In mid-September 1999, a small tropical disturbance moving west across the Atlantic grew into a 600-mile-wide hurricane that tore through the Bahamas with winds of 155 miles per hour. Florida residents jammed grocery stores and home improvement warehouses as Hurricane Floyd bore down on the peninsula, but the Sunshine State was spared at the last minute as the storm turned north. Not so lucky was the Atlantic seaboard, which bore the full brunt of Floyd as the hurricane surged inland at Cape Fear, North Carolina.
Fortunately, Floyd had weakened in its trip up the coast, and by the time it made landfall, the highest winds were around 110 miles per hour. High winds caused some damage along the coastline, but the worst was yet to come. Hurricane Dennis had lingered off the North Carolina coast only a week before, pounding the eastern part of the state with wind and rain, and the ground was saturated with water. In Rocky Mount, Dennis had dropped 5 inches of rain, and Floyd deposited another 16.18 inches on top of that. In less than a week many areas of the state received more rainfall than they usually saw all year.
As the rain continued to fall, already swollen streams and rivers rose even further, overflowing their banks and spreading out into floodplains that had remained dry for more than a hundred years. The flooding spread eastward as the overflowing tributaries carried huge amounts of water downstream toward the sea, virtually wiping out the small town of Princeville, which had been founded by former slaves in 1865. The town was built on the banks of the Tar River, and when the river crested at an estimated 27 feet (estimated because the measuring gauge was completely submerged at that point), Princeville all but disappeared.
Many people had to cut holes in their roofs after being trapped in their attics by rising waters, and Coast Guard helicopters were pressed into service to rescue thousands. Pigs and cattle died in droves, trapped in the flood, and county after county was declared a disaster area. Floyd completely destroyed 7,000 homes in North Carolina alone, and left another 17,000 uninhabitable. H. David Bruton, the state’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, said, “Nothing since the Civil War has been as destructive to families here.”
Floyd wasn’t through with the East Coast yet. Many rivers in southeastern Virginia broke one-hundred-year records as they rose high above flood stage. The rampaging waters left nearly 300,000 people without power, damaged 5,000 homes, and filled downtown Franklin with 12 feet of muddy, smelly water.
One of Floyd’s worst effects was felt in eastern North Carolina, which is home to the majority of the state’s hog farms. Each day thousands of tons of hog waste and manure are flushed out of hog houses into open-air cesspools. When these lagoons were flooded, millions of gallons of waste poured out of lagoons into rivers and streams, polluting groundwater and posing a serious health threat.
By the time Floyd reached New Jersey, it was a tropical storm with winds of only 60 miles per hour, but its rains had lost none of their punch. The Raritan River Basin in the north-central part of the state received 7–11 inches of rain in less than twenty-four hours, and when the river crested on September 17, it set a new record of 42.13 feet, the highest recorded level since 1800. Tens of thousands of utility customers were without power after the storm, and flooded water treatment plants left thousands more without drinking water. The flooding caused electrical short circuits in many places, and fires began to break out, burning out of control as firefighters tried to reach them by boat.
Floyd took a final swipe at the United States in Maine and New Hampshire, where it dumped another 3–7 inches of rain before exiting into eastern Canada. The storm killed fifty-seven people, mostly deaths by drowning, and caused damages estimated to be more than $6 billion. More than 2.6 million people were evacuated from their homes ahead of the storm—the largest peacetime evacuation in US history—and ten states were declared major disaster areas in its wake.
Many of the disaster-relief problems uncovered by Floyd were organizational. The radios in military vehicles called in to help support relief efforts often couldn’t communicate with the radios used by civilian disaster workers, for example, and many rescue units were neither equipped nor trained for flood rescue.
Hurricane Floyd didn’t exactly sneak up on the East Coast. By 1999 satellite and aircraft observation methods were advanced enough to give everyone plenty of warning. Unlike a flash flood, Floyd gave coastal residents several days to make preparations. If that’s the case, how could so many people still get caught unaware as floodwaters swept away their homes and families? Weren’t any flood warnings issued before the storm?
In fact, the Southeast River Forecast Center (SERFC) in Atlanta was predicting 6–12 inches of rainfall from Floyd the day before it made landfall in the Carolinas, warning that rivers 80 to 100 miles inland would experience record floods. But the media were concentrating on the coastal regions, broadcasting video of thousands of evacuees heading west as the storm advanced. Kent Frantz of the SERFC remembers that “we tried to tell everyone that the main problem was going to be inland flooding, but no one seemed very interested.”