Hurricane Matthew Recovery Continues in Hard Hit Eastern North Carolina

With the destruction caused by Hurricane Matthew still weighing heavily on some communities in eastern North Carolina, authorities in the region are working to get displaced residents back into homes and to repair damaged infrastructure.

The consequences of the storm varied widely between towns and neighborhoods. And while some local officials contacted last week and Monday said their jurisdictions are moving swiftly towards a full recovery, others anticipate the process stretching well into next year.

“Eighty percent of the community, life’s back to normal,” said Scott Stevens, city manager in Goldsboro. “For the other 20 percent, it isn’t going to be normal for them for another six to nine months.” He added: “There’s still a long way to go.”

In Matthew’s wake, the Neuse River crested at about 29 feet on Oct. 12 near Goldsboro—roughly 11 feet above its flood level. Stevens said Friday 396 homes in the city of about 35,800 residents had been temporarily condemned due to flooding and storm damage.

Between 8 and 15 inches of rain associated with Hurricane Matthew fell on parts of eastern North Carolina during a 24-hour period over the weekend of Oct. 8 and 9. Matthew has been blamed for 27 deaths in the state, according to Gov. Pat McCrory’s office. At the storm’s peak, there were about 800,000 power outages. Over 2,300 water rescues were reported. And, last Wednesday, more than 500 roads remained closed due to damage or flooding from the hurricane.

“If you haven’t experienced this,” Stevens said. “I don’t think you can really understand it.”

The storm affected areas in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina as well. Outside of the U.S., it devastated Haiti, where the death toll from the storm reached 1,000 earlier this month.

Lumberton is located about 90 miles southwest of Goldsboro, off Interstate 95.

“The water was higher than I-95 overpasses,” Mayor Bruce Davis said Friday, as he described the flooding Matthew caused there earlier this month. “It’s hard to wrap your head around.”

Davis said neighborhoods in western and southern parts of the city were worst affected by flooding.

He estimated that about 5,000 people in and around Lumberton had been displaced.

The city has about 21,600 residents.

“We’re now dealing with getting people back on their feet,” Davis said, “trying to get them out of shelters and into some sort of housing so they can continue their lives.”

Complicating the recovery in Lumberton: Storm damage knocked the city’s municipal water plant offline. To help get water flowing into residents’ taps again, the state deployed portable water treatment equipment to the city and surrounding Robeson County provided water from its system.

Davis expects the city plant to be running normally again in less than a month.

He expressed gratitude for volunteers and donors from inside and outside the state. “It’s an emotional thing when you think that somebody would drive 300 miles with his farm truck to bring my town a load of water,” he said.

At Sandy Grove Baptist Church, in Lumberton, an employee who gave her name as Linda said Friday that about 8,500 people had gone through lines there to get meals and other items. “We’ve been giving out a lot of water, food, clothing,” she said.

The outreach, she added, had happened outside the church in its parking lot. The church itself flooded with about six feet of water in the basement and was off limits for regular use.

Early this week, it was still hard to quantify all of the harm Hurricane Matthew caused in North Carolina.

A spokesperson for the state’s Department of Public Safety said Monday that assessments were underway and that it was not yet possible to offer estimates for the number of damaged homes and businesses in the state, or the number of residents who had been displaced.

Also unclear is the storm’s full financial impact. McCrory said at a press conference Monday it was still too early to provide figures for costs and lost revenues.

Davis, the Lumberton mayor, praised the assistance the state had provided so far to his community. “People need to give our governor credit for what he’s done,” he said.

“Understand that he’s a Republican and I’m a Democrat,” Davis added. “But listen, when it comes to helping people, in my personal opinion, there is no political affiliation.”

McCrory is currently in a competitive race for re-election.

The governor’s office said Tuesday that 35 counties had been approved for federal aid programs. Over 1,000 FEMA representatives were in North Carolina on Monday assisting with storm recovery, McCrory’s office also said.

Tony Sears, city manager in Kinston, North Carolina, said going through Hurricane Floyd, which hit the state in 1999, made the blow from Matthew softer than it might have otherwise been.

“It prepared eastern North Carolina for this,” he said Friday.

Sears explained that it’s difficult to even compare the damage from the two storms in Kinston, because after Floyd many city residents living in flood-prone areas took federal buyouts for their homes and moved to less hazardous areas.

The Goldsboro city manager, Stevens, said he’s hoping residents there will take similar buyouts.

“The flooding that occurred here,” he said, “will happen again.” But Stevens acknowledged that “there are folks who’ve been in these homes for 50 years” and that “some won’t want to leave.”

Goldsboro is not an especially affluent city. The median household income there is about $35,000, roughly $11,600 less than the state figure, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Stevens noted that lower income residents tend to be more vulnerable to flooding.

“At least in eastern North Carolina,” he said, “the poorer neighborhoods were built in floodplains.”