- [Kelly] Hurricane Floyd devastated eastern North Carolina 25 years ago.

- Tonight, get out of harm's way.

Get in a safe place and stay in it until this storm is over.

- [Kelly] We review its impact then and how we still feel that storm today on this very special "State Lines."

[dramatic music continues] - [Announcer] Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[dramatic music continues] - Welcome to this very special edition of "State Lines."

I'm Kelly McCullen joining me today is a man of many roles who in 1999 was Assistant Secretary of the Department of Public Safety.

I'm talking about my dear friend, Joe Stewart here joining the panel, former Department of Public Safety Secretary and former State Treasurer Richard Morris to his right.

And in seat four, as we call it, Jay, hurricane historian, former Director of the State Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores, Jay Barnes.

Guys, thank you so much for being on this very special look back.

25 years, we're not as young as we used to be, and Hurricane Floyd came through.

And if you're new to North Carolina, you may not know the significance of this storm.

You'll hear a term storm of the century, it's used a lot in recent years, especially during hurricane season.

But 1999 was at least the hurricane season for the history books in this state.

There were three storms that struck us in North Carolina between August and October of 1999.

But it was that middle storm, Hurricane Floyd, that's still remembered today.

[dramatic music] - [Narrator] The passage of Hurricane Floyd through eastern North Carolina in September 1999 produced an epic flood that ranks as the most widespread, destructive, and deadly natural disaster in North Carolina's history.

66 counties were declared disaster areas.

Damage estimates exceeded $6 billion.

There were 52 reported fatalities.

More than 60,000 homes were flooded, most of them hit without warning in the middle of the night.

Hundreds had to be rescued from rooftops and submerged vehicles.

- I don't have to tell the people of North Carolina what a dangerous storm this is.

- [Narrator] It was the three-fisted punch of Hurricanes Dennis in August, Floyd in mid-September, and Irene in October that delivered the biggest blow in North Carolina's hurricane history.

Floyd prompted the largest peace-time evacuation ever along the eastern seaboard.

Finally at 3:00 a.m. on September 16th, Floyd made landfall near Cape Fear.

The center tracked along the beaches of New Hanover County, moved over New Bern and Washington, and then turned back out to sea over the coast of Norfolk, Virginia.

It moved on up the coast at a quickened pace and left heavy rains in New England before heading out over the North Atlantic.

- And that's just a taste of Hurricane Floyd.

Jay, that's from the 1999 UNC TV documentary, "Faces from the Flood," that you gentlemen played a key role in helping us both fund and produce with Donna Campbell, and I appreciate you for that 'cause our archive is a real treasure trove.

But Jay, back to business, looking from a helicopter with news media and B-roll, it dehumanizes the effect that all those houses you saw underwater was someone's home.

How bad was this storm compared to other famous storms you hear about, say Katrina in New Orleans, or even as the old-timers here used to talk about Hurricane Hazel?

- Yeah, it's a really good question.

I think that Hurricane Floyd was a benchmark for our state in so many ways.

And it was probably because it was the first statewide flood that caused the kind of scope of damage that we saw.

66 counties were declared.

There were about 63,000 homes that were flooded.

It was called a 500-year flood and unfortunately a lot of times people think, well, you only get those every 500 years.

It turns out to not be the case.

We've had some other recent disasters like Matthew and Florence, whose flooding was equal or surpassed that of Floyd.

But still for 1999, at that time, it was a storm unlike any other we had seen, the most expensive storm in our state's history, and still to this day, one of the deadliest with 52 fatalities.

- Richard Moore, you were running the Department of Public Safety under Jim Hunt's leadership as governor, tell me about this storm.

Fran was one thing, that was in '96, when did this one get on your radar?

What were your expectations as you saw it skirt up through Florida, bypass Charleston, and head our way?

- Well, first of all, I wanna thank you, Kelly, for having us and this book and looking back at the documentary and the book that Jay and I did together did exactly what we wanted it to do.

To pick it up today, it's reliving the storm.

And when I was growing up in North Carolina, people always talked about, well, where were you during Hazel?

And so this is, and Jay has done this for so many storms, but it was a cultural experience unlike any of the other storms.

