| Over a period of several weeks, nearly every river basin in the eastern part of the state exceeded 500-year flood levels. |
We have learned that it is an awfully ill wind indeed that blows no one good, and a dark, dark cloud, for true, that doesn’t have some sort of a silver lining.”
Langston Hughes
Ten years ago, Hurricane Floyd left a track of devastation across North Carolina, becoming one of the worst disasters in the state’s history. Today, coastal resource managers can point to the storm’s many silver linings—successful programs and projects that have left a positive legacy.
“We have come up with solutions,” says Chris Crew, state hazard mitigation officer for the North Carolina Division of Emergency Management. “North Carolina is now more disaster resistant.”
These solutions include improved disaster preparedness and response coordination by the state’s coastal managers, the implementation of emergency permits for rebuilding coastal property, buyout programs that are reducing flood impacts, relief grants for fishermen, and improved floodplain mapping that is serving as a national model.
While rebuilding has taken place and managers are better prepared than ever for future storms, Jack Thigpen, extension director for North Carolina Sea Grant, notes that it is the emotional and personal scars left by the storm that have been harder to heal.
The Storm
Mid-September 1999, Floyd made landfall at Cape Fear, North Carolina, as a category 2 hurricane with sustained winds of 110 mph and a storm surge of about 10 feet. It also produced torrential rainfall in eastern North Carolina, adding more rain to an area hit by Hurricane Dennis just two weeks earlier.
The rains caused widespread flooding. Over a period of several weeks, nearly every river basin in the eastern part of the state exceeded 500-year flood levels. In total, Floyd was responsible for 57 fatalities and $6 billion in damage, mostly in North Carolina.
Wind, Waves, and Rain
As a result of Floyd’s wind, waves, and torrential rain, thousands of families lost their homes, water quality suffered from chemical and sewage spills, and millions of farm animals perished. Muddy waters from rivers flowing to the coast resulted in dark sediment plumes in estuarine waters.
The fishing industry suffered extensive damage from the hurricane and floods. Fishing gear, vessels, and shoreside structures supporting both commercial and recreational fishing were damaged and lost. Many of the 7,900 licensed commercial fishermen could not fish for periods ranging from weeks to months.
The storm also caused shoreline erosion and wave damage along the entire North Carolina coast, affecting about 300 miles of shoreline.
Setting the Stage
North Carolina was better prepared than it might have been because Floyd was the last of a series of five storms that hit the state in the 1990s.
“Basically, in order to talk about what we learned in Floyd, we have to go back and set the stage by talking about our response to previous hurricanes,” says David Moye, interim district manager for the Washington regional office in the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources’ Division of Coastal Management.
Before the 1990s, North Carolina had not been hit by a major hurricane since Hurricane Hazel in 1954.
When Hurricanes Bertha and Fran arrived a month apart in 1996, “we didn’t have a framework in place to allow for damage to be repaired on a wholesale level,” Moye explains.
Hurricane Manual
The experiences with the storms before Floyd served as the basis for the creation of the state’s hurricane manual, which came out in July 1999—just over a month before Floyd’s arrival.
“What that did,” Moye says, “was set policy for us for everything from preparedness prior to a storm, to long-range planning pre- and post-hurricane.”
For instance, the manual includes cooperative agreements between the state and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to secure and access funding after a storm.
Emergency Permits
The manual also sets out state procedures for creating “storm permits” that allow property owners to repair or replace shorefront homes and structures, such as docks and revetments. These procedures were codified after Floyd, says Doug Huggett, major permits coordinator for the Division of Coastal Management.
“We did similar emergency permits for the other hurricanes, but we realized after Floyd that what we needed to do was formalize a general permit, which is easier to implement, instead of issuing an emergency proclamation after each storm,” Huggett says.
Response Coordination
Another outcome of Floyd was the establishment of the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources’ Disaster Response Center, which coordinates agency activities and communications, says Kenneth Taylor, chief of the North Carolina Geological Survey.
“We pass our information and analysis of potential and observed disaster impacts to the state Emergency Operations Center,” Taylor says. There, emergency incident management technology is used to sort through reports coming in from many state agencies. That information is shared electronically with federal, state, and local governments.
