North Myrtle Beach officials address Hurricane Matthew damage

NORTH MYRTLE BEACH — In its wake, Hurricane Matthew left a beautiful Sunday autumn morning in much of the South Carolina coast, where officials in the hard-hit coastal town of North Myrtle Beach spent the day assessing and addressing damage.

Firefighters in the Cherry Grove community received a report of a blaze as the backside of the storm battered the area, a fire that soon claimed two condominium units, three and four stories tall, as well as three single family homes.

Pounding winds forced officials to hold off on an immediate response, said Jay Fernandez, director of public safety for North Myrtle Beach, though one family who remained in a beachside condo was safely evacuated and no injuries were reported.

On Sunday morning, firefighters continued to douse hot spots at the beachfront condominium, while across North Ocean Boulevard, a backhoe operator moved rubble where the second complex once stood.

The fire started there, and was blown to the beachfront properties, Fernandez said, adding that officials had not started investigating the cause.

A utility pole, still standing but leaning toward the destroyed properties, is one possible culprit.

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Power lines and trees were down throughout the region, and in North Myrtle Beach, police set up checkpoints, restricting access to the community of 14,500. Aside from construction workers and emergency officials, only residents and business owners were permitted inside city limits.

About 70 percent of the roads had been cleared, and officials were trying to prevent a rush of onlookers from visiting, Fernandez said. He said he hoped those restrictions could be lifted later Sunday.

In North Myrtle’s Tillman community, Matthew spun off a small tornado that caused structural damage to homes, twisting some, said Garry Spain, chief of the North Myrtle Beach Fire Department.

All homes in that small community suffered at least minor damage, though none were destroyed.

Much of North Myrtle is without power, and utility workers were first concentrating on restoring downed transmission lines servicing the area.

Officials, Fernandez said, are working as quickly as possible to bring the area back online, and he said he understands frustrations people may have.

“They want to get back and put eyes on their homes, even if it’s seeing the devastation we see here,” Fernandez said, referring to the homes that had caught fire. “They want closure. We are sensitive to that. We started at 1:30 [Sunday morning], we were still having 35 to 40 mile-per-hour winds. We were going in and clearing roads. We had police officers on front end loaders to get trees out of the way, so we could get to the point at daybreak where we could allow residents and business owners to get back in.”

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