And the four years that I was Secretary of Public Safety, we had one storm after another, starting with Fran and Bertha that were, one was a tree-driven damage, the other was an agricultural damage.

But this flood, it may not have been the storm of the century, but it was the flood of the century.

And it became a cultural event because it lasted so long.

Usually when you get ready for a hurricane, you see it, everybody's watching the Weather Channel and everything else, and you have a terrible 48 hours, and then everybody begins to rebuild their life.

What was so unusual about this storm, it was day after day after day of rising water, in some places more than 14 days of the water going up every day.

And it just really, I've never been involved in anything like the emotional tax, but then the outpouring of people caring about their neighbors.

- Joe, I remember the rain falling and this storm clearing outta here in '99.

It didn't feel that bad, but what about the rising water?

What happened from the west to the east?

- Well, the devastation that it caused, notwithstanding the fact that storm water like this is usually full of sewage, and garbage, and snakes, and all sorts of terrible things, the aftermath for people who have had their homes flooded is many times it's either not easily repaired or it's simply not possible for them to ever go back to where they once lived.

The emotional toll was significant in that regard, too.

It really did put the state's capacity to respond to a large-scale natural disaster almost to its breaking point because of the significant scope of this damage.

And a water event is very difficult because the transportation infrastructure becomes so much more complicated to deliver aid to people.

It really was devastating in a way that I think North Carolina hadn't been prepared for entirely, but we responded to pretty well, in large part because of the lessons we'd learned from Fran where there were inadequacies in the state system for responding to disaster.

Probably our response to Floyd was stronger because of what we learned in Fran.

- All right, Hurricane Floyd wasn't like any other hurricane, it does blow through our state, it will head north and oftentimes it will curve out into the North Atlantic where it dies a quiet death.

What made Floyd different was what the gentleman are saying.

It was the flooding, it came days after landfall, and that's what changed state history.

Let's pick up the documentary from here.

- [Narrator] As the rain poured on the Pamlico Sound was six to eight feet above normal, backing up into the Neuse and Pamlico Rivers.

Floyd had only been a category two storm when it passed through, so local officials were still thinking they had dodged a bullet, but before it was all over, the rains would last for more than 60 hours.

Flash floods soon swept through the Tar, the Neuse, and the Northeast Cape Fear basins.

The magnitude of the danger was simply not understood yet.

Some people were asleep in their beds, awakened by the sensation of water on their backs.

[somber music] The ground was saturated and the rivers were already at flood stage.

Water backed up into homes, farms, businesses, and highways.

Road bridges crumbled and buckled under the rush of water.

Whole sections of highways were swept away.

Dams burst.

Hog lagoons spilled over their levees and scores of water and sewer treatment plants were submerged, Hog, chicken and turkey operations were hard-hit, drowning thousands of animals whose carcasses would drift for days.

Tobacco barns that had just been filled were in ruin.

Fields of cotton, peanuts, and soybeans would never be harvested.

Meandering creeks and rivers that normally were only 30 to 50 feet wide had spread to reach across a mile.

Whole towns looked like lakes and the water was still rising.

An epic flood held the entire population in its grip.

But by the first day of sunshine, people knew what had to be done.

- I want to appeal to you tonight on behalf of one million of our neighbors who are suffering the worst disaster in the history of North Carolina, neighbors who desperately need our help and our prayers.

- [Narrator] Governor Hunt declared a state of emergency, activating the National Guard and the state's emergency management plan.

More than 235 Red Cross shelters were opened.

Many of the thousands of people who had left home were now trapped in those shelters and couldn't be reached by land.

More than a thousand roads were closed, including sections of Interstate 95.

Power lines were out, so were the telephones.

Cell phones weren't even working.

- It's like our town has been wiped out.

- How can you sleep and rest good knowing that somebody live next door to you that are hungry?

- We just need all the help we can get.

- You heard from those citizens back in 1999.

I don't know, how do you keep everything straight after a storm like this?

You've lost everything, you're in the middle of town, and that may be the only dry spot.

How did it get this way?

Floyd moved through, moved out.

Why did that water not soak in the ground or flow better than it did to get away from these homes and farms?

- Well, it really all started with Hurricane Dennis, which then became Tropical Storm Dennis, as it made landfall twice on our coast.

