When Anderson took over she raised the shelves 37 inches off the ground and came up with a plan complete with “hurricane angels,” or members of the community who activate at a moment’s notice to prepare the store for extreme flooding.

But despite the preparation, Anderson was taken off guard when the remnants of Hurricane Michael inundated her store with water in October 2018 . She arrived at the store hours after the flooding hit.

“It was heartbreaking, particularly because a month earlier Hurricane Florence was supposed to hit us,” Anderson said. “At that time we were prepared, … we had nothing within 36 inches of the floor.”

“So if that had happened in Florence I wouldn’t have lost a paper bag,” she said.

The storm dropped a massive amount of rain, filling the store with 24 inches of water. 

“We had not moved everything, which we do a lot of times because it wasn’t even a hurricane by the time it came through our area,”  she said. “It had been downgraded to a tropical storm – it was supposed to be much further west and skirt us.”

The raised shelves saved the majority of the books, but $11,000 of merchandise on the lower shelves were destroyed, including some staple reads.

“There was a lot of stuff in the kids in the kids section that I needed to replace,” she said. “I lost all my Harry Potter and stuff like that.”

The community came together to clear out the lost merchandise, catalog the damage and help clear out the water.

“At one point I counted 36 volunteers in the store, everything from church youth groups to teachers that I work with, people who live in the upstairs apartments, other business owners,” she said.  

During Hurricane Florence, the store closed for five days under a mandatory evacuation costing $5,000 in profit. In addition to the loss in merchandise, the small store’s owner had to dip into winter savings. 

“It took seven weeks with insurance to start replacing some of the books,” Anderson said. “You can’t not have Harry Potter.”

Facing those losses, Anderson was encouraged to reach out to an organization that provides financial relief to bookstores in a variety of stressful situations called the Book Industry Charitable Foundation.

Within 48 hours of reaching out to BINC, they cleared checks to help her pay for rent. 

According to their website, the Binc Foundation “provides financial assistance to brick and mortar bookstore employees working full-time or part-time who demonstrate a personal financial need arising from severe hardship and/or emergency circumstances.” 

Natural disasters are one of many events BINC helps to cover.

While many small businesses are hurt after natural disasters, bookstores are hit particularly hard. 

“We’ve got that online competitor is just out there and ubiquitous,” Anderson said. “You know it’s not like oh ‘this such a cute pink shirt, I guess I’ll come back tomorrow,’” she said. “This is like ‘oh, I’ll just go home and order it online.’ ” 

Pam French, executive director of BINC, said the danger bookstores face is not only for themselves, or for their communities. 

“Losing any sales can be a huge challenge for a bookshop, and also then for that community because that bookstore is there to provide not only the sales of books, but often it’s a gathering space for a community to come together once they’ve had … a natural disaster.”

That issue is a problem for bookstores across the country. In 2015 severe storms hit the small island of Bainbridge, Washington. Eagle Harbor Book Co. has faced severe weather in recent years, and owner Jane Danielson discussed the possible impacts of long-term closure.

“In most cases there’s a few loyal customers who will only come here. But for the most part they will finally establish that Amazon account and start using it,” Danielson said. 

Those loyal customers, however, are not enough to keep small bookstores like that one open. During the summer months they count on tourist dollars.

“So if that is depressed or if that goes away or is severely diminished we would not stay in business,” Danielson said. “We just don’t have strong enough margins in the book industry to weather something like that.”

In addition to being a place to buy books, bookstores are mainstay of communities, where people gather to meet, hold events and other activities. 

“There’s been a bookstore in the space that I occupy for over 30 years,” Anderson said. 

She called it an anchor for downtown in her North Carolina hometown, and a destination for generations of Manteo residents.

People come in all the time, who say: “My grandparents used to bring me to the store, my parents used to bring me this store,” Anderson said. “Now they’re bringing their kids to the store.”

French said there has been an uptick in disasters, but as long as disasters continue to impact bookstores, BINC will act as a buffer for them.

“There are a lot of folks that work retail, and they aren’t there to get rich,” French said. “They’re there because they love books, they love stores. They are not unlike most of the population in the U.S. and that is that they are one emergency or one disaster away from losing their house, from having their utilities turned off or having to declare bankruptcy.

“We are hoping that we can be what keeps them from that disaster.”

Isaac Windes

Isaac Windes is a recent graduate of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, with a major in journalism, a minor in political science and a certificate in international studies. Windes interned for the Arizona Capitol Times, covering water policy stories and reported from the Pentagon and White House as a reporter for Cronkite News in Washington, D.C. Windes also spent three years as a politics reporter for ASU’s student publication, The State Press,  breaking several extensive in-depth and investigative stories, as well as time reporting for the Arizona Capitol Times, Zócalo Public Square. His work can be found here.

isaacwindes.com

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That is the first thing that agencies try to assess after a disaster hits, whether it is damage assessment of a tornado, flooding, fires, volcanoes or ice.  Damage assessments allow emergency responders to develop a full picture and the areas that were hit the worst. 

