Is NC ready for the next hurricane in a pandemic? Oak Island family was a test case.
The floorboards of Burt Lea’s single-story home on Oak Island’s Beach Drive have stayed dry during every hurricane since his family bought the house in 1962. He figured that would remain the case during Hurricane Isaias.
But when Isaias made landfall and Lea looked out the front door, he saw water rushing down the street from east to west and spilling into his home.
Then, he heard pipes break away from the underside of the house with a loud crack. The water sloshed up out of a drain onto the bathroom floor.
Two weeks before Isaias hit North Carolina on Aug. 3, Lea had quadruple bypass surgery. This week, Lea sat inside the flood-damaged house, his shirt open in the 90-degree heat to reveal a long vertical scar along his sternum.
Lea recounted how the floodwaters lifted his wooden front deck, making it impossible for his family to leave through the screen door. He busted out the screen and pushed the deck down, giving him a chance to pull the door open against hurricane-force winds.
And then they were in the dark water.
“The waves are real ocean waves, washing you,” Lea said. The family finally reached a neighbor’s house, and from inside, Lea watched a car knock his house off of its posts, dislodging it.
Then the car floated toward the center of the house, ramming the brick chimney and bringing it down, breaking the house free from its last anchor and setting it adrift.
A test of readiness
Lea and his neighbors on Oak Island were unwillingly part of the first test of North Carolina’s storm readiness in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The storm made landfall in Brunswick County as a Category 1 hurricane before accelerating quickly through the state, spinning of an F-3 tornado that killed two people in Bertie County.
Brunswick County’s beaches were hit with a strong storm surge that washed away much of the sand dunes in Oak Island and parts of Ocean Isle Beach.
While Lea chose not to leave his home, much of the state’s focus has been on how people can shelter in a way that keeps them safe from the highly infectious virus, both when people are evacuating out of a storm’s path and after the storm destroys their homes.
Typically, Lea would have headed inland during a storm. But Isaias was forecast to be a tropical storm or Category 1 hurricane, and his house had survived much stronger storms. He figured floodwaters would reach his front yard like they did during Matthew and Florence without coming any further.
This Monday, standing near his toppled chimney, Lea reflected on that decision.
“Every hurricane is different and can be different and can change in a second,” Lea said. “That’s what I didn’t take into consideration.”
This hurricane season will likely include 19 to 25 named storms and between seven and 11 hurricanes. At least three and as many as six hurricanes could reach major hurricane status, meaning the storms will have sustained winds of at least 111 mph, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote in an Aug. 6 update to its hurricane season outlook.
“The season is now expected to be one of the more active in the historical record,” the outlook said.
The height of North Carolina’s hurricane season typically lasts from September through early October, a period in which both 2016’s Hurricane Matthew and 2018’s Hurricane Florence hit the state.
Seeking shelter
After the storm, Mike Sprayberry, the director of North Carolina’s division of emergency management, visited the Bertie County mobile home park that had been destroyed by the F-3 tornado. As he walked through the pieces of siding and piles of possessions, Sprayberry said that Isaias had been a test for how the state’s emergency management structure would address two ongoing disasters.
As Isaias approached the North Carolina coast, the state put at least 2,500 hotel rooms on a 72-hour hold, with some rooms in the Triad and others in western North Carolina. To obtain a room, evacuees had to visit reception centers in either Lumberton or Rocky Mount, positioned near both ends of Interstate 95.
Only one person, an evacuee from Hyde County, did that.
“What we need to do is learn how to make sure that all of the residents and the visitors and the county governments understand how the process works,” Sprayberry told The News & Observer in an interview after the storm.
In a July 30 briefing, Sprayberry warned that Isaias was set to approach the North Carolina coast the following Monday. During the same briefing, Sprayberry mentioned that shelters giving evacuees privacy like dormitories and hotels are preferred this season to protect against the coronavirus. Evacuees would report to a reception center, Sprayberry said, and be assigned a place to stay.
At no point in that briefing or others in the following days did state officials announce where reception centers were located. The News & Observer searched for information about the reception centers on the websites and Facebook pages of areas that had declared evacuation orders, but did not find any specifics.
A Reddit post about a reception center at Nash County Community College in Rocky Mount was the only easily searchable, publicly available information.
If another hurricane makes landfall in North Carolina this year, the state will again urge residents who are evacuating to first try to stay with family and friends, then choose their own temporary accommodations before seeking help from the state or local governments.
“We have to make sure that people who are evacuating understand that they’ll have to have more space, that they’ll be screened, that sometimes they’ll be placed in hotel rooms so that we can have distancing,” Sprayberry said during a press conference last week.
It is also important, Sprayberry said, to think about temporary housing for people like Lea and his family or those in Bertie who lose their homes during storms.
In an analysis prepared after Isaias, the Union of Concerned Scientists found that many counties with a risk of flooding as well as escalating COVID-19 cases aren’t communicating their evacuation plans.
Researchers visited the counties’ website to see what plans, if any, were publicly available.
“For the most part we didn’t find anything specific. When people are scrambling to evacuate and they have to dig into several links about where to go, it might take valuable time,” said Astrid Caldas, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of the analysis.
Hertford and Northampton counties were the North Carolina areas included, Caldas said. A search Wednesday turned up no information about hurricane evacuations during COVID-19 on Northampton’s website. Hertford’s site has information about where shelters are located and what to bring but does not include anything about bringing personal protective equipment or other information about COVID-19.
Caldas was complimentary of North Carolina’s state-level guidance about evacuations and preparation. But counties and cities, she said, also need to create effective local guidance.
