“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.

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.

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She’s strong and mighty, she protects against enemies and, according to Conway city spokesman Bobby M. Kelly, “she held on like hair on a biscuit” when her city was in danger.

Her name is Lollie Levee.

Conway needed a defender after the flood of 1927. Historian Cindy Beckman recounted that up to 15 feet of water from the Arkansas River covered the Lollie district, prompting the construction of the seven-mile pile of earth in 1929. Later named the Lollie Levee, residents of the city and of Faulkner County refer to the levee as a she, as if she were a person.

The flood of 2019 was the Lollie Levee’s greatest test yet in 90 years. Residents in the area became concerned after the river breached the levee in Dardanelle, Arkansas. The damage was catastrophic. Many farms and homes flooded.

Faulkner County Judge Jim Baker said that the levee in Dardanelle was constructed in the same year as the levee in Lollie, so after hearing that the Dardanelle levee breached, he was sick to his stomach. “I was concerned about it,” he said of the Lollie Levee.

Farmers bordering the Lollie levee were told to prepare for evacuation. If the levee were to breach, their fields would be inundated with feet of water, enough to decimate their crops for the year. Their homes would have been swept away as well.

Conway residents were worried, too. If the levee breached, water would have crept into the western part of the city for the first time in history. One resident was particularly anxious about a shopping complex along one of the city’s main roads, far away from the levee. “All that was in the flood projections,” Robyn Johnson said.  “A ton of people work there and even more shop there.”

Those close to the levee believed in her fighting spirit. She had been properly maintained by the Faulkner County Levee and Drainage District No. 1. in the years leading up to the flood, according to Baker. Officials from the drainage district told Baker that Lollie was “the best levee in western Arkansas,” Baker said. Their advice to him was simple: worry about something else.

But when so much was at stake, it was difficult not to worry. For six days and six nights, the levee was monitored nonstop as the water slowly eroded the soil. Residents built a backup dam in case of a breach, but when the river crested, Lollie was still standing.

“You build up enough anxiety about this, you do what you can to help with the sandbags and donating time and money to charity, and you’re told it’s not going to be enough in the end,” Johnson said. “Then, just like that, it is.”

She had never been so proud of an inanimate object in her life, she said.

Because of the upkeep by the levee board and the Army Corps of Engineers, the Lollie Levee was able to withstand the rushing river, saving the homes, farms and city behind it, Baker said. She took quite a beating, but in the end, she kept the water out.

“It held at the last three-foot block,” Baker said, holding back tears. “And the only explanation I’ve got is answered prayers and divine intervention.” He described the moment he realized the levee was going to hold as the biggest sense of relief one could have. As the river started to recede, the eroded part of the levee began to sink. Baker was relieved that “it never did cave in while the water was up high.”

For her service to the city of Conway, the Lollie Levee was granted a key to the city. It’s a shining reminder of her strength and willpower, Kelly said.

“We felt it was a good gesture to show our appreciation. Thankfully, she doesn’t have legs and she’s not going to go around the city unlocking every door we’ve got!” Kelly told THV11, an Arkansas news station.

Johnson added, “Lollie Levee being presented with a key to the city was one of the most adorable and quintessentially southern things I have ever seen. Second only to it being referred to as having ‘held on like a hair on a biscuit.’’’

Baker thinks that more levee boards will be created after this disaster so Arkansas will be better prepared if severe flooding happens again soon. He hopes to see less stories like Dardanelle and more like Conway and the Lollie Bottoms.

Levee boards also help secure towns financially. “Since the Faulkner County Levee Board had kept the levee up to national standards, there will be federal money to rebuild it,” said Beckman. According to Baker, 100% of the repairs will be covered.

These days, the Lollie Levee is resting. The Corps of Engineers gave her the equivalent of a nice spa day, which included a temporary patch. She’ll get a full makeover in the form of a permanent patch soon.

Baker is proud of the levee’s accolades, but he is more proud of the fight she put up for her people.

“The fact that she held… that’s what we’re so proud of in the city of Conway,” he said. “It’s a grand ole lady.”

Jordan Elder

Jordan Elder is a recent graduate of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a certificate in leadership and ethics. Her focus is on broadcasting and digital storytelling. Elder was a producer for “Catalyst,” an Arizona PBS series that explores scientific research at ASU, and a production intern for KPNX 12 News for two semesters. She served as a host and contributor to the entertainment news program “Cronkite Cut” for three years. Elder returns to Cronkite School in the fall to complete a master’s degree and report on sustainability issues for Cronkite News. View her portfolio here.

jordanelder.wixsite.com/home

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In late May, Cynthia Murphy desperately tried to find out when and where the water was going to come, but in the small town of Blackwell, Arkansas, there is no news station. There isn’t even a post office.