Technology for assessing this damage has evolved over the years. From film to high-resolution digital aerial photos to drones, there are a multitude of ways to get imagery of damaged areas. For the volunteers of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), that is their entire mission if they are tasked by state emergency management. 

“With aerial photography, we have some very sophisticated tools that we use that provide latitude and longitude encoded in the digital data that we provide to the to the emergency response agencies,” said Civil Air Patrol Lt. Col. David McCollum, director of emergency services for the Oklahoma CAP wing.

State and local agencies were the typical partners for those CAP missions, but now federal agencies are using them more regularly. Even when preparing for a disaster to hit, CAP is one of the first calls when working through the disaster support framework, said Lt. Col. John Desmarais, director of operations for the Civil Air Patrol.

An Air Force auxiliary, the Civil Air Patrol is made up of civilian volunteers who perform emergency services like search and rescue missions, organs and human tissue transport, and aerial damage assessment photography. After 9/11, a Civil Air Patrol airplane was the only nonmilitary aircraft allowed to fly. It provided high-resolution pictures of the World Trade Center site and began doing more imaging like this with federal funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

Civil Air Patrol volunteers have responded to many disasters around the U.S., including the 2013 Moore tornado in Oklahoma, the 2018 Kīlauea volcanic eruptions in Hawaii, and flooding along the Arkansas River earlier this year. They conduct around 75 disaster missions a year across the country, said Desmarais.

“We’ll use local airplanes and crews to go up and take some of that initial damage assessment photos to identify where problems are,” he said. 

He said these photos help first responders understand where roads and bridges might be out so they can plan response routes faster. They also provide their imagery to state agencies and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to identify people who live in areas that will need assistance. 

McCollum cut a beach vacation short this year to help gather imagery for the Oklahoma Office of Emergency Management. In May 2019, all of Oklahoma’s 77 counties were placed under a state of emergency due to flooding, and CAP documented any infrastructure that was impacted by floodwaters. He said he flew missions three to four times a day every day for about two weeks. Overall, the Oklahoma CAP wing provided around 100,000 aerial images per day during the flooding. 

“We’re very highly trained, we’re very highly motivated,” said McCollum. “Oklahoma is an incredibly rural state. But when something happens … you’ve never seen people come together and give you the shirt off their back like the people in this state will.
”

The biggest events they have supported in the past include the 2017 hurricane season, helping with Harvey in Houston, Maria is Puerto Rico and Irma in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Civil Air Patrol is still operating in Puerto Rico, taking photos of the electrical power grid with sensory systems that are able to create high-resolution 3D images for groups to be able to see the progress in restoring power.

Civil Air Patrol has a national emergency service academy every summer that runs between 500-600 participants each year. Additionally, they try to provide training CAP at a local levels to make it easier for volunteers. 

Members of CAP will fly in aircraft and do damage assessment, or other related missions like flying routes to identify firelines for agencies to use for real-time planning when trying to assign firefighters. Using CAP for these missions is much less expensive and more locally available than federal resources. For Houston operations after Hurricane Harvey, the support CAP provided cost a couple hundred thousand dollars, but federal agencies estimated it would have been between $18-$20 million to use urban contractors or federal resources, Desmarais said. 

“I think they see the value of what they’re doing hands-on in the field,” Desmarais said of the volunteer forces that make up CAP. “I think they see the benefit because they know that they’re helping their neighbors.”

Brigette Waltermire

Brigette Waltermire is a recent graduate of the University of Oklahoma, earning a bachelor of arts in online journalism in 2017 and a master of arts in journalism in 2018. She interned at the Enid News & Eagle in 2017 and was the executive producer for OU [UNFILTERED], a student media project with KWTV News 9. She managed over 100 student journalists during the 2018 Oklahoma teacher walkout. Waltermire was on faculty for the 2019 National Press Photographers Association News Video Workshop in Norman. She has been a public affairs specialist with the Oklahoma Air National Guard for six years, contributing to the award-winning Air Observer, the biannual journal of the 137th Special Operations Wing. See her work here.

www.bwaltermire.com

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“We’re really not a big congregation,” said Rosetta Davis. “We just gonna go on in the name of the Lord.”

Water permeated inside the church after Hurricane Florence struck in September 2018. Deacon Davis said the tiny congregation shrank after the church closed for months following the flood.

Like many small communities in eastern South Carolina, Bucksport was slammed by two 500-year floods in three years  – Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Florence last year. Many in the community of roughly 1,000 have lived in the region their entire lives, but the storms haven’t made it easy to stay.

Minutes after the service began, a few people arrived, including Ivory Williamson who wed at the chapel in 1991. 

“This is home,” said Williamson. “I’ve been out here 30 years and I never ever had to walk out my yard or walk anywhere in water unless it was a puddle.” 

Williamson said the flood, which severely damaged about 10 homes on her street, caused some longtime Bucksport residents to leave. Some living in homes inherited by ancestors evacuated to shelters and then permanently relocated.  Others vow to return if they can find the money to rebuild.

