Floods pass, but stories remain
HURRICANE FLORENCE: ‘WORLD GOES TOPSY-TURVY’ AS CAROLINAS ON US EAST COAST MOP UP
Woman hears loud bump as river comes down street during the night and boat ‘knocks at the front door’.
With rain still falling and no electricity, residents of New Bern, North Carolina are starting to pick up the pieces after devastating flooding caused by hurricane Florence.
At the confluence of the Neuse and Trent rivers, where several hundred people were rescued from flood waters, uniformed national guardsmen tour an area to provide assistance.
“Do you need anything?” one asks.
“Power!” a weary young woman replies.
Clint Hawkins and Jenny Baras accept food and water. They did not imagine living such a “nightmare” when they moved from New York to North Carolina.
“It’s our first hurricane. The wind was quite strong, some branches went down. But we were mainly affected by the flooding. The water started to rise even before the hurricane was here,” Baras said.
She shows photos taken the day before on her phone: “Do you see the red car over there? It was completely covered with water.”
Debris litters the ground around their modest red brick home and neighbours have left wet mattresses and sofas on the sidewalk, but the young couple had time to climb upstairs before the water came.
“We’re now waiting for the power to come back to give it a deep clean,” said Hawkins.
“We can’t really stay in at the moment, the smell is just too bad.”
Sheltered from the rain by the porch of the imposing family home, Laurie Eudy, the fourth generation to occupy the premises, takes time to update her journal. An entry in her neat handwriting reads: “That was an adventure!”
She heard “a loud bump” in the middle of the night when the waters of the Neuse River swept up the street: “I first thought it was a tree, but when I opened the door, I saw a boat knocking at the front of the house.”
Her husband and brother-inlaw donned life jackets to wade into the water and repel it.
The storm surge caused by Hurricane Florence withdrew from New Bern almost as fast as it arrived, and despite the rain that continued on Saturday, lawyer Bill Ward believes the worst is over. –