“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

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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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“This is not us just because of Hurricane Michael,” Summers said. “We’ve never lived in the house by ourselves. We’ve always been helping people.”

Summers and her husband, Sam, built their house 20 years ago on the Florida Panhandle, located 25 minutes outside of Panama City. When Hurricane Michael hit their community in October, the Summers and their 7-year old daughter, Gabby, instantly opened their property to more than 50 people who were displaced by the Category 5 storm, something they’ve done many times before.

Now, eight months and counting since Michael hit, the number of residents fluctuates weekly as families save enough money to move out or new families move in. When News21 visited in early June, 22 people were temporary residents.

When people arrive at what Summers refers to as a “tent community,” most have few possessions on them, if they have any at all. Summers noted that some even lack basic toiletries such as a toothbrush.

“Our goal is to help them get on their feet [and] save their money, so when the time does come, whenever they get the housing available, they have the money to start over,” Summers said. “It’s tedious, but it’s worth it.”

Residents are housed in tents, which Summers admits is not ideal, but she ensures each tent is equipped with air conditioning, electricity and real mattresses in an attempt to try and provide a  sense of normalcy. Residents are granted full access to the main house to watch television or cool off, and every night there is a home cooked meal, a combined effort between the temporary residents and Summers that adds a true community feel.

The Summers do all this without charging a penny. While a few local churches donate food and supplies to help Summers provide for her community, the rest of the costs and sacrifices fall on Shelly and her husband.

“We have spent a lot of money on this, but that’s OK, and we would do it all over again,” Summers said.

The Summers attribute their “strict community morals, values and standards” to their individual upbringings.

Although residents are not required to pay rent, maintaining a community with this many people and over 100 animals — mostly rabbits — requires assistance, which is why Shelly asks her residents to give back by helping around the property.

“Whether it’s pick up trash or vacuum the house or help put the donations up, do something. You have to do something. And for the most part everybody pretty much does chip in,” she said.

Shelly has just three rules for residents: no drinking, no drugs and no drama. Failure to comply with those three will result in eviction from the tent community.

“My neighbors will tell you we’re very quiet. [They] didn’t even know we were doing this until the news started showing up,” Summers said.

Amanda Bohn said she and her husband and their three children — two sons and one daughter — arrived in March, and they will continue to stay until they can afford to put themselves in a home.

Bohn did not want to ask for help when she and her family got evicted from their home after Hurricane Michael, but she decided that living on the Summers’ property was better than living in an RV on a vacant lot.

“Shelly is a blessing for what she is doing,” Bohn said. “A lot of us would probably be sleeping under a bridge or under some trees somewhere.”

In just a few months, Shelly has had several success stories, including a family who recently relocated to West Virginia. But as people continue to struggle and recover from the hurricane and its aftermath, the Summers family will welcome them into their home, no matter the cost.

“The ultimate goal is to get them in their own permanent housing,” Summers said. “But until that’s available, we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing.”

Peter Nicieja

Peter Nicieja is a senior at DePauw University pursuing a degree in music with a second major in communication. Nicieja has held various leadership positions with student media organizations, including programming director for DePauw’s radio station, WGRE, news editor for The DePauw newspaper, and producer for D3TV, the campus TV station.  Nicieja also has a background in filmmaking and graphic design.

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