September 11, 2018
Dear Sea Pines Property Owners,
I hope this letter finds you well. With the events of the last couple of days, I find myself writing my fourth draft of this letter to you. My first draft was to remind you of our scheduled Road Reconstruction Project for Greenwood Drive which we hope to start next week. With the advent of Hurricane Florence, I changed my letter over the weekend to discuss the storm and what might be coming our way. Then yesterday afternoon, Governor McMaster issued a mandatory hurricane evacuation notice for Beaufort County. This created several changes to our plans as we prepared to evacuate. I changed my letter again to talk about the evacuation, our service changes and how you can stay informed about Sea Pines.
All along we have been sending out our communication updates with information from various agencies regarding Hurricane Florence. Our update late this morning communicated the Governor’s latest order in which he rescinded the mandatory evacuation, that was to go into effect today at 12 noon. To reiterate, Beaufort County is not under a mandatory evacuation at this time.
The storm track continues to fluctuate, as such, we will continue to monitor the storm and make decisions on future operational status as additional information becomes available, so for now you are getting this letter. Things change fast this time of year!
As of right now, we are planning to be back to normal operations beginning tomorrow morning Wednesday 9/12/18, if this changes we will let you know. What will happen later this week and into next week is unknown, so we will keep multiple options open. One of those options, subject to weather conditions, is to start our previously planned road reconstruction project on Greenwood Drive next week. We are meeting with our contractor this Thursday and if the weather holds I will send you my first drafted letter on the Greenwood Drive project. In the meantime, you can view the video from our community meeting on the Greenwood Drive project by
clicking here
.
As of yesterday and through late this morning we were prepared to pull our operations team and implement our evacuation plan for the Sea Pines Community in its entirety. We had already begun moving equipment and sending some staff to our evacuation safe zones to set up emergency operations and communications. We were hoping for the rescission of the evacuation order. Fortunately, we got what we were hoping for. As we all know, things change quickly here in the low country, so stay prepared, we will also be on the ready. If you have already left the island and can stay away for a few days, I encourage you to do so. If you have to return, we will be here until told to leave by the Governor.
I want to take this opportunity to personally thank our Sea Pines CSA team. As always they have been at the ready, flexible and committed to Sea Pines. I know many of you have also expressed your thanks and I want to thank you for that.
I hope to send a good weather letter with notice of our upcoming Greenwood Drive project moving forward before the end of the week! Until then stay safe and continue to monitor the storm.
Thank you for your courtesy, flexibility, and ready response!
Bret
Bret Martin
Sea Pines CSA President