tigersaintsfan

I live in Gatlinburg and have been following the different threads here. I have been a longtime lurker but never had anything to post about until now. I would like to thank everyone who has shown concern for our community. My family evacuated around 9:30 that night and our house and neighborhood was untouched as we live near the high school. We right now stand at 1684 homes and businesses destroyed. We have a little over 150 kids at school who are homeless. The last that they told us anything about the missing was Thursday and it was 70 missing. They have started to let us locals in town and plan on opening up Wednesday which is crazy. The whole town smells horrible and the post office opened and I went in there today and the smell inside was unbearable. There is no way that stores are going to be able to open as everything inside has to smell like smoke and can't be sold. Here is a little understanding as to what happened and things I disagree with.


We have fires almost on a yearly basis in the mountains. We have wind storms like that. The drought was a major problem as we had no rain for seven weeks. Most of the fires here were actually started by power lines going down and the embers from that spreading. Not from the park as most are lead to believe. I believe local officials did a great job considering what was happening. The first fire broke out and in minutes they were popping up all over the place. Ski Mountain was hit the hardest and if you have never been here it takes 20 to 30 minutes to get up the mountain to that area. There are lots of little roads up there and trees were falling down everywhere. There was no time for police to go door to door up there as they couldn't even reach most parts. The areas around town they were going door to door and blasting over loud speakers. A friend of mine that is a police officer told me that people were holding them up as they were refusing to leave and they had to physically remove people from their homes. Most of us found out by the cops driving through neighborhoods as we were without power in most of the city so we had no tv or internet. Also some found out through facebook but many had lost cell coverage as I always have coverage at my house but it went down that night.


One of the things that has gotten lost in all of this is the remarkable job the fire departments around here did. In a 10sq mile radius they told us that 5sq miles of it was on fire. By midmorning the next day they had almost all of it out and what was still burning was under control. They have not got the attention that they deserve. It was a miracle that they put it out like they did. The made their stand at the elementary school and it was decided that if the strip caught on fire they would have to let it all burn down as they learned years back when we lost a section of the strip to a fire.


The issue I don't get is that they did search and rescue for a couple of days by putting eyes on properties and then they were going to start a process of going back and looking for forensic evidence since lots are missing. But the day they started that they let everyone back in town. People are going everywhere to check things out and construction has already started and clean up. How are you going to find the remains if backhoes are flooding into town. One of the bodies they missed and people sitting at home discovered it. A reporter was on Wiley Oakley and walking down the road doing a live report on facebook and people started typing in as she walked by it and didn't know what she was walking by.


We take care of each other here and everything was fine until Red Cross showed up. It has been nothing but a fight between them and locals. They showed up and took over the big shelter at Rocky Top and confiscated everything and started shipping supplies out of town. They quit taking donations and all they wanted was money. We have set up a huge local distribution center in PF and everything there is being distributed to local. The Red Cross then went out by the interstate and took over the welcome center there to try to catch people bringing in supplies to town not knowing where to send them and snatching them up and immediately putting the stuff on trucks and heading out of town on 40 west. The only thing we can do is alert people on social media to avoid Red Cross and where to send donations. Between that and the scam artists that are coming here it is a mess right now. We will rebuild and the mountains will be as beautiful as always. The trees are still standing as the underbrush was what burned. Those who posted about coming back up here on vacation thank you. It was mostly residential that was hit so all the things to do around here and see you still can.