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An aerial picture shows an Interstate 95 exit sign submerged in floodwater caused by Hurricane Florence in Lumberton, North Carolina. Photograph: Jason Miczek/Reuters

Hell and high water: Florence turned familiar haunts into an alien expanse

This article is more than 5 years old
An aerial picture shows an Interstate 95 exit sign submerged in floodwater caused by Hurricane Florence in Lumberton, North Carolina. Photograph: Jason Miczek/Reuters

As residents grapple with the hurricane’s devastation, they brace for the future: ‘They’re not 500-year events any more’

by Michael Graff in Charlotte, North Carolina

In the coastal shrimping town of Georgetown, South Carolina, only a few people even lost power. It’s here, though, that we’ll start, because it’s here that the Pee Dee river meets the Waccamaw and both flush into the Atlantic Ocean. Follow the Pee Dee north into central North Carolina, and it’s fed by the Rocky river, which is fed by Richardson creek, which on Sunday night was fed way too much rainwater. It’s near there, on a two-lane road that cuts through soybean fields, that a mother’s Hyundai Elantra was swept away by floodwaters from Hurricane Florence late on Sunday night.

When the car settled against a tree, she reached over and unhooked her 14-month-old son and held him in her arms. But as she got out, she lost a grip on him, and Richardson creek, this small tributary hundreds of miles from the ocean, claimed one of Hurricane Florence’s youngest victims, a little boy named Kaiden Lee-Welch who, in a devastating photo later provided by the local sheriff’s office, wears a onesie that reads “Handsome Little Guy”.

I’ve lived in North Carolina for half of my 38 years, and I can’t remember a heavier couple of weeks. Florence’s numbers alone are astounding: 37 people have died, more than 30in of rain fell, the Cape Fear river crested at more than 60ft, and 5,500 hogs and 3.4 million chickens drowned on farms, many of their limp bodies making their way downriver.

Kaiden Lee-Welch. Photograph: AP

I’ve driven all over the southern strip of the state in the past 10 days, back and forth between Charlotte and the coast for various reasons. On Monday, a three-and-a-half-hour drive to the coast took six hours. In rural, poor areas of Robeson county, people in towns like Fairmont burned debris as they waited for their turn on the river-cresting schedule, hoping it wouldn’t happen again.

The way Florence hung out and spun over us for five days, snapping longleaf pine trees in half near the coast, sending the Pungo river into homes in Belhaven, causing people to post updates from Harkers Island begging for it to end, pouring half a year’s worth of rain over the course of a weekend – all just two years after Hurricane Matthew – it all makes me think we should stop naming hurricanes. We should stop giving them personalities, as if they’re just old college friends who haven’t grown up but still visit and act a fool, leaving you to say: “Oh, that’s just Flo being Flo. What can you do? I guess we’ll just clean up now.”

Storms aren’t infrequent visitors any more. Their stays seem only to grow longer.

I stopped at a high-water spot near Sunny Point, a vast military terminal south of Wilmington where the government transfers weapons and munitions between boats and trains and trucks. Sunny Point got 27.44in of rain in the storm, which would be a state record if other towns hadn’t received more.

Two sheriff’s deputies were on one side of the water and two deputies were on the other, a few hundred yards away. They were here simply to advise people. Big trucks could make it, if they took the right line. But small cars would stall. A man in a car pulled up and waited, hoping the water would drop. He’d left work at the nearby nuclear power plant, where he’d been stranded for six days. Water lines to the plant were broken, and truckloads of potable water had been brought in to keep the place stable. Most workers slept in cots; this man slept in a chair, he says. Finally, on Tuesday, other employees arrived by ferry, and he was able to leave. He didn’t want to be named; he just wanted to get home. Deputies helped him map out a route around the water, a 15-minute drive now more than an hour.

“Brunswick county is essentially three islands,” the county commissioner, Frank Williams, said from Leland, a town mostly under water not far from where we stood. That’s where I was trying to go. Instead I talked with the deputies for an hour, watching big trucks push water up to their grills, and decided that in my smaller truck, it wasn’t worth it. I turned around.

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Millions of years ago, the North Carolina shoreline was actually set against the Uwharrie Mountains, about 150 miles inland. But as the ocean receded, it left the Sandhills region and the coastal plain.

You probably have favorite places, too. North Carolina’s coastal plain has been one of mine since I moved here nearly 20 years ago. The working waterfronts remind me of the towns back home in Maryland, where my father was a Chesapeake Bay fisherman. The people here cuss like he cussed, they shower at the end of the day because you just don’t go to bed smelling like fish, and for the most part nobody has a lot of money, so they all get along.

