"I lost both cars. My kid's car, and mine. I lost my furniture,” said Priscilla McKindley, 75, who lived through two hurricanes and severe flooding over the last four years.
“I lost my teeth, and my glasses, which I have not been able to replace yet. FEMA didn't do anything for me."
McKindley’s home in Lumberton sits near what the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, classifies as a Zone X territory, the rating associated with minimal flood risk.
However, in 2016 Hurricane Matthew swept away her family's two vehicles and damaged much of her furniture when water from the nearby Lumber River swelled 11 feet past flood stage.
Two years later, Hurricane Florence took her replacement car.
“At this point, we’re not really talking about different individual events,” said Andrew George, an environmental researcher at UNC-Chapel Hill who works with lower-income communities to assess water pollution.
“It’s like a permanent new abnormal where they’re constantly recovering from the previous disaster or preparing for the next one."
Lumberton and surrounding Robeson County has dealt with flooding for decades, but “what’s happening with climate change is that it’s making these systems more intense and more frequent," George said.
Data published by the National Hurricane Center in 2018 showed that hurricanes were increasing in frequency and cost, fueled in part warmer oceans.
“From year to year, you can’t really say that hurricanes are the result of climate change only,” said James Rosebrock, an operations officer from the Department of Justice who coordinates with FEMA to provide Federal law enforcement support in areas overwhelmed by a disaster.
However, Rosebrock said, “the long term overall thing is that ocean waters are warmer every year, so they are generating more storms.”
For Lumberton, a town of frequent floods, a greater frequency of storms means more rainfall and time spent underwater.
In 2017, a team of five researchers from the University of Iowa found that from 2001 to 2014, the number of residential losses from freshwater floods further inland was twice that of losses from coastal storm surges.
Blocked passages downstream can force flood waters to make unpredictable pathways through residential areas, according to Lumber River riverkeeper Jeff Currie.
“What happened in Robeson is partially because there hasn’t been a recent survey to assess how water travels through this area, so people get caught off guard,” said Currie.
“We just don’t always know where the water is going to end up.”
More than a month after Hurricane Florence made landfall, FEMA paid to board newly-homeless citizens in hotels like the Red Roof Inn across from McKindley's home.
Because of a shortage of affordable housing, a problem caused in part by damage from Hurricane Matthew four years ago and exacerbated by 2018’s Hurricane Florence, some of those displaced by floodwaters are still living in rooms at the Red Roof Inn today.
McKindley said the losses the community has suffered have made the most vulnerable among them lose hope that they’ll ever fully recover from past or future floods, a cycle that George refers to as a “continuum of recovery.”
Though Lumberton will certainly flood in the future, West Lumberton Baptist Church pastor Rick Foreman maintains that the flooding could be minimized in future storms with cooperation from CSX Transportation.
In 2018, a class-action lawsuit filed against the company claimed that it stonewalled the local government during the construction of temporary levees in preparation for Hurricane Florence and slowed progress on a critical floodgate beneath one of its train’s underpasses
"That's why all of West Lumberton floods," said Foreman. "That's the opening in the city dike system that lets it all through."
Foreman is part of an effort to convince CSX to agree on construction terms. The company is working with the Lumberton Department of Transportation to design a gate that will meet the community's need, though he cautions that the result is likely still a few years away.
A report from the North Carolina Division of Emergency Management estimated that the floodgate could save Lumberton millions when the next flood strikes, but even that amount pales in comparison to the estimated $2 billion in damage that Hurricane Matthew caused.
“The next time I hear of a hurricane coming," said McKindley, "I’m packing up, getting in my car and I’m leaving. Because I can’t afford to lose another car.” But for now, her health keeps her from leaving.
“I’m very sick now so, you know, maybe my time will be short and I won’t have to deal with it.”
