Blue Skies, Black Days in N. Carolina

ROCKY MOUNT, N.C. — Bedroom slippers, arthritis cream, scented candles, tape cassettes, canceled checks, kitchen utensils, medicine bottles--and one Mother Goose book, for when her granddaughter came to visit.

Ann Turner, 74, looked down at all her worldly belongings, hundreds of items scattered on the wet floor around her feet, and tried to keep herself together.

“I’m just going to start my life over,” she said, standing in the middle of her two-bedroom apartment near the Tar River, a normally sleepy stream that woke up and threw a fit last week, leaping its banks and leaving Turner and thousands like her with nowhere to go.

“I’m doing all right,” she said. “Then all of a sudden it hits me, and I go down again.”

At the depths of the worst natural disaster in state history, Turner’s neighborhood and the rest of eastern North Carolina look like the end of the world, a marked improvement from last week, when everything looked like The Beginning: The Earth without form, all water and darkness.

Flooding of Biblical Scope

Today, eight days after a flood of biblical dimensions was spawned by Hurricane Floyd, the water is finally starting to recede. But it could be months, even years, before the darkness in residents’ lives starts to lift.

At least 46 North Carolinians are dead, along with 2.5 million chickens and turkeys, 100,000 hogs, and 730 head of cattle--numbers everyone expects to go up as the water goes down. Though the sky has turned clear and blue as a robin’s egg, and the first taste of autumn wood-smoke hangs on the cool night air, the state’s eastern third remains a fetid, tropical swamp.

Thousands of square miles are still underwater. Land not water-covered is waterlogged. Farmers, most without flood insurance because they didn’t think they lived on a flood plain, face total ruin. Insects, infectious diseases and environmental catastrophes loom as ominous threats in the drying-out days to come, as do scam artists and looters, already preying on some victims, and the inevitable pollution of fragile coastal fisheries.

As state officials try to gauge the economic impact of the storm, they can say only this: It will far exceed the $6 billion in damage done by Hurricane Fran three years ago.

Many of the 60,000 residents who are still without water, or the 8,000 without power, or the 5,000 without phone service, or the 3,000 without homes, can be found wandering, pacing, muttering, outside hospitals, shelters and temporary trailers. Pale, dazed, they eat Red Cross chicken, sip warm soda, suck on cigarettes, and ask each other, How?

How could a disaster of such epic scope happen without warning?

Yes, people were told it would rain. But few expected such a killing downpour.

“They say ‘500-year flood’ and all that,” said Candy Madrid, executive director of the Rocky Mount Children’s Museum, which lost most of its animals, except a couple of snakes and an alligator named Samantha. “Uh uh. Last time it rained like this, Noah was alive.”

One reason for the flood’s magnitude was the quickly forgotten Hurricane Dennis, which prepared the ground last month, soaking the state with 10 inches of rain. Then came Floyd. An even bigger and uglier storm, it dropped 20 inches on the state, engorging the already swollen creeks, streams and at least four major rivers. The Cape Fear, the Lumber, the Tar and the Neuse reached levels no living person--in fact, no living person’s great-great grandfather--had ever seen.

“If you look back to North Carolina’s history,” said Tom Ditt of the state’s emergency management division, “we’ve got all these rivers . . . where the communities grew up during Colonial times.”

And since Colonial times, no one has seen the rivers do what they did this week.

Friday, for the first time since the rain stopped, Turner and hundreds of other riverside residents returned to their houses in this old railroad and tobacco town of 50,000, perched on the falls of the Tar. And tar was what they found. Smeared on cherished photographs, antique furniture and family Bibles was a thick film of black goo, the residue of a river running high with death and decay, with the carcasses of hogs, horses and cows, mixed together with human sewage and thousands of gallons of fossil fuels from submerged gas stations and airports and power plants.

(Also, dozens of caskets have been bobbing along on the current, dislodged from cemeteries in the raging flood waters’ path.)

In rooms that had marinated in such foul water for more than a week, Turner found nothing she could take away with her but a nose-stinging stench. Carpets were muck. Memories were caked over with mud. Corners were strewn with smooth stones carried downstream and arranged almost gently, prettily, like Zen rock gardens.

Outside, her once-lovely neighborhood was a war zone, a wasteland, fit only for bulldozers.

Several men from Turner’s church helped move her heaviest furniture outside. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, she said, won’t bulldoze a house and mail a check to its occupants unless the inside is emptied. So, from behind dark sunglasses, Turner watched her fellow Methodists take hatchets and shovels and wheelbarrows to her things, her delicate belongings. She watched them heft her handmade four-poster bed, her lovely chest of drawers, her red Queen Anne chair, and heap them onto the soggy lawn like so much driftwood.

Up and down her street, neighbors were doing the same.

“This looks like junk,” she said, glancing around, a hand to her cheek. “But it wasn’t.”

It was, until last week, the stuff of a rich and happy life.

Over here, face down, was a sepia photograph of her mother and two aunts, taken in 1919, the same year the Tar’s 100-year flood level was last recorded. She picked up the photograph and studied it, touching a finger to the water-spotted faces.

“Here’s my daughter,” she said, stooping and peeling another photograph off the floor, watching with dismay as the red of her daughter’s hair suddenly ran down her own hand.

“Ruined,” she whispered, setting the photograph down.

Around the corner, Betty Lefler was hosing off a lampshade, wrapping her mattress in plastic, and still shaking from the adrenaline rush she got last week when she watched the Tar go by her front and back doors. Until that day, she’d scarcely given the river a second thought. Suddenly, after days of constant rain, there it was, lapping at her stoop.