Nelisa Geathers was born and raised in Bucksport. Hurricane Matthew caused some damage to her home but Florence forced her to live into multiple shelters for months. 

Only a fireplace, a table set and a wall decoration stood after water seeped inside her home.

“When I came in my house, all I could do was cry because everything was mold. I mean, my furniture, my clothes, my bedroom set, my grandkids’ stuff, all my pictures,” Geathers said. “Everything was gone.”

After raising her one-story home with cinder blocks to protect herself from future flooding, Geathers said she wants to lift it even higher.

“I’m grateful because nobody lost their life,” Geathers said. “We have to come back together and we got to help each other because we don’t know what’s going to happen from now on.”

Nichols, a rural farming community an hour north of Bucksport, sits between the Lumber and Little Pee Dee River. Matthew and Florence left the town of 400 people underwater. 

It took more than a year for Dianna Owens’ home to rebuild after Matthew before Florence flooded it again. 

“This is a demon monster coming in,” she said, describing when Matthew approached. 

As water gushed into town, older people were forcibly removed, Owens said. A man stood on top of his pickup while venomous snakes slithered past him. Seven kids living under one roof held on to a rope made of sheets and blankets as they walked through water to reach higher ground. 

Rose Campbell has lived in Nichols for almost 70 years. The night she evacuated from Matthew, she kept her eyes shut as she and her husband traveled in waist-deep water toward an evacuation site.

“The scene sounded like a roaring ocean and I kept my eyes closed,” Campbell said. “It just kept roaring as it was traveling through the water and my heart stopped.”

She laid down on the floor as she processed the chaos Matthew brought. She recalled refusing to eat and struggled to remain composed in front of her husband and child. 

Bugs, frogs, crickets and rats infested her home. Mold destroyed her clothes while her food rotted.

Campbell used the majority of her savings to fix the damage. Two years later, Florence put her back to square one after it ravaged her home again. 

Nightmares and panic attacks were frequent for Campbell after Matthew but she felt mentally stronger to handle Florence. She turned to her faith and the community to lift her spirits. 

“I thank God for a lot of my citizens here in Nichols who stood by me,” she said. 

Marion County Long Term Recovery Group supervisor Roosevelt Campbell said more recovery funding is required to help people return to their homes, especially older residents who live on a fixed income.

“There’s not a lot of extra income for people in that age group. They just don’t have it,” Roosevelt Campbell said. “It’s been three [years] since Matthew … and people are just now receiving homes.”

Owens, who also works with the Marion County recovery group, said she feels apprehensive about moving back into her home after living with family members, but said she’ll take her chances once more.

 “Part of me wanted to remain there because my daddy built that house with his bare hands,” Owens said. “I’m going back this time and if [another disaster] should happen, I have no problem leaving that house.”

Miguel Octavio

Miguel Octavio is a recent graduate of the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities with a degree in journalism. He covered business and housing for UMN’s student-run newspaper, the Minnesota Daily, during his final semester. Octavio focused on broadcast journalism, interning at KARE 11 and WCCO-TV. He also earned a fellowship at CBS News, where he was part of the winning group in the 2018 intern project competition. More of Miguel’s work can be found here.

www.miguelgoctavio.wixsite.com/portfolio

The post In small S.C. towns, people struggle to stay after historic floods appeared first on State of Emergency | News21.

The website, MySonomaStrong, lets users self-assess their potential traumas and connect to resources anonymously.  

Some natural disaster survivors will not go to traditional treatment centers because they don’t want to deal with the feelings associated with the trauma, or survivors are in a place without mental health services, said Josef Ruzek of the National Center for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. 

Online tools can reach a large population in a variety of languages for low cost, Ruzek said. 

Ruzek helped develop MySonomaStrong and an app, Sonoma Rising, for the wildfire survivors. He said the programs can be used not just to help people acknowledge and track individual progress, but also could be integrated into traditional therapy. 

The website and app let users self-assess their potential traumas and connect to resources anonymously. 

Todd Player of MySonomaStrong said the website can “meet people where they are.” 

Susan Dunn uses MySonomaStrong to track her progress and monitor how she is feeling after a fire destroyed parts of her neighborhood. 

Certain sights, sounds and smells can act as a trigger for Dunn. 

“Oh, I smelled smoke. Now it’s happening again for me,” Dunn said.

Although she did not lose her house, she said her entire community was traumatized, with symptoms that won’t go away. 

“There’s been lots of trauma in that neighborhood, during the fires, and you just don’t take anything for granted after an experience like this,” Dunn said.

Player said the response grew after the second year because of 2018 wildfires in neighboring counties, and says that over 3,000 people now use the website.

“To some who look at web sites like Google or Facebook which get millions of visits per day that doesn’t seem like a lot, but I like to remind people this is mental health counseling not social media or an e-commerce site,” Player said. “If I took any provider and lined up even 100 people outside their door who wanted to talk about services or wanted actual therapy, they would feel inundated and that would be a huge number. So I look at that and say it’s really quite successful at reaching people who need help.”

