Michael Passes Through Carolinas, Still Recovering from Hurricane Florence

LUMBERTON, N.C. — At the flood-ruined home of a retired schoolteacher, Shirley King, a group of volunteers spent Thursday morning pulling out floors wrecked by Hurricane Florence. The volunteers had been here a couple years earlier, helping to rebuild King’s home after Hurricane Matthew.

As noon approached, a hard rain picked up. Tropical Storm Michael had arrived.

They are getting all too good at this in the Carolinas. Generators. Rain boots. Power losses in the thousands. Detours to avoid tree-blocked roads. Canned goods, bottled water, batteries — might as well open what wasn’t used for the last storm.

After a ferocious wallop of the Florida Panhandle, the tropical storm that was once Hurricane Michael slogged through the Carolinas on Thursday, states that have had a lifetime’s worth of bad weather in the past few years. Disastrous floods swamped South Carolina in 2015, then Matthew hit in 2016, then Florence in September, now this.

“I know that North Carolinians have been through a tough time,” Gov. Roy Cooper said in a news conference. “But we’ll get through this, and tomorrow when the skies clear and the winds die down, we can get back to the job of rebuilding and recovery in our state.”

Michael took a very different track through the Carolinas; it headed up through the west-central parts of the states, drenching midstate cities and mountain towns while largely sparing the eastern stretches that were inundated a month ago.

Officials in places like Wilmington, North Carolina, which lost power for days after Florence, are using terms like “inconvenience” to describe the potential effects of Michael. Officials in the Appalachian counties are bracing for problems they had expected but largely dodged during Florence.

A man in western North Carolina died Thursday when a tree fell on his car just before 1 p.m., officials said. Nearly 400,000 people were without power by Thursday afternoon, Cooper said, and the number of roads closed by Matthew — nearly 120, most of them in the west — had overtaken the number of roads still closed by Florence. There had been dozens of rescues and evacuations, the governor said.

In the tiny central North Carolina town of Lobelia, Michelle Gagnon, and her boyfriend have had to improvise on living arrangements in the weeks since Florence. Their home was among dozens that were flooded there and now have so much mold, residents are forced to live on their front porches amid swarms of mosquitoes.

Gagnon, 29, a server at a burrito chain, blamed climate change for the destructive storms of the recent years.

“The county and state can sweep it under the rug,” she said. “But it’s only going to get worse. This is going to continue. And I think you just don’t realize what it’s like when it doesn’t happen to you.”

“You won’t know what it’s like to walk through the house that you built with everything and then rip it out and watch it all be thrown in the front yard,” she went on, her eyes tearing up. “You cannot build again, when that was your dream. That is the American dream.”

Hurricanes have different personalities. Where Florence was a slow, suffocating steamroller, leisurely drowning small towns and midsize cities with days of torrential rain, Michael is a hit-and-run storm, puffing hard and moving quickly. Rivers in the Carolinas are expected to mostly stay within their banks, or to overflow into areas known to be flood prone. The absence of punishing rainfall is an advantage, but a drenching followed by wind is not an ideal sequence.

“When you get water like we did, the tree roots system is weakened,” said the Rev. Ron Taylor, a pastor in Dillon County, South Carolina, whose teams of chain-saw volunteers had just spent the past three weeks clearing downed trees and were hoping for a break. “The next time you get a big wind, that may be when the tree goes over that didn’t go over in the initial storm.”

Among the concerns were listing trees and dangling branches, especially around power lines. Strong winds are also a worry in places where piles of ruined debris line the streets, the innards of houses that were flooded by Florence.

In a bad wind, a pile can quickly become an arsenal or at least clog storm drains. So far, though, the brunt of the storm has missed the areas with the most flood debris.

Still, recovery efforts will be slow, officials said, as some flood-prone areas that had begun to rebuild now have to wait for waters to recede again.

“There’s people who had their homes damaged during Florence and now there’s going to be some winds that could further damage their homes and property,” said Mike Sprayberry, director of the North Carolina Emergency Management agency, describing how a 50-mph gust could rip the tarp off a house that was in the midst of repairs, sending rain pouring back inside.

Federal disaster recovery centers set up in the Carolinas after Florence were closed Thursday because of Michael. Schools in many parts of North Carolina have yet to reopen after Florence — close to 90,000 students have been out of school for weeks. As Michael came into the state, there were more than 575 people still in shelters from the last storm and many others who would have likely needed them but are living in hotel rooms paid for with temporary disaster aid.

In an era of climate change, the reality of the last few disasters just means a head start on this one.

“It almost just feels like another day at the office now,” said Harrison Cahill, the spokesman for Lexington County, South Carolina, talking of a neighborhood with flooded homes in the county. He knew the homes firsthand, having visited in his previous job as a newspaper reporter, when they flooded in 2015.