“It just kept coming,” Lefler said of the river, holding an unsteady hand beneath her nose. “It just kept coming and coming and coming. . . .”

At last, when the lights cut out, she decided, reluctantly, to flee.

As she stepped outside, the water came up to her hip.

A girlfriend down the street who decided to ride out the storm had to be rescued by boat.

Lefler spent that first night at the nearby Sprint office, where she works as an operator. In fact, she logged a full eight-hour shift, to take her mind off the two-bedroom house where she lived by herself, her children grown and moved away.

At some point in the night, her friends ventured out and tried to save her 1998 Chevy Cavalier, her most valuable possession. They returned a short while later to say the water was too high.

“Oh, please, please,” she told them, “please save my car.”

She just couldn’t afford to lose that car.

So they went back.

By then, the exhaust pipe was under.

“It’s totaled,” she said Friday, suddenly bursting into tears and leaning against the pillar of her porch for support. “My car. They couldn’t save my car.”

For days, Lefler has been living in a nearby motel, steeling herself for the worst. But how do you steel yourself for this: The contents of her kitchen were in her living room. The contents of her living room were in her bathroom. The house looked as if it had been trashed deliberately, as if it had been invaded not by the river, but by a rock star who threw a wild party, then stomped off.

Still, like Turner and others in Rocky Mount, Lefler counted herself among the lucky ones. Most people in the six counties still under evacuation orders won’t be let back into their homes for days, or weeks. For them, the flood left something besides ruin. It left a suffocating sense of suspension, a feeling like treading fetid water.

About 50 minutes downriver, in Greenville, police intent on preventing looting and injuries threatened to arrest people trying to enter their homes without first getting the all-clear. So, hundreds of refugees continued to bide their time in one of the 22 shelters operating in the region.

Pearly Mae Dixon was among them. She sat heavily on one of the Army cots crammed into Ayden Middle School, heaving sighs, fretting aloud about when she might be able to go home, back to the housing project where she’s lived for 16 years, the low-income apartment that suddenly seemed grander to her than any mansion.

“I know they say it’s just material things,” she said quietly. “But I want my materials.”

She laughed at herself, a defeated laugh, and peered down the hallway. Children in donated pajamas ate donated doughnuts and played with donated toys. Tired retirees, like Dixon herself, took exhausted naps, sprawled out across cots the size of surfboards.

“If you’d told me two weeks ago,” she said, “that I’d be sitting on a cot in a shelter, not knowing when I could go home, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

More worrisome for Dixon was what she left under her mattress--her life savings. She wondered if the mattress had floated away. Please God, let that mattress have sunk, pinning the money to the floor.

In Tarboro, the local high school was transformed into the largest shelter in North Carolina, a city in miniature, with 1,500 refugees, including 66-year-old George Harrison. Bone-weary, he sat in a patch of shade outside the school, smoking and contemplating all he’d lost, things no insurance company can put a price on, even if he’d had flood insurance, which he didn’t.

Harrison lived in nearby Princeville, the oldest black township in the U.S. Founded by freed slaves just after the Civil War, it was a proud and historic place by the wayside, where the 1,900 residents thought they were exempt from floods, protected. History, and a three-mile dam built 35 years ago, were on their side.

Then came that dark morning when Harrison and other elders in the town realized this was no ordinary sky, and Floyd would be no typical storm. They began stacking sandbags against the coming deluge, Harrison stacking as fast as the younger men, despite the pain in his lower back, wrenched by years of manual labor and a stint as a prizefighter.

Finally, they were forced to admit that all the sandbags in the world couldn’t stop what lay ahead.

Harrison came home to Princeville two years ago, home from New York City, to care for his aging, widowed mother. As her only child, whom she called Baby, he cooked her steaks, and bathed her limbs, and cleaned her house, which now sits under 20 feet of standing water in the vast brown bathtub that once was Princeville.

It pained him to say it--pained him to even think it--but he felt almost relieved that his mother died recently, relieved that she wouldn’t witness the ruin visited upon her son and her beloved hometown. Then he thought twice.

Maybe she did see the flood. Maybe she experienced it, since the cemetery where he laid her to rest was under all that water too.

“As strong as my mother’s mind was,” Harrison said with a smile that betrayed both pride and fear, “and as good as she loved that house, I wouldn’t be surprised when the water goes down to find her casket sitting right outside that door, and she be saying, ‘Lord, don’t let nothing happen to my Baby!’ ”

*

Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.

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North Carolina’s Rivers of Grief

Experts fear that the flooding will be North Carolina’s worst-ever environmental disaster. The rivers are now swollen with human and animal waste, and other pollution. Thousands of wells, a key source of water for the state’s rural population, are contaminated. Some of the causes and concerns:

Polluted runoff seeps into aquifers, contaminating wells.

Canals designed to drain farmland conduct contaminated flood water back up into fields.

Decomposing animal carasses further contaminate flood water.

Waste lagoons flood, releasing nitrates into groundwater.

As rivers flow to the ocean through flat coastal plains, river banks are lower, and rivers are more prone to overflowing.

Nitrogen in water encourages excessive algae growth, depleting oxygen and causing fish to die.

Sources: North Carolina Dept. of Emergency Mgnt.; Professor Lawrence E. Band, University of North Carolina; Professor Peter J. Robinson, University of North Carolina; Mike Smith, Weather Data.

Researched by REBECCA PERRY and EDITH STANLEY / Los Angeles Times