Department resources, such as boats, planes, and personnel, are made available to respond to a disaster anywhere in the state.
The agency’s Disaster Response Center also utilizes the department-wide geographic information system (GIS) capability to “assist in mapping the potential and observed disaster impacts,” Taylor says. “We can generate a map and share it with everyone.”
Mapping Program
One of the impacts of Floyd was that about 10,000 buildings and homes were destroyed, and about another 7,000 were severely damaged by massive flooding, says Chris Crew. Close to half of these structures were not in areas previously mapped as being in a 100-year—or even a 500-year—flood-hazard area.
“Even in 1999 we were still relying on maps that had been created in 1977 and ’78,” Crew recalls. “Between ’77 and ’99, a tremendous amount of growth went on all over North Carolina that resulted in a variety of impacts in Floyd. . . That was the impetus for the state to come up with funds to update a whole new mapping system.”
Since 2000, North Carolina’s Floodplain Mapping Program has acquired ground elevation data using lidar and conducted engineering studies to update the flood maps for all 100 counties in the state, says John Dorman, the program’s director. To accomplish this goal, $145 million—half from the state and half from FEMA—has been invested in the program.
Dorman notes that they have done a cost-benefit analysis of the mapping program showing that it has helped the state avoid $97 million a year in flooding costs. “For every dollar we have spent, we have $2.4 in benefit.”
Buyout Program
After Floyd, the state used FEMA mitigation funding to purchase flood-prone properties and provide assistance for elevating other structures to both avoid future losses and help the thousands of families in immediate need.
“The hazard mitigation program was relatively new at that point,” Crew says. “When Floyd came along, we were really just getting underway with mitigation activities associated with Hurricane Fran in 1996. After Floyd, we streamlined the acquisition process. . . By mid-November of ’99 we were writing checks to local governments for the acquisition of property.”
Fishermen Relief
Because of Floyd’s severe impacts to the state’s commercial fishermen, assistance was provided to help replace lost vessels and gear, says Don Hesselman, chief of the License and Statistics Section of the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources’ Division of Marine Fisheries.
“We distributed $7 million in two phases of the relief program,” Hesselman says. “This was the first time we had done this, so we had to come up with the rules and develop the methodology to distribute the aid.”
Be Prepared
These are just a few of the many successful programs and projects that resulted from Hurricane Floyd. The biggest lesson learned from the storm, managers say, is to be as prepared as possible before disaster strikes.
“Global climate change is happening,” says Kenneth Taylor. “That means storms are getting more unstable, and we need to be more prepared.”
“You can never be 100 percent prepared up front to anticipate all circumstances,” advises Doug Huggett, “but the more preparation you do up front, the better you are at adapting on the fly.”
He adds, “Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security. It may not be this year, or even this decade, but a storm will come to all of us at some point.”
For more information on the Division of Coastal Management’s role, contact Doug Huggett at (252) 808-2808, or Doug.Huggett@ncdenr.gov, or David Moye at (252) 948-3852, or David.Moye@ncdenr.gov. For information on the state’s Floodplain Mapping Program, contact John Dorman at (919) 715-5711, ext. 102, or John.Dorman@ncmail.net. For information on the buyout programs, contact Chris Crew, at (919) 715-8000, ext. 277, or jcrew@ncem.org. For information on assistance to fishermen, contact Don Hesselman at (252) 808-8099, or Don.Hesselman@ncdenr.gov. For information on Sea Grant’s role, contact Jack Thigpen at (919) 515-3012, or jack_thigpen@ncsu.edu. For information on coordination and communication, contact Kenneth Taylor at (919) 733-2423, ext. 401, or Kenneth.B.Taylor@ncdenr.gov.
For More Information
- The autumn 2009 edition of North Carolina Sea Grant’s CoastWatch focusing on Hurricane Floyd, www.ncseagrant.org/home/coastwatch/
- The North Carolina Floodplain Mapping Information System, http://floodmaps.nc.gov
- Information on managing risk, www.ncihrm.com