“If you do a search on hurricane evacuation for a location, the first thing that should pop up on the local government page is complete information about shelters, evacuation routes, number of people that will be allowed in shelters, what to bring — the hurricane evacuation kit now includes masks, sanitizers, sometimes bedding,” Caldas said.
Brunswick County, which operates its own shelters, opened two facilities with Hurricane Isaias approaching. Typically, those shelters could hold about 500 people each, said Ed Conrath, the county’s director of emergency services, but social distancing guidelines mean they can each hold about 200 people this year.
“That’s a big impact, and a concern if we have to do large sheltering,” Conrath said. He said about 45 people sought shelter in the county during Isaias.
People in shelters will be screened for COVID-19 symptoms and isolated if they have any, according to Brunswick’s website. Everyone in shelters will be required to wear face coverings.
Isaias in Brunswick County
Back in Brunswick County, beach towns Holden Beach and Ocean Isle Beach both declared mandatory evacuations as Isaias approached.
Debbie Smith, the longtime mayor of Ocean Isle Beach, said that her decision to declare a mandatory evacuation last Friday was based entirely on the approach and forecast timing of the storm, not the threat of a hurricane on top of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Check-in day for rentals on Ocean Isle Beach is Saturday, Smith said, and the timing of the storm meant that vacationers would likely be headed right back out on Sunday.
“There would have been 25,000 (people) here the next day. Where are they going?” Smith told the News & Observer, noting that there is a marked difference between someone driving down from Raleigh and someone visiting from Ohio.
Smith said people called her a fool and said that she was inexperienced for declaring the mandatory evacuation. But Isaias made landfall at Ocean Isle Beach, causing what Smith calls the largest storm surge she has ever seen — a wall of water she estimates was at least five feet high. The storm also caused several house fires on Ocean Isle Beach, destroying nine homes and damaging five more.
Oak Island did not order an evacuation before Isaias made landfall, only doing so afterwards, and for the parts of the town most impacted by the storm. Residents can now return to most of those areas, but as of August 13 vacationers were still barred from coming while clean-up efforts are underway.
Ken Thomas, Oak Island’s mayor, said that the storm did not behave how he anticipated it to, instead accelerating from a tropical storm into a Category 1 hurricane at the last minute and producing significantly more damaging storm surge.
“We would have handled it differently had we known that,” Thomas said, later adding, “It was bad. It was not the storm that was predicted.”
A National Hurricane Center track forecast from 5 p.m. on July 30 showed the center of Isaias near Southport at 2 p.m. Monday as a hurricane, meaning Oak Island would very much be in the storm’s path. Another forecast from at 2 p.m. on July 31 showed the storm making landfall in Brunswick County as a hurricane sometime on August 3.
Later forecasts from July 31 would downgrade the prediction to a storm, but still showed landfall around Brunswick, a prediction that would remain consistent.
Conrath said most of the county’s rescue operations during the storm took place in Oak Island. Many underestimated the storm because of its category, Conrath said, without focusing on the hazards.
“The Hurricane Center and the Weather Service were forecasting chances of tornadoes and storm surge,” Conrath said. “They were the two biggest concerns that they had, and they were the two biggest impacts we saw.”
This Monday, a week after the storm, stretches of West Beach Drive were still covered in thick layers of sand. Heaps were piled up next to the side of the road akin to snow in a parking lot after a snow storm.
At least 60 homes were seriously damaged, according to a post-storm report from the National Weather Service, and sand was pushed as much as three blocks inland. Floodwaters also damaged 75 to 100 vehicles.
Preliminary damage reports for Oak Island indicate Isaias caused about $10 million in damage to Oak Island homes, according to WECT-TV, with an additional $1.75 million in damage at area businesses.
Flooded during a pandemic
Anticipating water in the front yard during Isaias, Lea’s family had parked their cars at a nearby Publix that sits further back from the ocean. The vehicles all stayed dry through the storm, meaning the family can travel back and forth from their temporary accommodations to the house.
First, they stayed at the Captain’s Cove Motel for two nights and then spent two nights at the N.C. Baptist Assembly’s Fort Caswell, where there was a dock that the family could fish from.
Amid all of the short-term stays and close contact with new people, the Lea family is still being careful about wearing masks. At Fort Caswell, mask orders were strictly enforced. At Captain’s Cove all of the rooms open to the outdoors, Burt Lea said, meaning they can avoid close physical contact with other people.
“I’ve been scared to death of COVID ever since it came,” Burt Lea said. “I’m 68 years old with heart trouble, I’m as at risk as anybody. Yeah, but I’m not any more scared now than I was before this storm.”
Now, Lea has to figure out what to do about the house. After Hurricane Hazel lifted the house off of its foundation, prior owners returned it to the original spot. Lea would like to do that again, but he doesn’t know if local and federal officials will let him.
Late Monday afternoon, Lea was pondering how to find a piece of equipment to move large pieces of wood and brick that had either broken away or collapsed during the flood.
Before his bypass surgery, Lea said, tasks like removing the refrigerator or digging up and replacing a sewage pipe would have been challenges. Now, they are impossible without help.
“It’s harder to delegate than it is to do it,” Lea said, “but I can’t do it.”
This reporting is financially supported by Report for America/GroundTruth Project and The North Carolina Local News Lab Fund, a component fund of the North Carolina Community Foundation. The News & Observer maintains full editorial control of the work. To support the future of this reporting, subscribe or donate.
This story was originally published August 14, 2020 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Is NC ready for the next hurricane in a pandemic? Oak Island family was a test case.."