Floyd is history, but misery endures
A CLEAR picture of the devastation was only
beginning to emerge from the receding ooze, and Floyd’s misery was compounded by the
stench of the storm’s flotsam. Douglas Maready, leaning against his red pickup,
stared across a field to his turkey houses, filled with a quarter million pounds of
rotting turkeys and smelly muck. “Now we’re trying to figure out what to do with
them,” said Maready, 55, who lost 6,500 turkeys and four months of work.
“The problem is if you go in there to get them you’re stirring and
probably making it worse. It’s a situation where I don’t know what to do and
nobody can tell me what to do.”
Residents in 31 eastern North Carolina counties hardest hit by flooding have
barely begun the long process of digging out, repairing and starting over. Floyd dumped 20
inches of rain on eastern North Carolina last week on ground already soggy from Hurricane
Dennis’ two passes over the area.
For residents across the 18,950-square-mile area affected by Floyd, life has
stalled. More than 3,000 people were living in shelters, school was indefinitely
suspended, hundreds of roads were impassable, water systems were contaminated and offices
were too flooded to get back to business.
The ground had not dried enough for families to begin burying the dead.
DEADLY DISASTER
Hurricane Floyd, besides being the state’s worst environmental disaster,
was one of the deadliest. The death toll in the state had risen Friday to 46 and could
increase as floodwaters recede and searchers get inside homes and cars.
Floyd claimed at least 22 other lives in nine states and the Bahamas, taking its
death toll to at least 68.
“I keep thinking this is a dream. We’ll wake up and it’ll be
over,” Becky Brant said as volunteers ripped the water-damaged floor and cabinets
from her Chinquapin home, which until Monday had a foot of water in it.
In Hallsville, a farming community in Duplin County where 1,000 farm dwellings
and buildings were damaged, Maready was among several farmers whose animal operations were
swallowed by the Northeast Cape Fear River. In the nearby farming community of Northeast,
flooding was preventing most farmers and homeowners from beginning recovery.
FARM LOSSES TOP $1 BILLION
Officials estimated farm losses statewide at more than $1 billion. The storm
wiped out fields of corn and soybeans and killed 100,000 hogs, 2.4 million chickens and
400,000 turkeys, making Floyd the state’s worst agricultural disaster.
“It’s going to be a long, long process,” said Ed Emory of the
North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service. “To many of these farmers it’s
going to be a devastating economic loss.”
Flooding from Floyd compounded the already difficult situation faced by farmers
in North Carolina, the nation’s largest turkey producer and second-largest producer
of hogs.
Before the storm, farmers like Maready were hurting from low agriculture prices.
Because of Floyd, Maready’s output was cut to two batches of turkeys instead of his
four in 1996.
Maready’s 21-week-old birds were three days away from going to market when
the storm hit. All but 10 of his 120 acres of soybeans and corn were under water Friday.
With the market prices of the two crops already bottomed out, he had expected to do little
more than break even this year — before Floyd.
“It means I’m in a situation where I don’t know where I’m
going from here,” said Maready.
“Here I am at 55-years-old, I’ve had one heart attack, and it may put me in a
situation where I can’t stay on the farm.”
It could take months or years for the 3,100 displaced residents, many already struggling
financially, to recover.
“Everything I worked for 40 years is gone,” said Shirley Denton, 62,
as she took a break from cleaning her yard, which was littered with hog waste and dead
chickens.
But health officials are just as concerned about stress. Long-term stress could
lead to domestic problems, child abuse and even suicide.
“Essentially it’s like people have been through a war,”
Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Debbie Crane said. “We’ve
watched on television for months where the people in Kosovo have had to leave their homes
with nothing. Essentially that’s what’s happened in North Carolina.”
THE COFFIN PROBLEM
Coast Guardsmen plied the 20-foot floodwaters of eastern North Carolina on
Friday, trying to snag scores of coffins that popped out of the ground after the
hurricane.
On Saturday, a team of funeral home directors will begin identifying the wayward
caskets to help get them back to what were supposed to be their final resting places.
“We’re doing this to ensure that all the caskets are identified so
that we can notify their loved ones,” said Coast Guard Lt. Scott Bates.
The Coast Guard crews spent the day in Princeville, across the Tar River from
Tarboro, trying to round up as many as 100 airtight caskets that were forced from the
ground by the river’s floodwaters.
Too heavy to pull onto boats, the caskets were either towed to shore or tied to
trees as Coast Guard crews recorded their locations. All appeared to be sealed.
Manufacturers’ ID numbers on the caskets can be traced to funeral homes and
ultimately the families who bought them, but the bodies still must be identified and the
coffins repaired before they are reburied, said Buddy Bell, a mortuary liaison officer for
the U.S. Public Health Service.
Identifying the bodies could be as simple as a relative describing the clothing
the person was buried in or it could require the use of dental records, officials said.
Family members won’t be asked to make visual identifications.
“We have to be able to positively identify the person and assure the family
they are getting their loved ones back,” Bell said.
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Flood victims were given a number to call for
assistance: 1-800-462-9029
