A hurricane prepared for; a flood that can't be avoided

A week after we completed our hurricane prep, the sky is blue, the yard is raked and the fallen limbs are picked up. City sanitation crews have collected our debris and appear to be back on a normal schedule.

Getting the deck furniture, the bird feeders, the wind chimes, the whirligigs and all the rest put away or lashed down was easier this time, the first hurricane since we both were retired. Two can do more than one. I made a quick (but crowded) run to the supermarket for non-perishable food, and we ate well last week as we finished off food from the freezer. We froze water bottles, repurposed juice jars, and food storage bags filled with water. They were never needed.

In 1996 (Fran) and 1999 (Floyd), we had lost hundreds of dollars worth of food when we were without power for more than a week each time. From Fran's devastation and the difficulty of cooking our own food and taking showers, we decided to switch to a natural gas hot water heater and a gas stove. Floyd was more tolerable three years later because we could cook and take showers, even though we had to do it all by battery-powered lights.

Nothing frustrated us more during those '90s hurricanes than being unable to read once the sun went down. A friend offered us a battery-powered lantern that gave off enough light for two people to sit close together and read from the same light source. This year, we invested in book lights — LED lights powered by a watch battery that clip onto a book. I was looking forward to using the book lights, but we never had a need.

The electricity NEVER FAILED. We waited, we worried, we fretted, but the worst never happened. We never lost power, no trees fell on our home. We could see flooded streets a block or more away, but floodwaters never reached our property. We feel incredibly blessed to get through this first major storm this year with so little damage or inconvenience.

Over the weekend, we unhitched the deck furniture and put the pieces in their places; we rehung the bird feeders, and we removed the collection of flashlights and battery-powered lanterns from the kitchen counter.

We're back to normal, but we're mindful of the thousands of others, not so far away, who are dealing with felled trees, loss of power, and flooded homes. We hope and pray that they will recover soon and that government agencies, nonprofits and individual donors will be sufficient to allow them to recover and be happy again.

Each time a hurricane strikes, some will warn that the weather is getting worse because of climate change resulting from human activities, such as burning fossil fuels. I don't know enough about it to blame fossil fuels for these hurricanes, but I can confidently see that man-made activities are causing increased flooding. Just look at the acres and acres of paved blacktop that we have added to our world in the past decade. While older shopping centers sit empty, newer, bigger shopping centers with even more blacktop parking areas are built.

The rain falls on the just and the unjust, the Bible says, but all of the rain that falls has to go somewhere, and all of the rain that falls on blacktop parking areas and on multi-lane highways runs off the blacktop, ultimately reaching small streams that feed mighty rivers. Waterways that could handle the runoff 20 years ago cannot handle the vastly increased runoff of today. The stream beds and creek banks that used to channel the water away can't handle the increased volume.

You don't need a degree in environmental science to see this happening, and to see that we need to find new strategies for reducing runoff before it ends up in somebody's home.

 

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.