CityView Magazine

8 | October 2018 After the Flood BY SCOTT MOONEYHAM N O T E S F R O M H O M E W hen my oldest son returned to Fayette- ville aer a stay in the mountains with fellow UNC-Wilmington students who had fled Hurricane Florence, the friend who drove him home remarked to my wife and me, "I guess you all have never seen anything like this." I had to laugh a little. Obviously, Hurricane Matthew, two years ago, did not bring the kind of widespread destruction of Florence, even if the damage here in Fayetteville – as well as in places like Lumberton and Linden – was every bit as bad or worse. But we had also lived through Hurricanes Fran in 1996 and Floyd in 1999 as residents of Fayetteville. As vaca- tioners on Ocracoke Island, we experienced the sudden blow up of Hurricane Alex in 2004. en there was the fact that I had spent a part of my ca- reer not running away from hurricanes, but purposely running into them. As a journalist working for the As- sociated Press, that came with the territory. So when my wife was riding out Fran and her 80 mph winds alone in our Fayetteville home, I was pulling a late-night shi from the main state AP office in Ra- leigh, calling county emergency management directors and compiling reports on the damage that then helped feed news stories appearing across the state and across the country. When Floyd's eye crossed Wilmington around 4 a.m., I was in a hotel room there waiting for it to pass and for the morning light to come so that I could push out the stories of its wrath. In 2003, aer Hurricane Isabel brought its own meas- ure of ruin to the Outer Banks and inland coastal com- munities including Edenton, I took a helicopter ride with then-Governor Mike Easley over Hatteras and Ocracoke islands to assess the damage. And in 1989, photographer and friend Brian Strickland and I – then working for the Goldsboro News-Argus newspaper – sat in a Wilmington Waffle House as Hugo stormed ashore in Charleston and largely missed Wilmington despite a forecasted path that had us eating with a large throng of media from around the country. It should not be surprising that, when spending time sticking your face into hurricane winds, all kinds of odd and funny things happen, even if they don't seem so funny at the time. While Hugo may have mostly missed Wilmington, it did cause enough damage on Wrightsville Beach to warrant a tour of the blown-out windows and doors at the Blockade Runner hotel. at tour ended with me, unable to see due to the horizontal rain, walking straight into the pool and being soaked from head to toe. Meanwhile, many of the national media members who had come to Wilmington from Charlotte, where they had been covering the high-profile trial of tel- evangelist Jim Bakker, had to pick their way back to the Queen City to cover the destruction there. On my helicopter ride with Easley, one of his aides and I wondered about the governor's future as he perched himself in the open helicopter window. He was, fortu- nately, harnessed into the aircra. In Ocracoke in 2004, aer being somewhat involuntar- ily enlisted to provide a first-hand report for e News & Observer of Raleigh on riding out Alex, I was less than thrilled with an evacuation order that came aer the storm even though our car and condo room had survived without damage. With the blessing of the con- do manager, we evaded the evacuation order by claim- ing to be the owners and keeping a relatively low profile until it was lied.

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