Hurricane Floyd Aftermath Pictures

On September 16th, 1999, North Carolina was hit by hurricane Floyd. For several days beforehand, all the news could talk about was the Class 5 hurricane bearing directly down on us. The weather bureau predicted that Floyd was going to make landfall over Wilmington and head directly over the Triangle area (where we're located), without losing much strength... it was predicted that it would still be a Category 4 storm when it hit us.

Well, everyone around here remembers Fran, which was borderline Cat-3 when it got here, and still hammered us hard enough that we were without power for three days... and we were among the relatively untouched - we didn't lose any flora more significant than a few dead branches. So everyone buckled down, we brought my car into the garage (it's the only one that fits, and only barely, at that... Dad's Bonneville is too long, and Mom's Caprice wagon won't even go through the door) and left Dad's in the empty parking lot at work. The Caprice, Dad parked on the lawn next to the house, in hopes that the building would protect it from any trees that might come down in its neighborhood.

So we sat around and watched the thing come. Some time just after midnight, we had the first power flicker, and I shut down all the servers save lynn, anastasia, and CI-NET, who had the UPSen to protect them. I went to bed after that, because with the speed the storm was moving, we weren't predicted to get hit with the destructive winds until mid-morning, and I wasn't about to wait up for it.

Well, the next morning dawned bright and sunny. The storm, it seemed, had veered east and pretty much missed us completely. All we got was a bunch of rain, which left some water in the crawl space, and had predictible effects on the Caprice parked on the grass.

Well, I thought it was predictable, anyway. Dad was apparently taken by surprise by the concept of a large vehicle sinking into ground made soft by three days of rain, and the idea that it might leave ruts when driven across that ground.

That was the extent of our storm damage, anyway. No big deal. The poor folks downstream from us got seriously screwed, though... I'm still having trouble picturing rivers 25 feet above flood-stage, even after seeing on the news every night for weeks...