Coastal towns fear new disaster from Dorian will compound old disaster from Florence

B.J. Stiens climbed the stairs into her house that has wobbled precariously for nine months on wooden cribbing 10 feet off the ground. She looked out at the still-calm Core Sound 100 yards away and worried about the storm grinding up the coast in her direction.

“If we get a wall of water like we did in Hurricane Florence, it’ll knock the cribbing out from under the house, and it’ll all be gone,” she said. “And there is nothing we can do to prevent it.”

The Stienses are an extreme example of a common scenario for people across Carteret County, where Hurricane Florence in September 2018 damaged hundreds of homes, many of which have not yet been repaired as Hurricane Dorian approaches.

The Sienses bought the house, in the fishing community of Smyrna, several years ago, relocating from Alamance County to what they hoped would be a less stressful life.

Then along came Florence, with its 7-foot storm surge that swamped the Stienses’ nearly 4-acre property. Their house, which sat then on a 4-foot-high foundation, got only 6 inches of water inside. But because the house had never flooded before, the Stienses had no flood insurance.

In order to receive repair money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the couple agreed to elevate the house so that future storms couldn’t flood it again.

They hired a man who promised he could lift the structure, build the new, higher foundation and set the house back down in seven to 10 days for $15,000. The couple paid half the money up front from their FEMA payout. They moved into a travel trailer that strangers donated and parked in the yard.

The contractor brought a crew out at the end of October and on Nov. 1, the Stiens house was up on temporary supports.

He never finished the job.

Not safe to go inside

Month after month has passed. The Stienses took the man to court for accepting payment for work he had not done. He signed an agreement saying he would complete the job by a deadline that came and went last week, with never another hour’s worth of work done.

In the meantime, the stress from being suspended without proper support has caused the house to sag in the middle. The framing below the windows is warped into a faint smile. Doors don’t close. The house sways when anyone walks through it.

An engineer has told the Stienses it’s not safe to go inside it.

But B.J. Stiens was in there Wednesday, looking for anything she had not already taken out that she might be able to save before Dorian hits. She found some family photos and old military records she had forgotten were stashed in a drawer, and a wagon her uncle had built when he was young.

In the neighboring communities of Otway, Straits and Marshallberg, others are in similar circumstances, worried that Dorian could be the new disaster that just compounds the last one.

Facing a labor shortage in the construction trades, homeowners have struggled to get repairs made; many houses still have blue tarps across their roofs, holes in their floors and exposed wall studs.

“We just got finished hanging drywall a month ago,” David Cashwell said as he pulled storm shutters from his garage to install on the windows of his two-story house facing Sleepy Creek in Marshallberg. The community, a half-hour east of Beaufort, was hit hard by flooding from Florence, and Cashwell said his neighbors had decided to leave for Dorian, in case the water rose in their house again.

To stay or not to stay?

Cashwell and his wife, Alice, will decide Thursday whether to stay in Marshallberg or retreat to Fayetteville, where Cashwell has a landscaping business. That’s what they did during Florence, but it didn’t work out all that well for the couple, Cashwell said. Parts of Fayetteville were badly flooded during Florence and the couple couldn’t get back to the coast for a week.

By then, their upstairs was a mess where the hurricane had ripped open a section of the roof and let the rain pour in.

Cashwell said he is inclined to ride this one out. If it gets real bad, he said, he and Alice will bring their pet pig, Banjo, into the house and wait until it’s over.

For fishing families, a hurricane is a double threat. They worry about their homes and fret over their boats.

“Nobody down here has insurance on their boats,” said Rusty Taylor, who was aboard the Addie Gage on Wednesday morning in Harker’s Island. It was his friend’s boat; Taylor already had secured his own on the other side of the harbor.

It’s a familiar routine for fishermen, he said: Add extra lines tying the boat to the dock, tie down the nets, go home and wait.

At home, there are other problems, he said. “We’ve got rooms with nothing in them, where we’re still redoing them from Florence.”

Ben Payne, who was helping put plywood over the windows of the NAPA Auto Parts store where he works in Otway on Wednesday, said the first floor of his house is still damaged.

“We’re still rebuilding from the last one,” he said.

As Dorian approached, it began raining a few hours later.

This story was originally published September 4, 2019 at 5:21 PM with the headline "Coastal towns fear new disaster from Dorian will compound old disaster from Florence."