And all the rains from Dennis, which really weren't that bad, but they filled all the ditches and the creeks and they raised the river levels almost to flood stage before Floyd came.

And then Floyd approaches from the Caribbean as a category five.

And everybody was just laser-focused on what is this thing gonna do.

And fortunately it turned and weakened and came our way, unfortunately.

But then all of us who sat around and said, wow, it looks like we've dodged a bullet because this could have been a category four or five when it came, came in as a category two.

So we're looking at a storm that's diminished in strength.

Everybody kind of relaxed a little bit, and it was a mistake because we knew that it was gonna get worse from there from the rains.

- Richard, what caught you off guard at the state level?

'Cause history has shown that maybe your team thought we got away this time.

- Yeah, and I can remember that feeling, thinking it was a two, but it was a weak two.

And you know just a week before this was the most perfectly formed storm anybody had ever seen.

And it was three times the size of a normal, well-formed hurricane.

And first it was gonna hit Florida, so Florida cleared out.

Then it was gonna hit Georgia, then Georgia cleared out.

Then it was gonna go the path of Hugo, it was gonna go to Charlotte, so western North Carolina cleared out.

And then it moved again.

We weren't off guard for anything, but we were completely and totally overwhelmed.

If you think about it today, okay, a storm comes, you have a lot of flooding, people got nowhere to go, they can't go home.

But the one thing that made this storm so different, we opened up the shelters.

We actually did a really nice job of evacuating, largest evacuation in the history of the United States at the time and maybe even still today.

We did a great job of getting people outta harm's way, but we sent them to shelters.

Well, one of the biggest shelters we went and I ended my workday almost every day for a week at Tarboro High School.

We set up these wonderful shelters and we were ready to shelter people, to feed them, to keep them dry, but then all of a sudden we had to do it by helicopter, because there was no road.

And so will we have something like this again?

Probably yes.

But to have places where you've sent people to and then not be able to get to them for over a week.

- Joe, as an assistant secretary, it is tiring, but is it more overwhelming, or is it stressful in that you're tense, are you just tired and having to plug along, but you know what you're gonna do at the state level?

- You know, one of the interesting facets of the time I spent working for then Secretary Moore, during these natural disasters, the folks from FEMA that would come into the state and they work more or less like reservists.

They get called up whenever there's a disaster of any sort to work on response and recovery types of initiatives and efforts.

And so they've seen a lot of different types of things.

Meeting with those people that had made a career out of responding to natural disaster, getting a better understanding of just how essential it is for the citizens who've been dramatically affected by the storm to not give up hope, to let them know what the government's doing to respond and react, as Richard said, make sure they know they have a place they can go where they'll be safe and fed, making sure that it's understood we're trying to clear the roads so your life can be restored and you can get back to where you were before this event.

A lot of the communication that's necessary through government to the public, other local elected officials, everybody being aware that the state and the federal government has a plan.

And it's deploying that plan to make sure people can be restored and recovered to where they were because if they give up hope, that's when bad things happen.

- Richard, I'm glad you mentioned Princeville.

I wanna move to that and we can get back to this topic.

But Princeville, North Carolina is a very small town.

It's still small, it's located right across the Tar River from Tarboro.

It was completely destroyed by flood water.

And the federal government believed in '99 it was too risky to rebuild that town, but the history of Princeville is what saved it.

[peaceful music] - [Narrator] Before the flood, most people in North Carolina had never heard of Princeville and its historical significance.

But when the dike around the town broke and the Tar River rushed in, Princeville was in the news all over the world.

The entire population, 2,100 people, had lost everything they owned.

Every building was underwater.

Even burial vaults in the cemetery had floated up to the surface.

Delia Perkins, a native of Princeville and mother of six, worked as a teacher's aide in the elementary school.

She had only recently been elected to the part-time position of mayor.

- [Delia] Right after the flood, it was chaos because we had all of these people in two schools, and then there were other people from East Tarboro that were in those schools, too.

So we had to really wonder what we were gonna do about the people.

And it was just a chore trying to get from one place to another to check on the senior citizens to see who was where.

And then FEMA came into town and I had never heard of FEMA.

- [Narrator] FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, saw Princeville as their biggest challenge after the flood.

