Fear and Flooding in North Carolina 

 

Scientists warn that flood-prone U.S. communities…, like Princeville, [North Carolina, a poor and largely minority community]* face an increased risk of disaster due to a dangerous combination of global warming and ongoing

human alteration of land for profit. And they say future flooding has the potential to be just as or even more devastating than what happened [in 1999] following Hurricane Floyd, which killed 35 people, destroyed 8,000 homes and caused some $1.9 billion in damage in North Carolina alone. The storm hit eastern North Carolina, the state’s most impoverished region, especially hard…

 

A man-made catastrophe:  [Dr. Stanley Riggs, an East Carolina University geology professor and Floyd expert, urges] people to stop blaming God and Mother Nature for disastrous floods and face their own role in creating them… Though the floods followed storms that were beyond earthly control, human tampering with the land has exacerbated the damage storms cause. Soon after the white settlers drove the Tuscarora people from eastern North Carolina in the early 1700s, they began ditching and drain- ing the region’s extensive swamps and upland coastal dismals known as “pocosins,” an Indian word for “swamp on

a hill.” By the 1980s, North Carolina had lost half of its original wetlands, which act like sponges to absorb rain into the earth. Also in the mid-20th century, the U.S. Soil Conservation Service and Army Corps of Engineers began

artificially channeling streams with the intention of improving marginal agricultural land and controlling upland flooding. But as a result, stormwater now pours off the earth and jeopardizes downstream communities like Princeville.  

 

Road building… and [land development also contribute] to flooding by removing trees and increasing hard surfaces.  During the 1990s alone, North Carolina’s forests and other open spaces were developed at a rate of more than 156,000

acres a year — a 67 percent increase over the previous dec- ade. The state lost more than a million acres of forests over the last 12 years, largely due to urban sprawl.*  

 

The solution becomes the problem:  [Flood] control efforts have complicated the very problem they set out to fix. “The traditional approach to reducing flooding largely relies on straight-jacketing rivers with levees and floodwalls, and quickly funneling floodwaters to downstream areas”   ...That’s precisely what happened at Princeville, where the levee altered the Tar River’s flow to disastrous effect. 

 

Rising Flood Risks:  While Princeville has been largely resurrected since Hurricane Floyd, little has been done to protect the town from future floods. Meanwhile, the likelihood of flooding is increasing due to manmade climate

change that’s expected to heat up annual temperatures in the Southeast by 4 to 10 degrees over the next century and raise sea levels by as much as a foot by 2030, according to a recent report from Environmental Defense*… 

 

Excerpt from an article written by Sue Sturgis for Southern Exposure 32 (Winter

2005) – www.southernstudies.org/reports/Princeville-WEB.htm.  *See the full text for footnoted sources.