Autumn Davis stood on her front porch Wednesday, gesturing toward the mounds of dirt in the vacant lot next door.
The house where Davis, 32, grew up used to sit on that lot, along Sessoms Street in Fayetteville, until Hurricane Matthew slogged by in 2016. Afterward, almost everyone on Sessoms and other nearby streets hauled soaked and mildewed furnishings out of their homes and piled them along the curbs in the Old Wilmington Road neighborhood off Eastern Boulevard.
The hurricane didn’t topple Davis’ home, it just dumped about 14 inches of water inside of it. Davis said her parents, who owned the house, had to take out a federal low-interest loan and hired an unscrupulous contractor who failed to fix the home’s foundation.
Davis said her parents spent about a year living in motels and rental houses before deciding to return to their home in summer of 2017, even though it was still structurally damaged.
Finally, eight years after Hurricane Matthew, contractors hired by the state are digging the foundation for a new home for the Davises. Federal disaster-relief funding will pay for the home. Davis will continue to live next door to her parents on Sessoms Street.
The family’s plight illustrates the excruciatingly slow and painful state processes that many victims of Hurricane Matthew — and Hurricane Florence two years later — have had to endure. As of summer 2024, some of those victims continue to remain unable to return to their homes, including 53 families or individuals in Cumberland County.
“This has been awful for it to be this long to get the house,” Davis said. “It’s been a nightmare.”
But now, all these years later, it appears that the state is well on its way to solving its disaster-relief funding issues, and the city of Fayetteville is spending millions of dollars to improve severe stormwater drainage problems that caused at least some of the flooding in the first place.
Gov. Cooper establishes recovery office
Concerned about the slow pace of distributing federal long-term disaster aid money to victims of Matthew and Florence, Gov. Roy Cooper in 2019 established the North Carolina Office of Recovery & Resiliency to take over the job of meeting the needs of storm victims, past and future.
Initially, the Office of Recovery & Resiliency didn’t fare much better than other departments that had been tasked with the job. Figuring out who is entitled to the federal disaster aid is complicated. Questions often arise about heirship disputes, unpaid property taxes, easement concerns and myriad other issues, said Janet Kelly-Scholle, a spokesperson for the Office of Recovery & Resiliency.
But the pace of putting people back in their homes accelerated after the office made program and policy changes to expedite storm victims through the recovery process. From August through December of last year, the office had completed an average of 63 homes a month statewide, Kelly-Scholle said in an email. A year later, it is averaging 100 homes a month.
Statewide, 2,491 families have returned home out of 4,356 within the program. The vast majority of those still waiting are in the contract and bid work phase or are experiencing actual construction. No one is waiting in the intake phase, state records show.
In Cumberland County, the Office of Recovery & Resiliency has enabled 179 families to return to their homes or to new homes. But 53 more families or individuals in the county are still waiting, including Davis’ parents.
The state has until Aug. 15, 2025, to disburse $237 million in federal disaster aid for Hurricane Matthew and until Aug. 17, 2026, to disburse $543 million for Hurricane Florence. As of July 24, it had doled out $231 million of the Hurricane Matthew money and $435 million designated for Florence, Kelly-Scholle said. North Carolina is on track to be the first in the nation among 2016 grantees to close out the money for Matthew and could be the first for Florence, she said.
That’s a far cry from a few years ago — before the Office of Recovery and Resiliency was created — when the state was in jeopardy of losing disaster-aid money because it wasn’t allocating it fast enough.
Fayetteville plans Sessoms Street drainage improvements
Shortly before Christmas, Autumn Davis said, workers for the state showed up at her parents house, told them they were going to get a new home soon, and gave them two weeks to move out. A construction crew started digging ground for the home’s foundation about a month ago, she said.
As she stood on her porch Wednesday, Davis said she wasn’t too concerned about Tropical Storm Debby, which on that day was projected to dump as much as 15 inches of rain on Fayetteville. The city ultimately saw over 8 inches of rainfall as of Friday.
Davis said what does worry her is the next hurricane — or the one after that. Weather forecasters say this year is ripe for a record number of named storms due to the combined effects of a La Nina weather pattern and warming oceans caused by climate change.
Pointing down Sessoms Street, Davis said water pools in a dip of the road, even with normal rainfall. But Thursday morning and again on Friday, she texted to say her street had not flooded.
Relief may be coming soon.
Spokespersons for the city said Thursday that they would try to respond to CityView questions about the neighborhood, but they were being deluged with pressing matters caused by Tropical Storm Debby.
An undated city news release details what is being called the Sessoms Street Drainage Improvements Project. According to the release, the existing drainage system serving Sessoms Street, Buxton Boulevard and Montgomery Street backs up water into the neighborhood “due to a high tailwater condition and a shallow drainage system causing flooding in the neighborhood.”
The release says the project will “create more pipe capacity by increasing the size of the current storm system and creating a new culvert outfall across Buxton Boulevard while rerouting the existing path of the storm system.”
It also says that the design status is 95%completed and that construction was estimated to begin last month at a cost of $4 million.
Davis said she has seen no evidence of the work getting started. She said she didn’t know about the city’s plans, but was grateful for them.
The city, meanwhile, has been working on drainage improvements all across town. According to a separate news release provided Wednesday, the city has completed or is working on $52.5 million worth of stormwater drainage improvements with another $58.5 million under design, including the Sessoms Street project.
City prepared for Debby
Hurricane Matthew in 2016 dumped about 14 inches of rain on Fayetteville and caused an estimated $1.5 billion in damage across the state. 2018’s Hurricane Florence, which was downgraded to a tropical storm after making landfall near Wilmington, was a slower moving storm. It dumped more than 12 inches of rain on Fayetteville and more than 30 inches in a few other areas of the state. That storm caused 42 deaths and an estimated $16.7 billion in damages, according to the National Weather Service.
Fayetteville officials appear to have learned from those storms. Before Tropical Storm Debby, they began clearing storm drains and lowering water levels of lakes held by dams. Five shelters opened.
“Our Stormwater and Streets Division is diligently working to ensure our streets remain clear and clean in anticipation of upcoming storms,” Byron Reeves, the city’s deputy public services director, said in a news release Wednesday. “By taking both proactive and reactive measures, we aim to guarantee the safety and well-being of our community.”
But no amount of preparation could eliminate flooding, falling trees and wind damage caused by Tropical Storm Debby,
A Wilson County man died when a tornado demolished his home, a dam in the Rayconda neighborhood in Fayetteville was breached, trees were uprooted, power was lost to thousands of homes and roads flooded in Cumberland County and throughout much of the state. At least five tornadoes were reported statewide.
Although Debby didn’t pack the punch of Matthew or Florence, residents agree on one thing: it could have been worse without proper preparation.
Editor’s note: Randy Brechbiel, a spokesman for N.C. Senate leader Phil Berger (R-Dist. 26), contends that the Office of Recovery and Resiliency was created by the General Assembly in 2018, not by Gov. Cooper in 2019, as the office’s website states. Brichbiel also says the pace of home rebuilding accelerated only after legislative hearings in 2022 and 2023 led to staff resignations, leadership changes and public pressure on the office.