Submerged by Florence, North Carolina’s Rural Towns Fight for Attention

IVANHOE, N.C. — As the rivers trapped them inside their blacked-out town, the dwindling families of Ivanhoe collected rain to drink in plastic pitchers and flushed the toilets with buckets of rust-colored hurricane floodwater.

They salvaged thawing chicken from their broken freezers and cooked it over wood fires. They handed out headlamps at bedtime so their family members could find the bathroom in the bottomless dark. They sweated through the night and wondered how long they — and their little farming town — could bear all this.

It has been a week since Hurricane Florence slugged ashore, and as much of the Carolinas picks its way back home to assess the damage, this town at the confluence of the Black and South rivers was still filling up with water. It is a drain trap for Florence’s record rain and floods, with no power and no roads in or out.

“It’s just families, farmland,” said Thomas Brown, whose home was wrecked. “Small town. Why does it matter if we get flooded?”

North Carolina is freckled with Ivanhoes, little rural towns that have long struggled to hold onto families and chart their economic future far from the state’s banking and tech hubs, or even from reliable cellphone service. Many lost businesses and residents after being pummeled by Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and were limping along before Florence.

Now, with the country’s urgent attention slipping away, people in places like Ivanhoe worry about being washed away unnoticed.

“It’s all been ripped out from under them again,” said Patrick Woodie, president of NC Rural Center in Raleigh.

They worry about being too small and politically insignificant to fight for attention and limited aid. They worry that poor and disabled residents without flood insurance will flee instead of rebuilding. Simple distance is daunting: The closest Home Depot is an 80-mile round trip.

“You’re at the bottom of the county and secondary roads everywhere,” said Damarius Hayes, 29, whose family is rooted in tobacco and blueberry farming. “It’s the last place to get checked out.”

Ivanhoe isn’t quite a town. It is an unincorporated crossroads of a few hundred people with five churches, a post office, a volunteer fire department and blueberry and organic vegetable farms. There are some well-off families, but more live near or below poverty. The median household income in 2010 was just $13,000.

On Tuesday afternoon, Brown had to go see his house again. He nosed his jon boat through Ivanhoe’s currents toward his family’s flooded trailer home.

He had just put on new moss-colored vinyl siding before the storm hit, one of the finishing touches in rebuilding after Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Now, his 11- and 3-year-old daughters’ toys were bobbing in sewage and rust-colored water. The new molding, drywall, tiles and custom, barnlike ceiling he had built by hand were ruined.

A National Guard helicopter whumped overhead. Next door, Carl Schulter decided he had held out long enough. The water was now soaking his rear end when he sat down, so he loaded his boat and puttered for shore. “OK, time to go,” he said.

The low side of Ivanhoe was now a ghostly lake. Waves licked the historic 19th-century Baptist and Presbyterian churches. The greenhouses where Black River Organic Farm grows its tomatoes looked like whales floating belly up. The post office, the fire station, the faded lumber house where a neighbor, long since passed away, used to scold Brown to get himself to church — all submerged.

The high side of town was cut off from the rest of North Carolina by water and destruction. The main road out had been washed away. Lagoons up to 10 feet deep blocked all the other roads.

Every morning, families now assessed their pantries and debated whether to stay or flee on rescue boats or helicopters buzzing the pines.

“They’re running out of supplies, and the water’s still rising,” said John Farrell, deputy task force leader of an Oakland-based rescue crew deployed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Dorothy Goodman, 80, who grew up picking tobacco, called for help after five days without power, air-conditioning or fans left her feeling sick and weak. She was able to get an emergency call for the boats to rescue her. “We’re running out of food,” she said. “It ain’t never been like this.”

This week, rescue helicopters plucked 31 more people from the Snow Hill Baptist Church and flew them to safety and nearby shelters.

One of them was Jeanette Lemke, 66. She was now sleeping on a cot at Union Elementary School in nearby Clinton. There was no power or air-conditioning in the school, and generator-powered fans did little to stir the swampy air inside the gym.

Lemke’s health problems were flaring in the shelter. She said the county had found an oxygen machine for her after she had trouble breathing. But so far, no one had been able to provide her with a walker to replace the one she was forced to leave behind before boarding the helicopter.

The evacuees at the gym said they were anxious to get back. They said they loved Ivanhoe and the way people there helped one another. Charles Lee, 62, half-joked that if he helped one neighbor replace their drywall, others would notice and he would soon be doing the entire town’s.

Returning carries some dread. Elvira Malinek spent days digging channels to try to drain water from her house before she finally gave up and hailed a helicopter. She does not expect to be home for another week and does not know what she will find.

“The disaster just really starts for us now,” she said.