He said driving through the county is still surreal. 

There might be three or four houses clumped together, with nothing left except the fireplace and the foundation, Player said. “You can drive another 250 feet, and they’ll be houses that are completely unscathed.”

Ruzek said there is a growing interest and need for mental health-related to natural disasters, but involving the internet is a very new development. He sees a future where survivors can use their phones to help learn coping skills, connect to other survivors and check their trauma. 

Surrounding counties and California government are asking the Healthcare Foundation Northern Sonoma County to replicate the website and app for their communities, said the foundation’s CEO Debbie Mason.

She said this September, the foundation will start advertising more heavily for the anniversary of the fire. 

“We constantly need to be in front of people so that when they decide they’re ready for help, they know where they can get the free tools to get help,” Mason said. 

Mental health professionals in Sonoma are especially worried about its residents because of economic stress after the fires, said Mason.

The average daily rate in April 2019 is down a little over 4% compared to the same time last year.

When the fires hit Sonoma, 2017 was the first year the county didn’t experience any population growth since 1860. Over 3,300 people moved from Sonoma County in 2018, according to World Population Review.

Mason said people are still leaving.

“Everybody is feeling it,” said Mason, adding that even mental health professionals are overwhelmed with the need in Sonoma. “Everybody feels exhausted. We’ve got a community that’s really, really hurting right now.”

Sarah Beth Guevara

Sarah Beth Guevara is a senior at the University of Oklahoma where she is finishing a degree in journalism and a minor in vocal music. She currently serves as president of  the National Association of Hispanic Journalists at OU. She is also a Gaylord Ambassador. The bilingual journalist has interned with the Enid News and Eagle and News 9. She’s also written for OU Nightly, Gaylord News Oklahoma, Monkey Cage….and [UNFILTERED], a student media project with KWTV News 9. In the fall she will be a wire reporter for Gaylord News in Washington, D.C.

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Then came Michael. 

On Oct. 10, 2018, Hurricane Michael landed at Mexico Beach, Florida, and swept across the Gulf Coast westward through Panama City. The brunt of the damage from the massive storm stopped short of the highway bridge that divides the tourist-hub Panama City Beach from its underlooked neighbor, Panama City proper.

Along with leveled buildings, downed electric poles and wide scale debris, the storm also brought psychological trauma upon Panhandle residents who, more than eight months after the hurricane, are still recovering physically and mentally. 

“People here, whenever we hear a heavy wind, we see the rain, now we get the PTSD, the anxiety, the depression,” Dossie said. “I’m seeing a psychiatrist about it. I have no problems telling everybody about it.”

Since Hurricane Michael, many residents of the Florida Panhandle – including Dossie – have dealt with mental health issues related to the storm. 

As many as four in 10 survivors can experience a mental or behavioral disorder after a natural disaster, according to the American Psychological Society.

A study on mental health from Bay District Schools reported a shortage of mental health resources in Bay County was made worse with the increased need for mental health services after Hurricane Michael. 

Project Hope is a prevention-oriented crisis counseling program in Panama City funded by FEMA and meant to help individuals affected by Hurricane Michael. It offers free mental health services for community members struggling with the mental toll of the hurricane aftermath. 

Mental health experts warn that trauma peaks seven to 10 months after a storm, putting Panama City currently in that range. 

As the storm rattled the walls of his house, Dossie realized that this storm would hit harder than the many that came before it. Slowly, the confident excitement he had in the calm moments before the storm hit turned into fear and panic as the severity of his situation became as clear as the reality that he had no choice but to stand pat.  

Dossie waited out the storm from inside the bathroom of his home as Michael reshaped the landscape outside. 

“Hurricane Michael came to me, literally knocking on my door, tearing my windows down,” Dossie said.

Then he remembered the pine tree looming above his home as it always had, but now, waiting to drop like a hammer at the unpredictable discretion of Category 5 wind speeds.

Dossie outlasted the storm, however, his property was less fortunate. 

It took 26 days for him to regain power, and the neighboring structures on his lot – including the house he grew up in, just feet away from the house he currently resides in – were severely damaged by the storm. 

“At that moment, I got all afraid and stuff like that, shaking because I realized I’m a house-and-a-half away from what could have possibly been my death,” Dossie said.

After Hurricane Michael, the roots beneath the pine tree slowly began to pull above the ground and brought a lean and wobble to the tree’s ordinarily upright posture. When the rain falls, the soil around its roots softens and the risk of it toppling through Dossie’s already damaged house increases. 

On top of the headache of coordinating the recovery of his home damaged by the storm, Dossie said he spends each night with an added fear that the timber will come crashing through what is left of his house while he sleeps.  

“I appear to cope, but I have my moments,” Dossie said. “When the wind’s blowing, I’m peeping out my window at that tree.” 

Inflated prices for tree removal services – one of several forms of price gouging reported by residents in the area – in addition to a lack of insurance and resources from FEMA combined to prevent Dossie from cutting down the tree threatening his home.

The mental toll that accompanied the long grind of recovery presented itself throughout Bay County in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael.