Finding the residents was the first difficulty.

Many had fled the town and were staying with family and friends in other parts of the state.

Those who remained had to be moved from the emergency shelters to a travel trailer village that was erected on a landfill next to the women's prison near Rocky Mount, they called it Femaville.

Within weeks, FEMA announced that Princeville could not be rebuilt.

The land would be purchased by the federal government and set aside, the residents would have to relocate.

Princeville found friends from all across the country who wanted to save the nation's oldest black-governed community.

- Most folks didn't know Princeville existed a week ago as an African town with tourism.

There'll be people around the world wanting to help Princeville now.

- We're gonna stay with you 'til you get back on your feet again, as long as it takes.

Thank you and God bless you.

[crowd applauding] - [Narrator] President Clinton set aside $1.5 million for Princeville but the bill for rebuilding the town, the dike, and flood proofing was estimated at more than $18 million.

- Back to you, Richard.

$18 million, you needed billions to get the job done across the state.

However, bill Clinton comes to Princeville, Jesse Jackson comes to Princeville when FEMA says we want to relocate all the folks and create a, was it create a new Princeville or just do away with Princeville at the time?

- I think it was both at the time.

The first step being we're not letting anybody move back into this low-lying area that the dike had basically created a bowl.

And what happens when water comes into a bowl, it stays for a long time.

There were some, because of the historical significance of Princeville, it did become an important part of this.

But having those folks come in and all the attention that we got really helped/ Governor Hunt later went to Congress at the end of the session and came back with the $4 billion that North Carolina needed.

And the thing, Kelly, that I think about today, if this storm happened tomorrow, would partisan politics completely stay out of it?

I would hope that it would.

I can't remember anybody talking about, well, that's a Democrat or that's a Republican.

Everybody was concerned with helping their neighbor/ And are we really just left with emergencies where we were able to put that piece of our lives to the side?

But it was everybody worked really hard to get what we needed done.

And the people of Princeville ended up in a good place.

Their town is fine, the dike was built properly, which FEMA did not want to do at that point.

But to the best of my knowledge, it's back in great shape.

- Joe, talk about having the big-time, big politicians come into a town.

Usually when a flood happens, FEMA comes in, tells a bunch of homeowners, you're not rebuilding.

Princeville beat them, how?

- Well, in large part, it's important for the state to be able to tell the story that the nature of the disaster is so completely overwhelming that the resources available through the state are just insufficient to try to recover entirely.

And that you need the full resources of the federal government, bringing in people from the federal government, the president of the United States, high-ranking officials in the administration, even to the extent that someone like Reverend Jackson is a celebrity that brings attention, media awareness to the scope of the problem.

It's all an essential part of making the case, for getting the resources necessary, not just to respond and recover to the storm, but to begin to do the type of mitigation activity that will eliminate or alleviate, at least in part, the probability of losses in future storms.

- Jay, Princeville was a forgotten town until Hurricane Floyd.

Now it was flooded, it got national attention.

What's the history looking forward for Princeville in terms of people remembering it, what it went through, and where it could be in the future?

- I think you'll find that the people of Princeville are so proud of their heritage, they're proud of what they have built there, but it remains vulnerable.

I mean, we talk about the dike and some of these other storms, there will be another flood one day that will bring that to bear on a town like Princeville, just as we see in so many other eastern North Carolina cities.

And one of the things that FEMA was trying to do there is to prevent flooding in those homes again.

And so they have implemented a buyout program that's been pretty popular across the state in a lot of areas like Kinston, where homes have been removed and now is just a green space.

- All right, when people flee hurricanes for storm shelters, it's pets and other animals that often, not often, always get left behind, and if you're a farmer, you have nowhere to take your livestock, you just hunker down in the chicken house, the hog house.

Floyd displaced or killed about three million of our pets and livestocks and this documentary's called "Faces from the Flood," so we've got two of the faces in this next story.

They were a veterinarian and her husband who helped rescue pets in Pender County back in fall of 1999.

- [Narrator] Cindy Burnett is a veterinarian in the town of Burgaw in Pender County.

Her husband, Buster, is her business partner.

- A friend of mine who's a veterinarian was called to pull some of her client's horses out of the floodwater.

