The 500 Year Flood

It was September 16, 1999 a day I will never forget. Hurricane Floyd was approaching the North Carolina coastline with an eye on hitting our coast. Just a few weeks earlier we had soaking rain from Tropical Storm Dennis which did not help anything at all. Hurricane Floyd was a category 5 as it churned out in the coastal waters.

My husband who was in the National Guard at the time, was called to active duty. He felt that due to him not being there and living in a mobile home that it would probably be best to go stay with my parents in an adjacent town. So with all my valuable memories things that cannot be replaced and my puppy, I headed to Kinston to stay with my parents during this hurricane. I arrived the night before the hurricane was to hit. The hurricane hit during the midnight hours which I always hate as I don't like storms when I cannot see clearly what is happening. Luckily I am a sound sleeper so I did not awake until approx. 5am that morning. I went into the living room where my dad was watching the weather on a battery powered television since the lights were already out.

We watched as the hurricane became stronger and stronger. The 20 foot pine trees swayed as the wind blew. My mom had been well prepared for the hurricane stocking the house with plenty of nonperishable foods and a lot of snacks. My parents do not smoke and I do smoke so smoking was to be done outside under the car porch. Luckily the direction of the wind the brick wall shielded me allowing me to go outside to smoke. At one point during that morning, I was getting ready to step outside to smoke a cigarrette while the hurricane was continuing when all of the sudden I stopped by the kitchen table and decided to take a cookie first.

All of the sudden I heard the most roaring and loud noise I had ever heard. I could not make out what the sound was until I heard the huge thump that the item made. Looking out the kitchen window there right there on the carporch was one of my parents huge pine trees. The sound I heard was the tree cracking at the root. I was so scared as I realized that had I not grabbed a cookie, I would have been clobbered by the pine tree and most likely seriously injured. I was very grateful to that cookie for enticing me to pick it up and eating it instead of going outside to smoke.

After the hurricane was over, we went outside to survey the damage to my parent's house. Luckily there was not much damage other then the meter box was ripped off the side of the house and some shingles were gone due to the tree hitting the carporch. We knew the biggest challenge would be removing the tree from the carporch and hauling off the tree.

The next morning after the storm had left was a beautiful hot day. One would have never known that there had been a hurricane previously the next day. However, a glance at the houses and rivers showed a different story. My parents had a creek on one end of the road and a little further on the other end was the Neuse River. My dad's worst fear was beginning to happen. The rivers and creeks were reaching their banks and spilling over. We went for a drive to see that the river was already covering the road to the point there was no crossing it and the same applied to the creek on the other side. We were essentially trapped on a small stretch of about a half of a mile highway in front of my parent's house.

Nothing more we could do except to make the best of it. However with no electricity there was no way to cook food or take a hot shower or anything else we always take for granted. My parents next door neighbor had a generator which he graciously sent a long drop cord to our house where we could plug in a fan and the television. The graphics on the television portrayed absolute devastation. People's homes were under water. People were on roof tops begging to be saved. Parts of my town were literally islands with no way on or off except by boat.

The next day we spent with a saw cutting up the tree into manageable pieces by then the creek had subsided so that gave us a little extra access to country stores and phones. We carried the pieces to the local drop off area throughout the day. I had my dad stop by the store where I called my work to let them know at the time I could not make it home to come to work.

Approx. 4 days after the hurricane I tried to drive home going through a town I had never been to. My dad got me confused about the directions and I called him at a pay phone. He urged me to forget trying to get home and come back to the house as the river was flooding more and I might get stuck on the wrong side of the river with no way to get back to my parent's house. I hurried back to my parent's house and about 15 minutes after I got there they closed the road I had driven on due to unsafe condition with the road being under rushing water due to the river.

On the sixth day, my husband called saying they had finally let him leave duty and that I should try to come home the next day. My mom had a friend whose husband had driven to my town through a very long route. The normal route was a stretch of highway between Kinston and Greenville however a bridge had been washed out during the hurricane making that road impossible to take home. Our eventual route to get me home was to drive to another town Goldsboro and then take a road there to go to a town called Wilson. then getting on the main road there would eventually bring me back to my hometown. My dad wanting to be sure I made it safely and did not get lost followed me all the way to Goldsboro. Once we got to the road that would take me to Wilson we stopped and he reminded me of the rest of the route to get home safely. Luckily this time the directions were easy enough to not be confused and I was able to make it home.

My husband told me of his escapade with the hurricane. He was out in the frightful winds most of the time trying to rescue the very people he had tried to get to leave before the hurricane. No one in a million years would have thought that the hurricane would have gotten so bad as it lost a lot of strength before hitting land and ended up a Category 3 and since we were a good forty minutes from the coast they all felt it would die down considerably doing minimal damage. Unfortunately with the previous rains of Tropical Storm Dennis and the fact that Hurricane Floyd was a slow mover too much rain was dropped that the ground and rivers could not withstand.

Our town and surrounding towns took years to get back to normal. In 2001 I worked at a government agency that was near one of the rivers that went over it's banks and two years after the hurricane there were still homes ramshackle from the flood waters with signs from the government saying the houses were unsafe to live in. Approximately 50 people died as a direct result of the hurricane however, the biggest loss was the thousands of people that were homeless. I was extremely lucky as our home had gone untouched.