Scenes Across the Carolinas, Where Florence Is Far From Over

ALONG THE CAROLINAS COAST — Two weeks after a storm named Florence barreled into dozens of coastal communities — flooding homes, demolishing buildings, uprooting trees and carving up roads — its wrath and havoc continue, with entire neighborhoods still submerged and streets entirely impassable.

In Socastee, South Carolina, a small town west of Myrtle Beach, many residents over the weekend continued to navigate their neighborhoods by boat, the Waccamaw River having reached a record high before spilling into their community and filling their homes with several more feet of murky, dirty water.

About 80 miles north, in Lumberton, North Carolina, Patricia Fox, 56, a single mother who lost everything in Hurricane Matthew two years ago, once again tallied all she had lost. While her daughter slept inside their four-door sedan, where they are both sleeping these days, she worked silently and alone. Wearing a mask to cover her nose and mouth, she carried their belongings, now stained with mold, and dropped them onto their lawn.

Across the Carolinas, states that have been battered time and again by hurricanes and tropical storms — where this time at least 45 people died, thousands were displaced, more than 1,000 remain in shelters, and damage is expected to surpass several billion dollars — Florence remains far from over.

The late-summer air across the Carolinas crackled with an electric charge of haste and dread.

The sun was still shining on beach bars and crab shacks, but every television was tuned to weather reports about the monster hurricane charging toward them. Its forecast path veered north, then south, as if it could not decide which city to wreck first. The beaches were already deserted, cedar-shake houses locked up and shuttered with plywood over the windows.

Millions of people agonized over whether to stay and risk it, or leave and potentially spend weeks as storm refugees. They left work early to fetch their grandparents from tiny, flood-prone towns. They ran into supermarkets and stripped the shelves of bread, milk and batteries. It was as if the entire state of North Carolina was counting down.

Then the sky went dark. Trees buckled and the pulsing ocean charged ashore. Some people banded together to mock the arriving storm with defiant hurricane parties. Some danced in the rain.

Others, trapped in their cars on flooding roads, stuck in roofless trailer homes, had never been more alone.

The wind screamed and waters started to puddle in neighborhoods. Here it came.

The water just would not stop.

Florence landed Friday, Sept. 14, as a Category 1 hurricane, and crawled inland as slowly as 3 mph, dumping an estimated 8 trillion gallons of rain on North Carolina. Storm surge pushed rivers into historic downtowns, subdivisions and apartment complexes. People scrambled onto their roofs and into boats and helicopters.

On the roads, drivers pulled into empty gas stations just to escape the relentless drum roll on their roofs. At home, they watched the water creep like a burglar up their steps and through their front doors. The state became a constellation of islands, each city cut off from the other by downed power lines, felled trees and drowned roads. Fatigue and desperation burbled up as people searched vainly for food, gasoline and power when nearly every storefront was dark.

People like Juleon H. Dove, in New Bern, North Carolina, who took shelter on the second floor of his family’s mortuary business, listening as the water rushed in below and watching from windows as it slowly engulfed nearby homes. Or Thierry Sullivan, in Chocowinity, North Carolina, who used his phone to film streets that had become unrecognizable, the “whole town” under water, he said in one video he posted on Facebook.

There were of course cities that dodged the worst, and people there celebrated in the drizzle and toasted the Waffle House and other open restaurants whose windows glowed like beacons.

But the names of other cities became synonymous with Florence’s waterlogged destruction: Wilmington; Lumberton; Jacksonville; New Bern.

When the rain finally stopped, people crept out of the cocoon of their homes to see the shredded, soaked landscape that was their new reality.

Power lines and 30-foot trees covered the roads. Neighbors’ roofs were caved in. Lawns were covered in trash and branches. Convoys of National Guard trucks rumbled through town and boaters plied the streets. Some people cried as they surveyed the damage. Others numbly sloshed through their homes and started sweeping out water.

In Wilmington, North Carolina, Maikke Brandis, 33, a bar owner who chose to ride out the storm, said so many trees were destroyed that it would take years to rebuild the city’s canopy. About 15 miles north, in Hampstead, North Carolina, Joey Canady, 54, a Baptist pastor who did not evacuate so that he could care for his aging parents, walked somberly but determinedly through the flooded Hampstead Baptist Church, ready to rebuild.

Still, as people vowed to bounce back, anxious questions hovered over every choice they made, like a new storm gathering force at sea. Would rebuilding wreck them financially? Was it wise to stay in the same house — even the same town — that had now been devastated by two powerful hurricanes in two years? Would governments in the Carolinas confront climate change now, or enact policies to limit development in areas torn apart again and again by floods?

Those questions remain — and will for many more months and years.

First, though, without any answers, they grabbed brooms and mops, chain saws and crowbars. They had to get to work.