‘This Is the Red Cross. Do You Have Food?’
NEW BERN, N.C.—Just two weeks after Hurricane Florence inundated this historic town with floodwaters and raging winds, many of its downtown streets have been swept clean of debris and brought back to life.
Businesses have reopened, shop fronts are sparkling, and young couples are out for lunch after church on Sunday, peeking in shop windows and making plans for the week ahead. The annual MumFest celebration, with vendors and street performers and concerts, is less than two weeks away. After a few weeks of discussions over whether to cancel the festival, it was announced last Wednesday that the show will go on.
“By the time that MumFest rolls around,” Lynne Harakal, the executive director of New Bern’s downtown-development corporation and the festival’s primary organizer, told me, “we will be four weeks post–Hurricane Florence, and there’s been a real desire in the community for things to return back to normal.”
But in neighborhood after neighborhood just blocks from the downtown business district where MumFest will be held, nothing is normal—and may not be for months, even years. In public housing such as Trent Court, in historically black neighborhoods such as Sunnyside and Duffy Field, and across the city’s historic districts, where pricey colonial-era homes line the riverbanks, the viscera of house after house after house is still spilled out onto the curb: insulation, carpet, furniture, appliances, clothing, dishes, pictures, memories left on the side of the street, waiting to be picked up and disposed of.
Florence was an equal-opportunity destroyer, dumping more than 50,” said Naderia Tucker, who lives in Trent Court, an apartment complex owned by the city’s housing authority that was badly flooded. “It’s really something to see the devastation in this town.”