And she asked me if I wanted to come and watch or see because she thought they were gonna be flown out with a helicopter and a sling.

And I thought that'd be kind of neat.

And when I drove down this road and all of a sudden the water was covering the road.

And as you looked further down the road, it just got deeper and deeper and deeper.

And some of the houses, all you could see was the rooftops.

The houses that weren't completely covered, you could see dogs chained on porches and dogs in the windows parting the curtains, looking out.

- They couldn't open the doors and they didn't know that they could just step through those screen windows.

The animals that have been trained, don't scratch on the door, don't bark, don't tear the curtains down, don't tear up the house.

Okay, I'll just sit here and wait.

- So we were just going to get four horses.

And when we got the last one out of the water, and my husband asked the man who owned the boat, he said, "There's just so many animals out there."

He said, "Can I just take the boat and get what I can see?"

And that just started an avalanche of people coming to help him.

He would come back with a boat full of dogs, and cats, and chickens all in the same boat.

- Fortunately, they didn't fight.

The first trip I had those two chickens, four or five cats, several dogs, a pot-bellied pig, all in one little bitty 14-foot boat with two guys in there and none of the animals were fighting at all.

None of 'em tried to get out until we hit dry land and then they were ready to come out then.

- [Narrator] In spite of Burnett's tireless efforts and the work of other animal rescuers, many animals perished in the flood, 30,000 hogs, 2.8 million poultry, some 2,000 cattle, and 600 horses.

The disaster also created havoc with insects, snakes, and other wildlife.

- When I felt like I was at my last, my last muscle's ability to get up and go out there, I'd have somebody call from somewhere else and say, "You're going out today, right?"

I'd say, "Yeah."

- And I clipped that interview and edited it just for the shortness of this television show.

He said he was tired, Joe.

That image of the hog farm, those hogs traipsing around there.

You've mentioned off camera about the smell of what you saw at these farms and areas, was it traumatic, do you still remember it vividly?

- Well, I remember having a lot of conversations being in the state's emergency operation center and a farmer would call and say that all of the hogs were out on top of the barn.

Pigs are, I guess ironically, are good swimmers but there was nowhere to go so they were on top of the barn.

But they're very susceptible to the sun.

They were dying as a result of being exposed to the sun.

And the farmer's pleading with us to do something and we said there's nothing we can do.

Once the hogs have died, we can come and clean out the carcasses.

But it was devastatingly sad to think these farmers were gonna lose their livelihood and there was very little that could be done.

- Richard, how many farmers did, that's not a statistic, but did people lose their livelihood or was the government there and insurance companies there to backfill this loss?

- To my knowledge, the businesses that were damaged were able to put their businesses back together.

But just again, the resources that we never thought we'd have to have.

We didn't think we'd have to have large-scale incineration of livestock.

We didn't think that we would have to rebury coffins.

- Of humans.

- Yes, of human begins, of cemeteries that had floated up in places.

And these were huge operations.

This wasn't a couple of people in a day.

These were things it took on months to put things back to normal.

And I know, as I said before, I know we'll have things like this in the future, but I hope I never live to see a flood like this again.

- Jay, we have one minute left in this show maybe, I'll leave it to you, historian, put Hurricane Floyd in perspective.

- Well, one thing that sticks in my mind is as we were doing these interviews for this book, a couple of the people I talked to told me that the insidious nature of the way this flood came in, in the middle of the night, when they had seen on the news before they went to bed that the storm was moving by as a category two, and the way they found out they had a problem was they woke up at three in the morning and their backs were wet.

And if you think about that, what that means is that the water rose quietly into their homes and woke them up.

And then we launched these major efforts for rescue and God bless 'em, all of the local fire departments and police departments, and rescue teams locally in the counties, many of them volunteers, just put their Jon boats to work and went to pull people out of houses.

That's one of the great lessons that we learned from Hurricane Floyd.

Today, and you look back at Hurricane Florence recently, we have swift water, highly trained teams all across the state.

- Thanks a lot, gentlemen, thank you for this look back at Hurricane Floyd, we're out of time.

If you have a storm story, share it with me, I'll share it with the panel, statelines@pbsnc.org.

Thank you for watching, we'll see you soon on "State Lines."

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