Bad flooding in this state brings me back to my college years

The news is awash with stories about how the state of North Carolina is pretty bad with the recent hurricane damage from Helene but as you might expect, they are making it out to be a lot more traumatic than it actually is. I suspect that this is probably intentionally done by the news to offer an opportunity for the President and Kamala to come on down here and turn this into a campaign rally while they hand out "free stuff." If there is one thing politicians absolutely love it is to get into some photo situations where they claim they are the hero of the day when in all actuality they don't actually have a great deal to do with the process.

FEMA is in charge of things like this and if you live near the water, like I do, and you are in a hurricane prone area, as I am, you are no stranger to people making FEMA requests. Unless a President or Congress decided to defund FEMA or made some sort of executive order to prevent the distribution of FEMA resources, the help that ANY President - and I include Trump in this statement - claims to have been responsible for, actually would have happened anyway.

In North Carolina, we are recipients of FEMA aid on a regular basis because this is such a hurricane prone part of the country that our professional NHL team is actually called the "Carolina Hurricanes." I thought it was an appropriate name that suits the area for sure.

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You are going to be seeing a lot of images like the one above and they will find some people to put on TV to make it seem devastating, much more so than it is because that is the way the news functions these days. Stories of woe sell and keep people clicking whereas feelgood stories, for some reason, fail to bring in the masses. Therefore, if you do try to follow up on the aftermath of this hurricane, take what you see and hear with a grain of salt because it is probably mostly sensationalism.

I have lived through many of these hurricanes and to paraphrase the Mayor of London some time ago "hurricanes are just part and parcel of living in North Carolina."

The big one for me was when I was in college and it was Hurricane Floyd. I was living in an apartment that we could see the river in the city on a normal day. The hurricane itself wasn't so damaging to the city of Greenville, North Carolina... hell, we barely noticed that it was going on and were just being silly and drinking beer in the rain rather than not in the rain. I don't recall any wind damage happening to anything.

What we did notice was that the river was growing larger and larger each day that passed and that the drain covers that lead to the river were flowing backwards. I think the city at that time held off as long as they could before they declared it an emergency and since college students are invincible, we didn't really take any of the warnings signs seriously.

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This overhead shot of these two very different style apartment complexes bring back memories because I lived in both of them at one point or another. The nicer looking ones to the left were where people that wanted to have a bunch of roommates and live in something a bit nicer because of the shared expense lived and the ones on the right were cheaper, 1 or 2-bedroom apartments for people who do not need the "luxury" but would rather have their own space. Both of them were absolutely awful by the standards that I have today.

When I first started living there, the ones on the left that are closer to the river didn't exist and I think there was a reason for that that may have been related to them being in the "floodzone." A floodzone that was realized just a few years later. Just like that picture suggests all of those units were completely waterlogged and had to be torn down. I don't know if they were ever rebuilt. The thing is, the media likes to present this as some sort of thing that came out of nowhere like a wall of water but that is not how these things work at all.

All of us that lived in this area close to the Tar River could see the river advancing, slowly, over the course of 4-5 days. I was on the 2nd floor of my apartment building that was called "Langston Park" and even when the water had entered the apartments that were on the 1st (ground) floor, me and my roommate at the time didn't feel any sort of urgency to get the hell out of there. Then one night all the power in the entire city went out because the central power plant, which is near a water source, got breached by the floodwaters and since electricity and water don't like to play together very well, they turned the power out for the entire city.

Then and only then did the college students start to take the situation seriously. This was well before the time of everything being on the internet and we didn't have smartphones so we were just talking to one another or waiting for instructions by authorities. In the meantime we actually were seeking out minimarts that were known for selling only beer and seeing who was going to have some flash sales to liquidate their stock in the event that they too got flooded. They weren't hard to find and we just went and got a ton of beer and sat on the 2nd floor of our building and watched the river get closer and closer. Looking back, this is very different to how I would react to something like that today.

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This is a photo of the utilities complex where my university was located. I have to say, they did a good job to hold the water at bay for as long as they did. We were on the porch drinking beer as the water was already a foot or so into the downstairs apartment when a GPD boat, which I didn't even know they had, came by not to get us in trouble, but to hand us a flyer from the boat to our balcony instructing us that a mandatory evacuation of the city was taking place the following day. We were required to leave the entire city. We were not the sort of people to get all worked up about this sort of thing and we certainly were not going to risk be arrested for refusing to leave our apartment that neither of us owned and had a combined value of maybe $2000 worth of stuff in it. Neither of us came from money so almost all of our furniture were hand-me-downs.

The next day we evacuated our stuff with boats provided by the city and concerned citizens but most of our stuff was just left behind. We put it up to the highest points of the apartment that we could because we didn't want to take everything with us. We spent that night at a free hotel that didn't have any power and polished off the rest of the beer before heading to my friend's Mom's house the next day. Then we just kind of chilled out there for a week or so until martial law was called off and we were allowed to return. I was kind of impressed about how FEMA and other charitable organizations managed to get us all new places to live and we didn't even have to pay for them or the first month. We were also given vouchers to purchase whatever sort of bed that we wanted from participating outlets. They didn't offer any free extravagancies or anything but this new bed that I received was the very first brand new bed I had ever had in my life.

Overall I think that it was handled extremely well but that was the only time that the property that I lived in was ever threatened. Floyd was one of the worst flooding disasters that has ever been recorded in North Carolina, so the news of Helene haven't really shocked me all that much. If your property has been damaged by it... trust me, I feel for you. If the system functions at all like it did back in 1999, you'll be fine and maybe you'll get a new bed out of the deal as well.