“I live in a small community that never gets mentioned on the news, or on Facebook, or anywhere else,” she said. “There was no information available.”

Cynthia has worked online for most of her life. She was a recruiter for many years and has always admired the way that the Internet bridges the gaps that news outlets can’t fill.

“I was thinking, too bad there’s not a group where people were posting pictures of what’s going on in each neighborhood, or each little community,” Cynthia said.

A Family Affair

Melanie Murphy, Cynthia’s youngest daughter, also craved more information about the flooding. She followed countless storm chasers, journalists and meteorologists on social media. When her mother suggested they start a Facebook group, she was hesitant at first.

“I didn’t want people to get their news solely from our group,” Melanie said.

The amount of crowdsourcing made her fearful of accidentally spreading misinformation. And as with any social media forum, she knew things could get political.

In the end, the need for it outweighed any risks, Melanie said.

“I didn’t want people to miss out on important information,” she said.

The mother-daughter team created the Arkansas River Historic Flood 2019 group on May 25. In its first day, the group acquired 52 members and then grew beyond anything they ever expected.

“I had a couple of people in mind that were already sharing pictures and videos of the flood, so I thought maybe I’d send them an invite,” Melanie said. “They all joined and then they invited all their friends.”

The Murphys’ hunch was correct: people wanted information quicker than the news could put it out, making this group the perfect way to stay updated. And as the river level rose, so did the group’s numbers.

“I thought maybe 200 or 300 people might be out there, but apparently there is really a need,” Cynthia said.

People from all over Arkansas requested to join. They posted photos, asked questions, offered help and shared their stories.

“There are people from out of state that would join because they have family members here and they could follow what was going on,” Cynthia said.

The group created a sense of community, inspiring some Arkansans to go above and beyond to help those they had never met … literally.

Help From Above

Bill Collins is an agricultural pilot and a lifelong Arkansan. His home wasn’t affected by the flooding, but because he spends most of his time in the sky, he had a bird’s eye view of the areas that weren’t so lucky.

Collins, along with his best friend, Dubs Beyers, noticed that people in the Facebook group were distressed about not knowing the status of the water levels in their homes, which they had to evacuate.

“It was a tremendous amount of water, and it was still rising,” said Collins, adding he had never seen a flood of this magnitude hit the Natural State.The evacuated families could only use boats to get to their homes, which looked like scattered rooftops poking out of the murky, brown water.

Wanting to bring these families closure, the two friends took to the air. Collins piloted his two-seater plane with Beyers in tow with a camera. They toured the damage from above, snapping photos of homes and farms to post in the Facebook group.

“It gave them a sense of relief to know what was happening and what to expect,” Collins said.

He didn’t personally know any of the families affected by the water he was flying over, but he says that’s the beauty of the Arkansas community: “When I see somebody someplace, I know who he is, how it affects them, where they’re coming from and where their heart is.”

There are many more examples of group members offering their time and resources through the forum that the Murphys created.

“I’m just thankful that we were able to help anybody,” Cynthia said.

Switching Gears

Now that the river has crested and the water is beginning to recede, the group has taken a new direction: promoting recovery efforts. The news cycle has moved on, but people are just now returning to their homes. The damage that lies before them will take months to undo.

“We don’t want people to forget about them,” Melanie said of the flood victims.

The Murphys have spent countless hours working on this group. Melanie’s screentime was clocked at 80 hours in one week at the peak of the flooding. She plans to create a spinoff group based around photography to continue building community in Arkansas.

“I don’t want a bad disaster to be the only thing bringing people together,” Melanie said.

Cynthia is proud of Melanie’s dedication to the group and her newfound leadership skills. “It was nice to see Melanie’s self-confidence,” she said. “I’ve seen her just blossom over the last two weeks.”

Melanie is currently unemployed, so monitoring, moderating and managing this Facebook group became her full-time job. She says that it helped her in her struggle with depression as well, giving her a sense of purpose.

“To be able to step out of my comfort zone and help people… it’s a big step in my life,” Melanie said.

As of June 12, more than 16,000 people have joined and remain the group. Even as the immediate need for information has slowed down, the Murphys plan to leave the group open as an artifact to remember the history that was made, something that Cynthia supports.

“Ten years from now, a school kid might decide to report that, and this group could come up,” Cynthia said.

Jordan Elder

Jordan Elder is a recent graduate of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a certificate in leadership and ethics. Her focus is on broadcasting and digital storytelling. Elder was a producer for “Catalyst,” an Arizona PBS series that explores scientific research at ASU, and a production intern for KPNX 12 News for two semesters. She served as a host and contributor to the entertainment news program “Cronkite Cut” for three years. Elder returns to Cronkite School in the fall to complete a master’s degree and report on sustainability issues for Cronkite News. View her portfolio here.

jordanelder.wixsite.com/home

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