‘It’s Back’: Underwater Yet Again, the Carolinas Face a New Reality

GARLAND, N.C. — After Hurricane Matthew stomped into his trailer home and pulped his floors, walls and cabinets two years ago, Bobby Barnes Jr. spent $90,000 to rebuild and protect himself from another flood. He raised the house 2 feet onto brick pilings, bought $1,300 worth of flood fencing and said he complied with every federal recommendation.

But Tuesday morning, his family was underwater again. The Black River, 10 feet above flood stage and still rising, was now a lake that had swallowed farm fields around the Barnes’ house. The water lapped at their front door and sloshed around the newly laid floors.

“It’s back,” Barnes said. “Same nightmare.”

It was the kind of tragic, expensive, depressing rerun that played out across much of the Carolinas this week, not only on the coast, but in inland communities like this one in Sampson County, blessed with tobacco and turkeys, not sea and sand.

Throughout the region, residents like Barnes were struggling to put soggy homes and soggy lives back together yet again, amid palpable anxiety that the Carolinas seem to be confronting a new normal of too many storms, with too much water coming much too often.

In both states, the will, and the assumptions, of residents and officials were being sorely tested.

In inland Kinston, which saw streets go underwater in 2016 during Matthew and again last week, Tony Sears, the city manager, had accepted the fact this was hurricane country. “Typically you think Louisiana, Miami, somewhere a little south,” he said.

Sears and many others here are well aware that hurricanes have long been a fact of life in North and South Carolina, with nearly 500 miles of coastline between them. But the last four years have been particularly punishing. An unnamed weather system that drew moisture from a hurricane in the Atlantic paralyzed much of South Carolina in 2015. Hurricane Matthew arrived the next year, drenching the Carolinas and leaving dozens dead. And now, Florence, which has dropped more than 8 trillion gallons of rain on North Carolina alone.

“The tropical systems that have affected us recently have not been wind events. They’ve been rainfall events producing inland flooding,” said Susan Cutter, a geography professor at the University of South Carolina and director of its Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute. “This is something that these areas may have experienced, but not with the constancy that we see now.”

Acknowledging the constancy, and planning for it, has been a theme this week for Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, who has been touring some of his state’s hardest-hit areas.

“When you have two 500-year floods within two years of each other, it’s pretty clear it’s not a 500-year flood,” the governor said at a news conference this week. “So as we approach recovery, both short-term and long-term, we will have to look at flooded property, work on mitigation and buyouts, and being smart about how we recover and make sure that we’re involving local, state and federal officials.” But buyouts could prove tricky in rural communities where families have deep ties to the land. On Tuesday, Barnes, 42, and his wife, Brandy, 41, sat parked on what was now the water’s edge of Lisbon Bridge Road in Garland County, some 60 miles inland from where Hurricane Florence had slugged ashore four days earlier.

They had lived in the house, just across the field from Barnes’ father, since 1996 and had never flooded out until Matthew. Barnes didn’t think twice about rebuilding after the 2016 storm, even though he said his flood insurance only covered about $25,000 of the damage. He paid out of pocket to get county approvals to raise the house and even put on an addition.

Barnes said he was denied a low-interest construction loan through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, so he borrowed money and drained the savings his family had built up after several good years running a local repair business.

“I replaced everything,” Barnes said.

Now, as he looked out at the waters and talked about boating home to check on the house, he said they did not know what to do.

Raising the house yet again would cost thousands. They had raised a son and a daughter there and did not want to leave. Their 16-year-old son, Mason, had been killed in a car crash just before Matthew. When the family had to flee again this month, the first thing their 11-year-old daughter asked her mother was: When can we go back?

“She needs a place,” Brandy Barnes said.

“We’ll probably try to go out and try one more time,” Bobby Barnes said. “You can’t relocate. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”

While there is some research suggesting that small storms may become less frequent because of climate change, there is also widespread consensus among scientists that the most powerful storms — those with the kind of extreme rainfall brought to the Carolinas by Florence — are already becoming more common, said Kerry Emanuel, a professor of environmental science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

What’s more, Emanuel said, there is evidence that the occurrence of powerful storms is particularly likely to increase in places on the margins of the tropics — “like the Carolinas.”

The states are among the fastest-growing in the country, and in each of them, Republican-dominated legislatures have been accused of prioritizing business and growth over efforts to limit the consequences of climate change. Beginning in 2012, North Carolina lawmakers took actions that forced state and local agencies that make policy on the coast to ignore models that predict rising sea levels. Earlier this year, the South Carolina Legislature changed the preamble to a 30-year-old law governing beachfront development, striking out a state policy of “retreat” from the shoreline in the face of erosion and replacing it with a policy of “preservation” of the beaches. It was a small change, but a sign of the state’s approach, said Josh Eagle, who teaches environmental law at the University of South Carolina law school.

“The philosophy is one of, ‘We can beat nature,'” he said. “The driving forces are property rights and climate denial.”

People are moving to the Carolinas by the tens of thousands, and to coastal areas in particular, many of them starting businesses in places that would be right in a hurricane’s path. Extreme storms like Florence might jeopardize that growth, but then again, so would aggressive measures to protect against those storms, said Robert Hartwig, the director of the Risk and Uncertainty Management Center at the University of South Carolina.

“Are city planners — and the states and counties — are they zoning in a way to reflect the new reality?” Hartwig asked. “The answer to that is, generally speaking, no. Most local officials are going to be loath to kill the goose that lays the golden economic egg.”

Still, a number of local governments have been forced to acknowledge that the flood risks are real. After experiencing some of the worst flooding in its history in 1995 and 1997, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, home to Charlotte, began regulating all development with an eye to what the “anticipated ultimate development would look like” in the region, said Dave Canaan, the county’s stormwater services director.

Growth and development, Canaan said, remains a priority in a place like Charlotte, the largest city in the Carolinas. But at the same time, the county has run a rolling and aggressive buyback program that has moved roughly 700 families and 450 structures out of the county’s floodplains. “This is not supposed to be where big box stores are, or homes upon homes upon homes are supposed to be,” he said, “but just to be open space, where our streams are meant to meander back and forth.”

In Kinston, a working-class city of 21,000, the buyout program that started after the last hurricane was not even finished by the time Hurricane Florence arrived last week.

But the mindset seemed to have fully changed. Local officials used to regard hurricane response as something akin to major snow removal: sporadic events that therefore warranted relatively little investment.

“Two years of these types of storms have really made us look internally at our own preparation,” Sears said. “Now that we have a better understanding of where people may be at risk, we can better stage assets in that area.”

“Matthew got me once, Florence got me twice,” Sears said Tuesday, recounting what he told the City Council this week. “The next hurricane won’t get me.”

Closer to the coast, in Conway, South Carolina, a few miles northwest of Myrtle Beach, the weariness with the cycle of worry, flood, repeat was palpable.

“I grew up here,” said Matt Bruton, 34, a moving and storage business operator, who was hanging out Tuesday in his single-story brick home in Old Sherwood Country Club, an eclectic neighborhood of old and new houses north of the Waccamaw River.

The waters had already risen through neighboring Crabtree Swamp to a level higher than residents had ever seen. “We had a record flood during Floyd in ’99, and it wasn’t this high,” Bruton said. “The hundred-year flood they called it the last time, and here we are again. I’d like to put my house in a different, higher place, but I call this the best neighborhood in Conway. We’re all friends here.”