LUMBERTON — Weeks after Hurricane Matthew’s floodwaters have receded from West Lumberton, a bizarre remnant of the catastrophe remains: Sand.
It’s everywhere.
Dragged from nearby railroad tracks and washed out from underneath an interstate bridge, the sand forms mounds at intersections, blankets yards and leaves a thin layer in homes that had filled knee-deep with water. Children play in it the make-shift beach. Neighbors trudge through it on their way next door. Visitors are baffled.
“It’s not just underwater, it’s now under sand,” Gov. Pat McCrory said Thursday during a visit to the neighborhood school. “It’s almost like a beach community. I’m not saying that in a haphazard way, I’m saying it in a very serious way.”
The new landscape is just one unique challenge facing West Lumberton, which certainly wasn’t the only Lumberton neighborhood devastated by the Oct. 8 storm. But the area’s mix of residential and commercial structures were on the front lines as water rushed from the swollen Lumber River, across Interstate 95 and through a gap in the levee intended to protect much of the city from flooding — catching residents off guard well after Matthew’s downpour stopped.
“I believe and I’ve heard a lot from the elderly, a lot of the churches — God is letting us know he is still in charge,” said Precinct 7 Councilman Leon Maynor. “That’s looking at it from a religious point, but there’s a message here. Could we have done something to prepare for it? I don’t know of anything.”
Nearly 200 roads were closed by Hurricane Matthew in Robeson County, cutting the county off from the state, Lumberton from the rest of the county and West Lumberton from the rest of the city. With its main artery — West Fifth Street — submerged, city services and rescue efforts were strangled. Some West Lumberton homes were still without power mid-week, Maynor said.
On the morning of Oct. 9, water was knee deep in a residential area south of West Fifth. By the next day, it was waist deep.
“The current was like it is inside the river,” said Lacole Norton, who lives on the now ironically named Canal Street, near several of her relatives, including her mother, a cousin and an uncle. Although aid has flowed steadily since the storm passed and roads reopened, Norton feels like she and her neighbors were left to save themselves from the rising floodwater.
The floor has already been ripped out of Norton’s mother’s home on Canal Street. Her cousin, Joshua Norris, has been displaced from the house he rents down the block because of mold.
“It’s dead over here,” Norris said.
They estimated that only about three homes in their neighborhood were still occupied on Tuesday, although some neighbors have been coming back during the day to work on their homes.
“It’ll never be the same,” Norton said. “It’s going to look like this for a long time.”
Maynor said many West Lumberton residents rent their homes and will struggle in the short-term to find affordable, suitable housing there with so many rental properties and public housing units destroyed by the hurricane. Landlords, he said, are already saying they can’t or won’t repair their properties. Homes too damaged to salvage will have to be condemned and torn down by the city.
“I don’t know what my community will look like a year from now,” he said. “I don’t think there will be too much of a change in a month.”
Maynor believes that many residents of the tight-knit community who can restore their homes will chose to put in the work. Local businesses, like Pate’s Drive-In and several car lots on West Fifth Street, will also have to weigh whether repairs are worth the cost.
“Some of these homes have been here 50, 60 years so they can’t withstand what they went through,” Maynor said. “It’s going to be a challenge over the next year or so just to see what does come of it and if we can maintain the dignity of what we did have.”
The fate of West Lumberton Elementary School is also in the air, at least in its current form. It suffered the most damaged of Robeson’s 42 public schools and as a result will not able be to open Monday when classes resume. Students will go to Lumberton Junior High while school officials explore the possibility of installing mobile units near the elementary school.
“We have issues regarding the cost of the cleanup of this school versus rebuilding and if you rebuild where do you rebuild?” McCrory said Thursday in front of the school.
Maynor hopes the school will be restored; it’s a point of pride for the community. Along with churches, it serves as a place where old friends and strangers alike can meet, particularly under the oak tree shading its entrance.
“There’s lots of history to the tree and it doesn’t mean nothing to nobody except old folks like me,” he said. “That tree is where people sat, they gathered around it with their umbrellas. Any kind of function they had, they had it around that old oak tree.”
An influx of volunteers to the neighborhood — and the city as a whole — could speed up the rebuilding phase. Ministries and other disaster-relief groups from all over the country have joined local volunteers in Robeson County, offering to rip out insulation, haul furniture and cut trees free of charge — a much needed service as residents await often disappointing financial assistance from the federal government.
“A lot of these people are on fixed incomes,” Maynor said. “They don’t have any money.”
On Tuesday, a Pennsylvania-based group with Christian Aid Ministries was working to empty a home on National Avenue before breaking for lunch. About 60 of its members are in Robeson County and they will continue their work in shifts until spring.
“Hopefully out of this we can have more unity and people can come together and realize that we can make a difference,” Maynor said, “but we have to stay strong as a community. You can’s step back and depend on the federal government, City Hall or anybody else. Some things you kind of have to take by the horn.”