“We’ve had a lot of suicides,” Bay County Sheriff’s Office Financial Crimes Investigator Dennis Rozier said. “We’ve had a rise in suicides here which is pretty tragic in itself. Hasn’t been good.”

More than nine months later, Panama City is faced with an uncertain timeline and path towards full recovery. 

“You’re looking at a year or two from this point, probably,” said Trey Hutt, president of Hutt Insurance Agency in Panama City and a resource for locals navigating the recovery process. “Full recovery of the community might be three years, five years, 10 years. We really don’t know.”

The towering, unstable tree still teeters outside of Dossie’s home as he, and the rest of the city, endures the elongated recovery process post-Michael. 

“I look at it like I have a mental injury, not a mental illness,” Dossie said. “With an injury, just like if you injure your foot, you go to the doctor. You get your foot healed. And then you know you’re back at it again. So then I get my mental psyche healed and I’m back good to go.”

News 21 reporters Katie Hunger and Sarah Beth Guevara contributed to this report.

Jake Goodrick

Jake Goodrick is a recent graduate of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, earning a master’s degree in sports journalism. Before Cronkite, he graduated summa cum laude from Cleveland State University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. As a reporter for Cronkite News and Arizona PBS, Goodrick covered the Phoenix Suns, ASU men’s basketball and the Chicago White Sox. His work can be found in The Arizona Republic, Indian Country Today, The Navajo Times and MLB.com.

The post Panama City man struggles with the mental toll of the storm appeared first on State of Emergency | News21.

Over 130 years later, a set of tracks runs on either side of a neighborhood and municipal buildings in low-lying south Dillon.

These two tracks, once a primary economic driver for the town, now serve as levees that trap water between them during floods, creating what many residents call a fish bowl. During Hurricanes Matthew in 2016 and Florence last year, Dillon County’s emergency operations center was in this fish bowl.

An emergency operations center, or EOC, is activated during a disaster to serve as a central base for local officials to respond immediately and effectively to community needs.

“We had to go to manually operating the EOC, and that made the operation devastating,” said Moses Heyward, the Dillon County Emergency Management director, “That needs to change, because when you lose your brain of the EOC in radio communication, you have a problem.”

During Hurricane Florence, floodwaters from the Little Pee Dee River to the north and the Maple Swamp to the south flooded and shut down the Dillon County EOC along with the 911 call center, requiring emergency calls to be rerouted nearly 30 miles away to Florence, South Carolina. 

The calls would then be sent back to Dillon emergency responders through manual radios, making response time longer.

“It was like flying on a jet in a helicopter,” Heyward said.

Delayed response lasted for five days until a mobile 911 call center was installed in Dillon County.

Heyward has searched for grants to rebuild a new EOC on higher ground, but he has not found any grants that fund a project of that nature.

“They need to make a special provision to get Dillon County into a new EOC building relocated on higher ground,” Heyward said. “Without an EOC, 911 system, you are asking to get somebody hurt very bad if not possibly having casualties.”

Locally, funds to relocate the EOC are limited. The median household income in Dillon County is $30,866, and the poverty rate is nearly 30%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“You’re on a fixed income of what you’ve got in the tax base,” said Jarett Taylor, the town administrator in Latta, South Carolina. “You can’t really increase your taxes to a point where you can ever overcome something like this.”

South Dillon was not the only area of the town that flooded. The flooding was widespread in the city and the county, turning two other towns, Lake View and Latta, into islands.

“Downtown Dillon, every area and every storefront, was flooded in about three feet of water,” said Kenneth Smith, chairman of the Dillon County Long Term Recovery Group. “The whole downtown. It was like nothing you never seen.”

Flooding on the Little Pee Dee River in Dillon is a relatively modern phenomenon. The closest gauge for the river in nearby Horry County measured the crest at a record 17 feet during Matthew and Florence. The highest amount before Matthew was 16 feet in 1928. The river’s minimum flood stage is at 9 feet, according to the National Weather Service.

“I never expected flooding in Dillon County … but after 2016 and after 2018, we see that we can definitely have that happen in our area,” said Thesdia Bethea, assistant director at Dillon County Emergency Management.

Local funds are insufficient for Dillon County Emergency Management to respond to this recent onslaught of flooding, Heyward said.

“After a disaster … we pretty much have to request resources from the state, and it will make it so much easier for recovery efforts if we already have those resources in place,” Bethea said.

Officials in Dillon County don’t expect the flooding to stop any time soon.

“We’ve had two in the last three years. I don’t think it’s going to be a ‘if it ever happens again.’ It’s going to be ‘whenever it happens again,’” Taylor said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens this year.”

For Heyward, the priority is relocating Dillon County’s EOC to higher ground, so local officials can respond more effectively to future flooding.

“The bottom line,” he said. “They’ve got to get this EOC moved.”

