Hurricane Floyd’s Floodwaters Fueled Changes that Could Save Lives

We often learn valuable lessons in the wake of disaster and Hurricane Floyd is no different.

The storm and its flooding spurred policy changes that could one day prove life-saving.

Nine On Your Side’s Philip Jones has a look at the lessons that were found in Floyd’s floodwaters:

Most of us here in the east simply call it “The Flood of the Century.”

But experts such as UNC-Chapel Hill associate geography professor Chip Konrad say even that may not capture the ferocity of the flood that forever changed the landscape of eastern North Carolina.

“The 500 year flood, a flood of biblical proportions—you can use any kind of extreme words there to describe it because there’s nothing like it that’s happened in the modern history of that area,” Konrad said.

The storm was so severe it drew a response from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Gavin Smith was the Assistant Director of North Carolina Emergency Management at the time and says the state quickly learned that FEMA couldn’t fix everything.

So in Floyd’s wake, he says the state sunk $836 million in to new programs to better prepare for the next natural disaster.

“One of the things that we did is we were acquiring hog farms and junk yards in the flood plain,” Smith said. “And not only were we reducing the likelihood of future flood losses, we were also improving water quality in the case of future floods.”

Smith is now the executive director of UNC-CH’s Center for the Study of Natural Hazards and Disasters. He studies how to mitigate the impact of future storms and says the buyout of hundreds of flooded homes and the re-mapping of our state’s flood plain that came after Floyd will hopefully limit future devastation.

“Now there’s actually money that is available to communities to do mitigation before a storm ever happens,” Smith said.

He says Hurricane Floyd helped the state prove the value of being proactive—a lesson he hopes we’ll never forget.