prepping and in no rush Wednesday morning in the Cherry Grove section of North Myrtle Beach and along marinas on the Intracoastal Waterway.
“I don’t think it will be as bad this year,” said Kelly Atwood, a manager at Captain Archie’s Bar and Grill restaurant on the Intracoastal, comparing the storm to Hurricane Florence in 2018.
The restaurant is having a hurricane party Wednesday night, and will do prep work after, she said. “We still have 24 hours,” Atwood said Wednesday morning.
At the nearby Cherry Grove Marina, formerly known as Anchor Marina, workers were finishing up bringing boats off the waterway. Crews only removed about a dozen, said Jeff Fletcher, yard manager. More than a dozen boats remained in the water.
An overcast day, misty rain started about noon as high tide approached.
Jimmy Phillips and Karen Pratt drove from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to batten down their house boat at the Dock Holidays Marina. The couple stayed on the boat at the marina during Hurricane Matthew in 2016, but they are “not going to go through that again.”
“It was pretty brutal,” Pratt said of Matthew, and she does not think Dorian will be as bad. “We hope everything is here when we come back.”
Crews worked a second day to dismantle rides at the O.D. Pavilion right on the ocean in Cherry Grove. The rides were scheduled to come down since the summer season is over, but the possibility of a storm sped up the process.
“You’ve got $500,000 worth of equipment you don’t want to get washed out,” said Sonny Taylor, manager at S&T Fabrication and Ride Renovations.
A flash flood watch is in effect for the area from 8 p.m. Wednesday to 8 a.m. Friday, the National Weather Service reports. At noon, the storm was moving at 9 mph, with sustained winds at 105 mph. Dorian was east of Jacksonville, Florida, around 2 p.m., the National Hurricane Center reported.
This story was originally published September 4, 2019 at 1:24 PM.