Ben Sessoms

Ben Sessoms is a recent graduate of Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, where he double majored in journalism and communication studies. During his time at Appalachian State, Sessoms was the news editor of the student newspaper, The Appalachian, where he covered issues ranging from free speech restrictions on campus to student voting rights. Sessoms also interned at the local Boone newspaper, the Watauga Democrat. You can find his work here.

bensessoms.com

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“Call the store – tell them I’m alive.”

His next words?

“I’m fine — I’m in a tree.” 

It was July 30, 2016, and Dave Carney found himself climbing to the top of a cherry tree outside The Wine Bin, the wine and liquor store he owns in historic downtown Ellicott City, Maryland.

Sitting in the tree, Carney recalled an unimaginable scene unfolding below him.

“There are logs floating by, I’m literally watching the dumpster [floating] in the parking lot. I’m watching cars float away,” he said. 

Attempting to escape the flood waters, Carney held on to the cherry tree as the flood that would claim two lives and wipe out the city’s historic downtown cascaded around him. 

“It was surreal,” he said. “It was like watching a movie that is not there.”

The next morning, Carney heard something no business owner wants to hear. 

“Sam, my staff person, came down and called me and said, ‘I think you’re out of business,’” Carney recalled.

“I think the town is closed,” he recalls her telling him.

But like many other business owners in town, Carney persevered and reopened his store, only to be flooded again less than two years later. 

Flooding is part of the town’s history. Established as a mill town in 1772, Ellicott City sits in one of the lowest parts of Howard County, Maryland. Given the steep terrain and abundant water sources, the area made for an ideal location to harvest the water’s power to grind flour and wheat.

Over two centuries later, the mills have left, but the water’s power hasn’t. 

In 2016 and 2018, Ellicott City experienced two 1,000-year storms. The Patapsco River and its tributary, the Tiber River, which runs under several businesses in town, rose past capacity after six inches of rain fell in just two hours. Less than two years later, eight inches of rain fell in the town in another two-hour span, once again causing the rivers to rise and overflow.

While cars were swept away by water and sidewalks around town were torn up by both floods, the city’s small businesses scene took a big hit in both storms. 

Before the 2016 flood, Ellicott City’s Main Street housed 141 businesses that contributed $124.2 million in business activity to Howard County, Maryland, and employed 955 workers, many of who live above the businesses they work in, according to a report by the University of Baltimore’s Jacob France Institute.

About a quarter of the businesses left by the end of 2018 after the second flood, according to Ellicott City Partnership, the organization responsible for preserving the heritage and vitality of historic Ellicott City.

The picturesque East Coast town’s economy relies on businesses like Carney’s business, small ice cream parlors, restaurants and bars and boutique shops to generate income. 

This summer, Ian Schwindt pointed to a spot on the wall just below the ceiling in Mooreko’s Ice Cream, a small ice cream shop he manages in the city’s downtown. 

“The water was up to here,” said Schwindt, holding his hand about six-and-a-half feet up the freshly painted wall, referring to the 2018 flood.

“A lot of people lost their businesses for the second time,” said Chris McIntyre, who works at Moorenko’s Ice Cream and also lives above it.

Joan Eve Shea-Cohen was one of these people.

After her antique shop, Joan Eve Antiques and Collectibles, was filled with water and destroyed in the 2016 flood, Shea-Cohen reopened her business in a new, smaller location. 

“Everyone said we would reopen,” Shea-Cohen said. Why wouldn’t I ⁠— they said it was a 1,000-year flood.” 

But then the 2018 flood destroyed her business for a second time. 

Between physical damage taken on by the buildings and lost inventory, including fine china, chandeliers and antique furniture, Shea-Cohen said she lost nearly $400,000 between the two floods. 

“I couldn’t go back there again,” Shea-Cohen said. “Not financially and not in my mind.”

Today, the town continues to rebuild its downtown, taking small steps to return to the way it used to, according to local business owners.

The current plan in place to manage flood waters in town includes the demolition of four buildings, most of them once housing businesses, to help alleviate future flooding in the town, according to Howard County Executive Calvin Ball’s office. 

The four buildings are built above where the Tiber River runs, and removing the buildings would give the river more space to rise and move before it reaches capacity and makes its way to the road. 

Things still aren’t back to the way they used to be, Carney said

“After the ‘16 flood, everything was normal,” Carney said. “Now, it doesn’t look normal it’s physically changed.”Outside The Wine Bin, the cherry tree he climbed in to save himself during the 2016 flood still stands tall — overlooking construction crews working to manage water for the next time it floods.

Christian Gravius

Christian Gravius is a recent graduate of St. Bonaventure University where he majored in journalism and minored in English. Gravius covered high school sports for the Olean Times Herald in New York, and worked as a marketing intern at the world’s largest YMCA in Estes Park, Colorado. Gravius covered the St. Bonaventure Bonnies in the 2018 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament in Dallas. Gravius won the top award in the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation competition for an essay he wrote about a former teammate’s running career before and after a life-changing accident. Gravius will pursue a master’s degree at South Dakota State University in sports and recreation administration. See his work here.

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When the city evacuated, those children evacuated too. But once out of the city, the state had a big problem: it couldn’t find them.

