Dennis-Floyd-Irene, with a Touch of Georges

Our first experience in a natural disaster of significant proportions was the Dennis-Floyd-Irene hurricane event in September and October of 1999. We lived in Onslow County at the time, which some of you will know as the home of Camp LeJeune. Dude was stationed with the USMC at nearby New River Air Base.

We were in the eye of at least three hurricanes in the course of our eight-ish years in Florida (at NACCS near Pensacola) and North Carolina. The eye, for those who don't know, is the main cyclone in the middle of any tropical system, like a tornado only bigger and wetter but with generally lower wind speeds. From a ground-based perspective one will see a distinct wall of clouds, wind, and rain driven relentlessly in one direction, followed by clear, still, blue skies and then another distinct wall of wind et al going the opposite direction. We felt the effects of many other tropical storms and hurricanes, but being in the eye of a system packing that much power is a distinct and unique adventure.

The first hurricane to pass directly over us was Georges in Pensacola, where we lived in 1998 in a rented trailer home not far off base. Throughout the duration of Georges' time with us we watched the hundred-foot loblolly pines behind the house bend first over it for a day and a night, then away after the passing of the peaceful but rather small eye, shifting with the direction of the wind. Those first many hours were pretty freaky, lemme tell ya, especially when we'd hear over the wind and rain that distinct popping sound made when a large tree cracks. Georges was fierce, but he passed without incident for us, just gave us an experience we'd never forget.

The next was Floyd, which still holds the record as North Carolina's most devastating storm to date. Floyd came on the heels of Dennis, which had saturated much of the state and pushed a wall of water straight up the sounds as far inland as it could go. But Dennis just brushed the county line; it was just another tropical storm from our perspective, wind and quite a lot of rain but nothing too unusual.

Floyd, arriving ten days later, was a big, wet, slow-moving beast of a thing with circular winds around 130mph, and it took its time ambling over eastern North Carolina just sucking up water from the Atlantic and pouring it down freely on all of us. It took perfect aim at the little divot in the NC coastline where Onslow County and Jacksonville sit, multiplied yet again the storm surge Dennis had already sent inland, and dumped from one to two feet of rain within twelve hours. The night after it made landfall, once it had died down and moved on, several rivers broke their banks and the flooding started in earnest. A month after Floyd moved out, with the ground still saturated and the waterways finally beginning to recede, Hurricane Irene swept by just off the coast with its wettest side over us, and in the aftermath of the three Onslow County became essentially an island, with the rest of the eastern two-thirds of the state underwater.

Every road out of the county was cut off and flooded out by this point. The advantage of living near a military base is that you can bet it's most likely been situated such that it's in the safest possible position with regard to natural disasters that might occur in a given area. There were at times concerns about the supply chain and other minor issues like that that would become major if they were long-term or widespread, but for the most part, where we were life was as largely uninterrupted as could be in such a situation.

We stayed in our home through all this. At the time it was unusual for shelters to take pets, and we, like many, were willing to gamble on being okay rather than leave our fur- and scale-babies behind. We didn't yet have a baby-baby, wouldn't for five more years and I can't say what we'd've chosen to do if Dude, Jr. had already been with us, but as it was Floyd seemed like just another hurricane in a place where they were as common as winter storms when we were growing up in the Midwest. It was thanks to the strategic positioning of the military's resources and a fair dose of sheer luck that we suffered no damage to life or property other than a few shingles torn off the roof, which was nothing new as most people generally lost a few during most hurricanes even when they didn't pass directly over us. After a storm, standard practice was to pick up the bits and pieces and try to figure out whose roof color matched the ones that had come off of a piece so they could be returned and replaced if they were still in good shape. Once the worst had passed and the sun was shining again the ladders would come out and bald roof spots would disappear one by one as folks had time to fill them in.

But this time, for weeks we watched as the news showed images of rising water, leading to people having to be rescued from their roofs and attics in a painstakingly slow (but as fast as could be accomplished) effort to go house to house in boats and find survivors. The agricultural industry was devastated by the loss of hundreds of thousands of hogs and turkeys, and millions of chickens. Expected fish and shrimp kills didn't come in the short term, but my experience keeping fish tells me that this event was connected to incidents such as the Neuse River fish death event in 2004 in which ~2,000,000 fish died overnight. Fish have an amazing capacity to survive in unfavorable conditions for surprising amounts of time, but are weakened by the stress of doing so and left extremely susceptible to events like the natural upwelling of anaerobic water - indicated by the accompanying hydrogen sulfide (rotten egg) smell - that occurred in that waterway that September. But eventually things went back to normal and, as it does, life went on.

Overall, the Dennis-Floyd-Irene trilogy was handled as well as could be expected. People were good to one another, and the state of NC went quietly about cleaning up the damage. In the end, long after the storms had passed, fifty-one human lives and thousands of homes were lost - fewer than it could've been but more than anyone would hope for; none, thankfully, at the hands of other humans - and it took years for many to recover from the aftermath, but in a rather impressive show of the stalwart human spirit North Carolina recovered and continues to thrive today. Fifteen years later nobody who wasn't there really even remembers this event. It isn't memorialized; the nation doesn't mourn for those fifty-one people, although their families and loved ones will surely never forget them. NC's disaster relief agencies continue to learn from this and the several other record-breaking hurricanes to hit the state during the 90's, and continue to work to protect the many people living on that coast as well as the natural resources that are devastated by any such event, and those of us who came through, scathed or unscathed, found another reason to be grateful for every hour of every day that passes uneventfully.