A few years ago, I was out on a boat on Bogue Sound with a person who knows as much about the coast as anyone. Todd Miller is the founder and executive director of the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which works to maintain the health of the state’s 12,000 miles of estuarian shoreline. Miller’s team has restored oyster reefs and helped build “living shorelines”, with natural rocks and plants.

Miller grew up on Bogue Sound and remembers wading out into it with a crab net as a kid. He lives on the sound today, in a town called Ocean. Miller saw the worst of Florence, but his home is about 25ft up on a hill, and the storm surge didn’t make it to him. He was cleaning up on Tuesday when we talked on the phone. He said the sound, which usually smells of saltwater, now was full of freshwater and runoff from upstream.

Coming up with ways to maintain the integrity of that runoff is a big part of the Coastal Federation’s mission. Much is made of climate change in times of hurricanes, and rightfully so, Miller says, but the more immediate issue is a generation of developers who have clustered homes in vulnerable areas.

“We tell people now that you can’t design and plan around normal climate events; you have to plan around extreme,” he said. “They’re happening. They’re not 500-year events any more.”

The Emerald Isle bridge is seen in the distance past the flooded docks in Bogue Sound on 13 September. Photograph: Tom Copeland/AP

“The hardship that folks are facing, it’s pretty awful,” Miller said. “And we have so much more population at risk, living in risky places. Our exposure is a lot higher than it’s ever been as the climate becomes more extreme. More people in harm’s way along with the unpredictable climate is a bad formula.”

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Late Tuesday afternoon, I wound up in a familiar place that had become unfamiliar. Boiling Spring Lakes is a small community built decades ago to house people who work at Sunny Point. Some of its homes are mobile; others are single-story places on fixed foundations, and others are larger and more idealized suburbia, with four or five bedrooms and a garage.

The dam that built the lake that made the community broke on Saturday. The lake emptied into homes downstream. At the end of one street on Tuesday, one mobile home was its own island.

One key road in the community traveled over the dam. I went to that spot, one of hundreds of places on the North Carolina department of transportation’s interactive map marked with a yellow exclamation point to signify it was out.

This was a little different, though. When the dam broke, the pavement fell with it. Now there’s a gap, about 300ft wide and 30ft deep. Where the pavement ends, it’s jagged like a razor.

I sat there awhile on Tuesday, watching people walk up to the edge, all saying their own versions of “holy shit”. To the south as far as we could see, what had been a lake was now a bed of mud. You could see what people had thrown in over the years, empty pipes and sawed-off stumps.

There were people on the other side of the break in the road, still stranded and cut off. We couldn’t do anything for them but wave. We couldn’t even holler; they wouldn’t have heard us. The sky was blue all around, but down here people were just exhausted and sad and frustrated, folks from the same neighborhood now on different peninsulas.

One person who walked up was Jimmy McKee. He’s the site manager at a nearby historic spot, Brunswick Town. Last week, McKee carried on a tradition that’s pretty important in these parts: he raised the hurricane flags in downtown Southport. From 1900 to 1962, a woman named Jessie Taylor had done it before every storm. Her official title was “voluntary weather observer”, which meant she took the calls from the National Weather Service when they needed to alert the town about a hurricane. Then she’d run out and raise two red and black hurricane flags on a pole. There’s a plaque in her honor in Southport.

Others have carried on the tradition since then. Now it’s McKee. Standing there where the road was no more and the lake was no more and the trees were snapped in half, I asked McKee what he would tell people who aren’t from here and might believe that Florence wasn’t that bad.

The latest voluntary weather observer for the region looked down and said: “I’d just shake my head and say look around. I can’t describe it.”

He’s right. No one person’s perspective could sum up what Florence did. Those same floodwaters from Richardson Creek that drowned a little boy on Sunday night made their way through South Carolina on Wednesday, as the Pee Dee crested and shut down Interstate 95, perhaps the most important highway in the US. The same water that killed farm animals inland changed the complexion of Bogue Sound in front of Todd Miller’s house. The storm isolated us all and showed us how connected we are at same time.

Another guy approached the break in the road and cussed. He told us he’d be on the crew in charge of fixing the pipes in the neighborhood. His bosses asked him to scout the area and see if any were showing around the dam. Sure enough, there were, down in the ravine. He’ll be out here later this week, boots in the mud, trying to make sure they’re all connected again.

“This is gonna fucking suck,” he said. “We’ll do it, though. But you ain’t gonna stop Mama Nature. Hell no.”

Michael Graff is a writer in Charlotte

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