Marketa Walters was assistant secretary of child welfare in what was then called the Louisiana Department of Social Services. It was her job to track down  foster children. 

According to Walters, it was already part of the foster parent commitment to file an evacuation plan with the state. Foster parents were trained to keep a “go box,” with the child’s important records, medications and special mementos in one location that they could grab in an emergency.

“Our foster parents did that,” Walters said. “They got their kids. They got their stuff. They loaded up their cars, and they went to safe havens like everybody else.”

The issue was communication. Cell towers were down. Landlines weren’t working. Most foster parents knew their caseworker’s name and office number, but the offices were closed.  

“When you call the office, you called a building that was now flooded. They didn’t know how to contact us,” Walters said. “It took us a while to find everybody, But it was just mostly because of the miscommunication, not because they weren’t safe.”

In the first month after the late August storm, they tracked down more than 1,800 of the kids. It took until November to find every one. 

“We had a teenager that had run away and did not want to be found, because he didn’t want to come back in the foster care system. He was 17,” Walters said. “So he was a bit tricky. But we found him on Nov. 7.” 

Lost kids were the big story, but finding them was only the beginning. Flooded offices meant records were underwater. There were computerized records, but as Walters said, “New Orleans was notorious for not doing good data entry.” Courtrooms were flooded too, so “you had cases happening by teleconference.” 

Putting foster children and birth parents back in contact was a huge challenge with everyone scattered. 

“When you think about it from the kids’ angle, what always stuck with me was the lingering effects of the trauma on foster children,” Walters said. “The constant replay of the bad things that were happening in the city hurt the children even more, because they thought that their parents were there.”

The situation was exacerbated by staff shortages. Many of Walters’ staff had been deployed to state shelters or displaced themselves. 

“We had a bell on the wall, with a list of missing workers,” Walters said. “Every time they found one, they rang the bell.”

When the crisis was over, it was time to rebuild. Lots of national organizations were reaching out to Louisiana, asking how they could help. One such organization was the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a Baltimore-based foundation focused on improving the well-being of disadvantaged children. 

Denise Goodman is doctorate-level social worker who’s been a consultant with the Foundation since 1992. She worked in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.

“They said, ‘We need help rebuilding our foster care system’, not just to make it the way it was, but to take this opportunity to make it better,” Goodman said. “They were in pretty significant need of families.”

According to Walters, they didn’t lose any foster families after Katrina, but some families couldn’t keep as many kids.

“That family might call and say, ‘We had to move, and we lost our support system. We can only handle three kids’,” Walters said. “We had kids who were already in the system who needed new placement.”

Goodman worked with state officials on streamlining the process of getting new foster parents certified. 

“They wisely used some of the funding that they received to hire regional recruiters who could pound the pavement, talk to people, get on TV, get on the radio, get in the newspaper, and just say, ‘Hey, can you help one kid?’” Goodman said.

“Their messaging was really smart,” she said. 

Louisiana is still a hurricane state, and according to Walters, who is now the secretary of the renamed Department of Children and Family Services, she and her staff  still make disaster planning a part of a potential foster family’s home study. But they’ve updated their practices based on what they learned in Katrina. Foster families get their case worker’s cell phone number. All records are computerized. 

“In the flood that we had here in 2016, that was a no-name storm, we could put stuff on social media,” Walters said. “We had all the new technology to keep up with people.”

It wasn’t just Louisiana that changed. In 2006, as part of the Child and Family Services Improvement Act, it became federal law for state foster care systems to maintain disaster plans. The Annie E. Casey Foundation now offers a disaster preparedness resource guide.  

“I think that Louisiana helped other sites be more thoughtful and prepared,” Goodman said.  

But there’s only so much that they can be prepared for.

“Our basic processes of how we’re going to take care of our families are pretty much the same, because they were good processes to begin with,” Walters said. “Of course, we’ve never had another Katrina.”

Sophie Grosserode

Sophie Grosserode is a recent graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she majored in journalism and electronic media. She worked as a features reporter for The Maryville Daily Times in Tennessee, and WUOT 91.1 FM in Knoxville. While living abroad in Sydney, she was an online content creator for HerBusiness. At college, Grosserode served as editor-in-chief of Scoop magazine, news director for WUTK The Rock, a top 10 college radio station, and a staff writer for The Tennessee Journalist. Her print and audio features reporting won multiple awards, including Best in Show at the Tennessee Associated Press College Awards. View her work here.

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“I am who I am today because of what I’ve gone through. I mean I’ve lost a son,  I’ve gone through Hurricane Katrina. I went through the [1964] Alaskan Earthquake,” Buffone said. “I know what it’s like to start over at 30, to start over at 60.”

 In 2005, it fell to the now-retired nurse to help rescue patients and pull them onto the roof of St. Rita’s Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana, where 35 trapped residents ultimately drowned in their beds and wheelchairs.

“They weren’t just patients they were family members … I mean it was such a tight knit family,” Buffone said. “We were all like a family, the people that worked in the kitchen, the nurse aides, everybody.” 

