Hurricane Matthew: North Carolina One Week Later

I have lived through a couple of different natural disasters in my lifetime. As a child I was a military brat, my father and step-father were both in the US Army, so moving around the country was an expected part of life in my family. We experienced blizzards in Alaska when I was just a wee tyke no more than 4 years old. I remember the snow being so deep my Mom would walk me to school in the morning, carrying me on her shoulders, and the snow banks along the sidewalk were still taller than my head.

I remember surviving more than a few tornadoes while stationed just outside Ft. Sill, Oklahoma on the outskirts of Lake Elgin. Back then there weren't any early warning systems in place, when the skies got dark you went out into the backyard and got into the storm shelter. From there you could hear the twister approach overhead...like a locomotive thundering down the tracks.

When we moved to Ft. Ord, California we traded twisters for earthquakes and aftershocks, which were a unique experience in and of themselves. There's nothing quite as unnerving as having the ground beneath your feet feel as though it is about to give out completely and send you hurtling to your death in a trench of hot magma thousands of yards deep.

From California the natural evolution was to be stationed at Ft. Shafter, Hawaii, where we lived through Hurricane Iwa back in 1982. That was also a very unique experience...having nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide, we had to hunker down in our living rooms and ride out the storm. The eye of that hurricane passed directly over us, and what a calm, eerie half and hour that was...the wind went from bending palm trees at 45 degree angles to a dead silence in the blink of an...eye...about half an hour later the winds picked up just as quickly as they had died, only this time they were blowing in from the other side.

I currently live in Fayetteville, NC, just outside Ft. Bragg. Hurricane Matthew blew through here last weekend and dumped so much moisture that we had 11 dams around town fail, some of which washed out roads. The Cape Fear River, which runs just east of town, rose to over 46 feet...several other rivers rose just as dramatically...more than a few lakes swelled above the floodplain for the first time in recollected history, some of them busting through dams and spilling into nearby creeks and streams. The video below is of Lumberton, a town south of Fayetteville that is still under water. As of yesterday we still had 8 lane portions of I-95 under water, as well as several other major thoroughfares. Here in Fayetteville, the two neighborhoods behind mine are completely cutoff from outside access as the single road entries they had were washed out by broken dams...they say it could be another 4-6 weeks before repairs can be made, and/or new access roads cut in and completed. To say this state is in a mess would be the understatement of the year. This is by far the most devastating natural disaster I have had the fortune to survive through.