#neuse river

because he put a baby in Mary

without her permission.

By Frances Stead Sellers, Washington Post, September 21, 2018

When Hurricane Florence crashed into North Carolina’s coastline last week, just a tree or two fell in this tiny town along the Neuse River, 70 miles inland. Soon, the power went out. As high winds and storm surge battered eastern cities such as Wilmington and New Bern, the residents here--those who hadn’t already moved away--left for higher ground to wait out what appeared to be a weakening tempest.

The storm then spun out over the state and broke up, unleashing massive rains before it moved on. When President Trump flew to North Carolina under sunlit skies five days later, evacuation orders were lifting, and people were beginning to go back home.

But here, in Seven Springs, the menace was mounting steadily. It seeped up Main Street, past the shop by the boat landing that sells fishing tackle, through the fire station, into Mae’s Restaurant.

When the Neuse finally peaked at three feet above major flood levels on Thursday, the mayor, who had not left his house since Monday, sat stranded on his front porch where Main and Easy streets meet. He eyed a ripped plastic bag of kitchen trash bobbing in the murky torrents whooshing by, a two-feet-deep brew of urban waste and everything else the Neuse picks up as it wends past hog farms and chicken houses on its 275-mile journey through North Carolina.

After Seven Springs, the swollen river flows by Kinston, where it is expected to crest early Saturday, and then New Bern and James City and on into the Pamlico Sound at the foot of the Outer Banks.

This, Potter said, is the real disaster, just like before, with Matthew in 2016, Floyd in 1999, and Fran in 1996. It comes on a time-delay, long after the winds and the rains have dissipated and attention has been diverted. The original assault over, the river completes a stealth attack, rising relentlessly out of its banks, lapping over curbs, inching its way onto porches and through doorways, and creeping up the riser onto the fourth of the new front steps that Potter had built two years ago.

Some roads around Seven Springs became impassible Thursday evening. Residents in parts of Bladen County to the south faced new mandatory evacuations as the Cape Fear River also continued to rise, with a crest expected during the weekend. Floodwaters breached a dam near a Duke Energy power plant on Friday, the company said, sending material from a toxic coal ash basin flowing into the Cape Fear River.

The river rises were predicted given the amount of rain Florence and its remnants dropped across the region--more than 30 inches in some places--and state officials have long been saying that the water, not the storm whence it came, was the real threat.

Small towns such as Seven Springs are paying the price; it has become more difficult to anticipate when the Neuse will crest, let alone how high.

“The flow of water changes every year,” said J. Mac Daughety, a county commissioner from neighboring Lenoir County who stood beside rescue vehicles on a short, dry stretch of Main Street, where a single brick marked the highest point the water has reached this time around.

During the flooding two years ago, Carolyn Griffin, 85, reluctantly agreed to let the National Guard carry her out of her stately Victorian house on Main Street. Her grandparents owned it once, and it had never taken in a drop of floodwater until the end of the century, when Floyd sent the river into its foundation.

Then Matthew slipped straight in through the front door. Florence is further confirmation of what Griffin already knew: She won’t be moving back. Even the handsome family furniture she rescued is bleached and cracking from the soaking it took.

“I think it’s a little bit too late for an ark,” Griffin said.

Potter, from his elevated perch across the street, tells a similar story. He purchased the old family home in 1992.

“In 100 years, it had never had water in it until Floyd,” he said. He gave the old frame away to one of Griffin’s daughters and had a new house built in 2000, elevated four feet above ground. That took in a foot of water in Matthew, and he has since rebuilt, this time another four feet higher.

Water wasn’t always such a foe here. The town was named after seven springs that were believed to have medicinal properties. Doctors would prescribe a visit to the hotel (now closed) so patients could ingest a concoction from the dipping wells: one scoop of water from Spring 1, mixed with two scoops from Spring 3 and half a scoop from Spring 5.