Six years after Hurricane Florence: Hundreds in southeastern North Carolina still need home repairs or rebuilds

WINNABOW, N.C. (WECT) – Just one day away from the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Florence, Crystle Silvey says horrible memories are flooding back.

“We lost everything we owned,” Silvey said. We didn’t we didn’t even have any clothes.”

Silvey’s home in Winnabow was one of several impacted by the intense flooding Florence brought to the area. After the water in her home got several feet high, she and her family were eventually rescued by the Coast Guard. Their nightmare was only just beginning, though.

“Everything was ruined and we had to throw everything we own on the side of the road on the side in front of the house,” Silvey said. “Pretty much only thing that was left to this house was the framing.”

That’s when they began their rebuilding process. Her husband and volunteers from a local Methodist church worked long hours to build back what they had lost. She believes the stress of this time could be what caused her husband’s early death just one year later.

“I do think that it put a lot of stress on him because you know, we just started all over,” Silvey said.

Now, several years after her home was completed, Silvey says she’s still dealing with some of the damage sustained in the storm.

“The floor started separating and there’s a mold in our bathrooms now, even though it has new sheetrock and my son’s closet has a leak inside of the the light fixture in there. So it’s really actually not safe right now.”

Silvey says many of her neighbors are dealing with the same thing.

However, the problem extends far beyond the Winnabow area. WARM NC CEO Andy Jones works daily with low-income families who need help repairing their homes after strong storm systems.

“Surprising as it is even six years later, we still get requests with Hurricane Florence damage,” Jones said.

He said since the hurricane hit in 2018, they’ve helped 350 homeowners with damage, but there are currently still 35 homeowners on their waitlist. Jones says all of those homeowners on the waitlist have reached out years after the storm, though. He says no one who reached out back in 2018 is still waiting for help from them.

“Even three years after the fact, we started getting kind of another wave of applications coming in and we’re like, ‘oh these are the ones that thought they were going to be able to do it all on their own,’” Jones said. “They’ve exhausted their resources. Now, they’re reaching out to us. The ones that are left are the ones that are really difficult cases and circumstances and big jobs that are still out there.

Another group, Rebuild NC which works on a statewide level, says they have a lot more cases to get through. The vast majority of their cases are in Southeastern North Carolina.

“We have just about 4,300 applicants from Matthew and Florence,” Rebuild NC’s director Laura Hogshead said. “And the reason that we keep those families together with Matthew and Florence is because so many of our Florence applicants were all so impacted by Matthew. We have gotten 2,623 of them into completed homes and the others are either with a contractor or inactive construction. Just a handful of our families are not yet with the general contractor.”

727 projects are in active construction with Rebuild NC as of September 2024.

Hogshead says the reason they are still actively working on projects related to Florence today is because of a delay in receiving funding.

“We did not get the money until 2020 even though the event was in 2018. So we are the folks that come in and help any of our families that could not be fully recovered with other Federal funding streams or state funding streams, and that’s why it takes so long because this is designed to be the last funding.”

She said they had a similar experience to WARM NC with several people reaching out for help years after the fact.

“We closed our applications last April,” Hogshead said. “So April 2023, but we did have applicants up until the last day. In fact, we had a lot of applicants on the last day. So you had folks who came in in June of 2020 and you had folks who came in in April of 2023. Families that we’re seeing now are mostly the families that either applied later or had significant challenges to their application that we’re helping them overcome.”

When it comes to the timeline, Jones said it’s normal that many people still need help six years later.

“The common estimate from FEMA is that it takes anywhere from five to eight years to recover from those kind of storms,” Jones said. “When we first heard that number immediately following hurricane Florence, I thought ‘no way, you know in five years surely we’re going to be able to really have this thing nipped in the bud’ and that’s not the case. And so we’re really, you know, just now kind of in that sweet spot six and a half years later.”

Hogshead said in some ways, it feels odd to acknowledge Hurricane Florence was already six years ago.

“It has been a very long time since Hurricane Florence in some ways and in some ways, it’s been a blink, but we work every day to make sure that folks can get home because if you are affected by a hurricane, it’s not over until you’re in your new home and that’s what we keep in mind every day,” Hogshead said.

While repairing or rebuilding a new home is important work and often necessary to protect a homeowner and their family’s health and safety, Silvey can’t help but miss her original family home.

“It’s kind of hard to tell a story when there’s one person missing,” Silvey said. “And that’s my husband. I really like the house that I had before. I like it better than the one that is here.”

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