Ten years after the Flood

Ten years ago this morning, I awoke from a fitful night, made coffee with water heated on the gas range and watched the remnants of Hurricane Floyd whip the trees surrounding our little brick home. Wisely, the newspaper I worked for had decided (at my urging) to go to press early, before the storm's fury hit. Drinking my coffee in the dark house and watching the storm rage outside, I congratulated myself on our foresight.

Three years before, we had not been so prescient. Hurricane Fran, a bigger, more powerful storm, had lashed the Wilson area throughout the night, and I lay awake, listening to the winds howl and the tree branches crashing against the roof . That morning, I rousted our publisher from his bed, meandered a circuitous route through a labyrinth of fallen trees and utility poles to the office, which was dark and eerie in the September dawn. We had no power. The phones were out. Although we had in front of us what I told the few available reporters was the "story of a lifetime," we had no way of producing the newspaper in Wilson. We managed to contact folks at the Greenville Daily Reflector, who invited us to go there to print our paper. A cobbled-together crew of everyone who could be found or who could get to the office car-pooled to Greenville with our handwritten news stories, our ad slicks and our notes. At the end of an exhausting day, we returned to Wilson late in the afternoon, a skeleton newspaper printed with news of the most devastating natural disaster to hit Wilson since Hurricane Hazel ripped through Oct. 15, 1954.

Three years later, in the aftermath of Floyd, after congratulating myself on the decision to go to press before the storm hit, I concluded that the hit from Floyd was not as bad as the hit from Fran. There were not so many trees down — although plenty of trees were lost — and I was able to make it to the office without as much difficulty as three years earlier. Power was out at the newspaper, but it was restored by mid-afternoon. Folks from the Greenville Daily Reflector came to Wilson, and we returned their favor, printing the Greenville paper here.

Reporters contacted their sources, and we began putting together coverage of the storm's impact from Emergency Management folks, the fire department, police and residents. Damage, it appeared, would not be as bad as Fran. But then the water rose.

Floyd arrived soon after a weak but lingering tropical storm had drenched eastern North Carolina. The ground was saturated, and the water began rising after Floyd dumped as much as 20 inches throughout a broad swath of eastern North Carolina. Photographer Keith Barnes snapped the memorable photo of barbecue king Bill Ellis in a small boat, looking like a frightened version of Washington Crossing the Delaware, as he rescued an employee who had been stranded in his restaurant when flood waters swirled around him. In the background, the roof of Bill Ellis Barbecue is barely above the floodwaters. The little valley where the restaurant stands had become a lake comprising hundreds of acres along Forest Hills Road between Tarboro Street and U.S. 301. Homes and businesses near creeks were flooded up to 6 feet deep, or even more. On Sunday afternoon, after the waters had receded, I visited a house on Park Street, where residents were carefully peeling soggy family pictures from a photo album in a living room where the water mark was about 4 feet up the wall.

Three years earlier, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had provided grants to the city for police and fire overtime, for replacing utility poles that had been blown over and for cleaning up the hundreds of tons of debris blown about by the winds. After Floyd, FEMA provided grants for buying flooded houses and demolishing them, leaving vacant lots along streets near creeks that are barely a ripple now but were gushing torrents 10 years ago today. Interstate 95 and Interstate 40 were both submerged following the storm. Large portions of Rocky Mount, Tarboro and Greenville were under water. All of Princeville disappeared under the flood. Thousands of homes were flooded and bought by FEMA. Fifty-two people died. It was a storm of if not biblical proportions, then certainly big enough to be a once-in-a-lifetime event. Let's hope so.

I still get an uneasy feeling when I hear the wind blow and see trees sway or when the rain pounds on the roof the way it did 10 years ago. The memories remain fresh, despite a decade's passing. I'm still proud that the news operation I directed never missed a day of publication and put forth a gargantuan effort to provide readers detailed information they needed. Of all the news I covered in a 33-year newspaper career, none was more important, more exhausting or more difficult than two hurricanes, three years apart, each beginning with the letter F.