TARBORO — Charmain Wooten would not face the blazing, brilliant sun that shone over the makeshift shelter at Tarboro High School Saturday afternoon.
She could not, considering what she was hearing: The Tar River, which used to ripple quietly near her house, had swallowed her town of Princeville whole.
Everyone — the sheriff’s deputies, the neighbors, the news — kept calling it Edgecombe County’s worst disaster in recent memory. About 1,500 people live in Princeville, the oldest U.S. town chartered by blacks. A quiet place 64 miles east of Raleigh, it flooded regularly until a three-mile-long earthen dam was built in 1965.
Hurricane Floyd’s rains broke that dam.
In the light, it was obvious. You could only see the tops of roofs, a few signs, and dead pigs and dogs floating past them. Everything else was under currents of deep brown water that smelled like gas, mud and sewage. At least that is what Wooten’s neighbors told her — those who could face the images they saw outside the shelter.
“Everything I own, my home and my two cars, is gone,” said Wooten, 26, as she wrapped her arms around her knees, huddled in a dark corner of Tarboro High School’s gymnasium, one of 10 shelters officials set up across the county. Nearby, her 3-year-old daughter, Kiona, tugged at her shirt and asked repeatedly for water.
But water service was out throughout the county, and the bottled water shelter volunteers brought in disappeared before anyone could get in line for it. Working on broken water and sewer lines seemed impossible now, considering the Tar was still rising and at least 10 people were missing amid its waters. At least two people’s deaths in Edgecombe County have been blamed on Hurricane Floyd as of Saturday evening, according to county officials.
This wasn’t an experience Edgecombe — or most counties in the eastern heart of the state — had seen before. Rains from Hurricane Floyd swelled the Tar into monstrous proportions, causing significantly more damage than Hurricane Fran did just three years ago. Nobody knows yet how many people in the state have been left homeless by the flooding. In just five counties that had reported damage to the state as of Saturday, at least 2,528 homes had some water damage. In some areas, the worst flooding is yet to come.
For many of the residents in Tarboro and other eastern communities swallowed by the flood, the tragedy is twofold: Floyd’s waters took their homes, and most won’t have flood insurance to cover their losses. For example, Rocky Mount - a city of 50,000 people - has only 608 flood insurance policies written for the city’s homes and businesses, according to state officials.
The reason: no one had ever seen the Tar swallow towns and parts of cities before. No one seems to remember 16 inches falling on this part of the state in one day, like it did last Thursday. The average rainfall for the whole year is 44 inches, according to Joe Durham, Edgecombe County’s town manager.
“This was a storm of monumental magnitude,” Durham said Saturday, weary after two days at the county’s emergency communication center. “No one ever projected this. There is no perspective that people would have on this. You could call it a learning experience, but I hope it will never happen again.”
The Tar River crested at 43 feet Saturday — 24 feet above flood stage, according to the National Weather Service. By today, the Tar’s waters were expected to recede somewhat back to the river’s natural banks.
But homeowners like 33-year-old Stephen Connor couldn’t wait until then. He had seen his house Friday afternoon, when the water was a few feet underwater, but he wanted to go check how bad things had gotten.
So Saturday morning, he and two friends — Charles Coker, 28, and Starkey Whitfield Jr., 30 — climbed into a friend’s small army green, single-engine boat and waded along N.C. 33 toward Greenville.
“Might as well get my skis and go skiing,”Connor said, laughing. His gravelly voice sounded steady, but his pained blue eyes betrayed him.
He runs an auto repair business in Tarboro, which escaped flood damage, but he had sunk himself into his house. He bought it 12 years ago for $40,000 and has since done some $12,000 worth of renovations. He has a new two-car garage and a big yard.
But, like most of his neighbors, he has no flood insurance.
He got out Thursday morning, two cats under his arm, and went to stay with his mother in Tarboro until the water went down.
As he passed submerged cars and homes Saturday afternoon, the strain showed on his face. He heard the squeals of his neighbor’s drowning hogs and saw some of the carcasses floating by. He and Charles and Starkey rescued a couple of stranded dogs — a full-grown collie shivering on a soggy piece of a smashed-up porch and a puppy beagle stuck on a tire who howled until they couldn’t stand it.
When they finally reached Connor’s small white house, they could only see the top of it.
“This is it,” he said to his friends. “Bad, huh? And I just got a new television.” Connor tried to laugh, but the noise caught in his throat.
“Hey, Charles,” he said instead. “How about lighting me one of those cigarettes there.” His friend obliged, lighting up a Marlboro Light and passing it to Connor.
“I’ve still got my auto repair business,” he said, dragging on the cigarette with one hand and navigating the small boat with the other. “I can be thankful for that anyway.”
In many ways, amid the loss and disaster and mixed-up lives, the idea that things could have been worse overcame the uncomfortable displacements.
People had died, after all, and if you weren’t one of them, then you probably had gotten by OK.
“Some people were stubborn and they didn’t want to leave, but we had to make them,” said 43-year-old David Morgan, who left the submerged amusement park he manages, “Fun-n-Wheels,” in Morehead City to help with rescue efforts in Edgecombe County. “I don’t want to see nothing else like this again.”
Even in Saturday afternoon’s misery at the Tarboro High School shelter, where hundreds of evacuees from Princeville and Tarboro filled the gymnasium and the parking lot outside, children found reasons to play hide-and-seek or sing songs or do somersaults.
Older people who had lost their medication in the flood found some comfort in conversation and little walks in the sun outside. A young man took time give his friend a shave.
“I was so scared when my parents woke me up,” said 13-year-old Quontelya Harper, who spent Saturday taking walks around the high school with her friends from Tarboro. Quontelya has lived in Princeville for six years and has been in the shelter since early Friday morning.
“I didn’t take anything with me. I didn’t have time,” she said. “But I’m OK.”
Inside, Charmain Wooten was still in her corner, Kiona and her 6-year-old son, Montrea, by her side. She, her husband, Gregory, and their children had been there since early Friday morning, when they were awakened by someone wildly honking a car horn and warning them of the rising waters.
“Somebody’s going to have to do something, because after this, nobody has a home to go to,” Wooten said, Kiona still tugging at her mother’s shirt and still asking for water.
(News researcher Hilary Sha and staff writer Joseph Neff contributed to this report.)