The water came in through the front doors of the building and pushed people out a window. Then there was silence, she said. 

“They told us that it was like the eye of the storm and then it was just pouring rain and you could hear people calling out for help.”

Even as the rain pounded patients and staff, she and others pulled people to the roof. 

“It stung so bad … and I thought if it burned that bad on me then I can imagine how it felt for other people, especially the older people,” Buffone said, adding that she started cutting mattresses so they could cover themselves.

“We saw people in the water that didn’t make it, we saw animals that didn’t make it … I mean things that you never thought you would see,” Buffone said. 

She moved to Michigan after the storm, but moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2009. Once there, she worried constantly about the possibility of another hurricane. She walked away from everything a second time. 

“I don’t think it will ever go away,” Buffone said

Katrina was not her first disaster. Buffone was 8 years old and living in Anchorage, Alaska, when she survived a 9.2 magnitude earthquake, the second largest in recorded history, lasting almost 4.5 minutes and leaving 139 dead. 

“My father told us to get out of the house, and I remember we didn’t have any shoes on so my father went back in to get us our slippers,” Buffone said. “For a child, it lasted forever.” 

She remembers her father shoving potatoes into pipes to prevent flooding. 

“I didn’t feel it was as devastating as being in Hurricane Katrina,” Buffone said.

Today, she is back in Flat Rock. 

“I don’t think it will ever go away,” Buffone said about her memories.“With the internet, I find myself going back and looking and seeing, and wondering what could have been done.

“The people and the culture and everything from Louisiana … I still have that and I’ll never get away from that,” Buffone said. 

Briana Castañón

Briana Castañón is a graduate student pursuing a degree in journalism at the University of North Texas. A native Texan, she has wanted to work in news since third grade. She interned at Denton Television, the city’s TV channel. She also reported for the campus television station, North Texas Daily TV. Her story about a local high school teacher who was an undocumented immigrant was nominated and won a Lone Star Emmy. She also has experience as a TV producer, editor and anchor. She studied and reported abroad in London the summer of 2018. View examples of her work here.

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The post One woman, two natural disasters appeared first on State of Emergency | News21.

 The town of 3,000 residences reported structural damage, and 90% of the wood buildings and their zinc roofs were blown away as a result of the September 2017 hurricane, officials said. 

But the damage done by Maria didn’t stop Serrano from working for the community —  her nonprofit center overnight became one of the first responders to the people of Loíza. It transformed itself from a learning center, with a Montessori school,  to a refuge and place of all kinds of help for residents, both there and in the community.

“We started to do visits to the community, to our own Montessori participants, our own kids. We saw that they lost their houses and a lot of them were now in shelters,” said Serrano. “We became a recovery center of clothes and food to distribute it to the community.”

The staff of Centro Esperanza worked around the clock for more than a week after the hurricane, Serrano said. They offered emotional management workshops in nearby shelters  with their program Vida y Esperanza (Life and Hope). And they distributed solar lights to children, groceries to bedridden elders and lunch to the neighboring communities.

In the first weeks after the storm, the center and its employees helped hundreds of people, Serrano said, even though their own building suffered some structural damage.

“We were the ones who went to them, since no one had gone to help them,” said Serrano. “We looked for the kids and the kids would come.”

After the hurricane, the center  also served as a care center for the many children that were living in shelters during the emergency, Serrano said. Cared for by teachers and staff members, children enjoyed music therapies, received psychological counseling and meals in an environment far away from despair. The space offered relief to both children and their parents.

For Deborah Delgado, Centro Esperanza has been a wonderful experience for both herself, as a teacher in the center, and her then 5-year-old granddaughter, Jailiany Correa.

After having to swim out of her nearby house during the hurricane, Delgado started volunteering in the center. Her experience as a volunteer and a teacher, she said, helped her recover quickly from that traumatic experience.

“I lost everything. So I know that I know what everybody else went through,” said Delgado. “It was helpful for me in not thinking of what I lost – and just to help out others to recover.”

As for her granddaughter, Jailiany’s mornings were spent with other children, learning and playing games .

That experience changed her, ” said the grandmother. “She was a little shy kid. Now she’s just this little tiny kid who just wants to have fun every day.”

Nearly two years after the hurricane, Centro Esperanza is still being rebuilt, but its work in the community continues.  It started new programs, such as Melodías de Esperanza (Melodies of Hope), a prevention program focused on reaching children through music, and La Mochila Alegre (The Happy Backpack), a nutrition program which provides children with healthy meals.

Priscilla Malavet

Priscilla Malavet is a recent graduate of the School of Communication University of Puerto Rico – Río Piedras campus with a bachelor’s degree in journalism as well as a minor in women and gender studies. Malavet’s areas of interest include cultural analysis, gender and women issues, pop culture and social media’s engagement culture. She has published research on the topic of sharenting, the overuse of social media by parents to share content about their children.  She covered stories on Planned Parenthood for Latinas and the migration of Puerto Rican students after Hurricane María.

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