Clinton OKs Aid for Flood Area as Toll Mounts

President Clinton on Monday surveyed vast swaths of North Carolina still submerged beneath flood waters, nearly a week after the state took the brunt of Hurricane Floyd, while emergency crews struggled to cope with rising rivers and death tolls. One official called the mounting disaster “a 500-year flood.”

“No matter how much television there is,” Clinton said, “it doesn’t do [the flood] justice. You can’t show what it feels like inside for people.”

Thirty-two people are known dead in North Carolina, most swept away when they tried to ford streams in their cars. A million chickens and turkeys also have been drowned, as have more than 110,000 hogs and countless house pets. When the water finally recedes, perhaps this weekend, officials expect they will find many more people now listed as missing.

“We’re looking at a situation that’s going to take weeks, months,” said Lisa Schell, spokeswoman for North Carolina’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

As yet another tropical storm threatened to dump more rain on what already looks like a prehistoric lake, Clinton announced an array of federal emergency measures for flood victims, including food stamps and low-interest loans.

He urged residents of the proud, rural part of North Carolina--where farmers raise everything from tobacco to shrimp--to “take advantage of these things,” promising: “The American people know that no individual can handle this alone.”

But many North Carolinians couldn’t be there to hear him. For a sixth straight day, thousands remained trapped in churches, schools and other makeshift shelters, some surrounded on all sides by water, with no idea when they might be able to leave or what they might find once they do.

“It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen,” Schell said. “It is a problem of monstrous proportions.”

Renee Hoffman, spokeswoman for the state’s emergency response team, said that no flood has ever devastated North Carolina this way. Not only is the volume of water immense, but the nature of it is different.

“This is water that’s decided to come and stay awhile,” she said. “It’s a different kind of flood.”

Three major rivers--the Cape Fear, the Tar and the Lumber--are at twice their flood levels, and just now beginning to crest. The Neuse, meanwhile, continues to rise, and won’t crest any time soon if weather forecasts hold true.

At least 2 million people are affected by the flood, in an area the size of Maryland. Roughly 10,000 have been left homeless, scattered among 50 Red Cross shelters.

Food and bottled water are being trucked into the state, and supplies are being airlifted to three shelters reachable only by boat or plane. They stand out like an archipelago in a dirty ocean contaminated by everything from hog carcasses to cottonmouth snakes.

Officials can do nothing, however, about the frazzled nerves inside: Fistfights have been erupting among shelter-trapped refugees suffering acute “cabin-fever.”

Temporary housing is being readied for refugees. Trailers are being bought with Federal Emergency Management Agency funds, and hotel rooms reserved. But housing is still a “huge, huge problem,” Clinton said, because many who lost their homes had no flood insurance.

Why buy flood insurance, they reasoned, when you don’t live in a flood plain?

No one expected a flood of such biblical scope. No one foresaw more than 20 inches of rain falling on some spots in a 36-hour span. No one expected a storm like Floyd to follow so fast on the heels of last month’s torrential soaker, Hurricane Dennis.

By late Monday, 26 counties in North Carolina had declared a state of emergency, and 39 had established emergency operations centers. Some 3,500 National Guard troops had been mobilized, and nearly 50,000 people were without power. Evacuation orders still existed in 10 counties, many of which have seen whole towns vanish.

Among the historic towns that are now nothing but smooth sheets of water is Princeville, the oldest town in the U.S. to be chartered by blacks. Founded at the end of the Civil War by freed slaves, it was home to 1,900 people, and now is gone.

“There are places in Pitt County where you had these big utility towers that were 70 feet tall, and only 20 feet of the tower is sticking out above the water,” Hoffman said.

Throughout the state’s coastal plain, more than 300 roads remained closed Monday, including long stretches of interstates 95 and 40, North Carolina’s busiest highways.

Several counties reported that their entire water supply is fouled by hog waste and human sewage, millions of gallons of which sluiced from lagoons and water-treatment plants, setting the stage for a health disaster to go along with the multibillion-dollar agricultural crisis. Typhoid and tetanus are major concerns.

Dave McRae, chief executive officer of University Health Center in Pitt County, said his hospital was full to the brim, with all 735 beds occupied, and the water creeping within inches of the power supply.

At Tarboro Hospital, near ground zero of the flooding, 32-year-old nurse Sharon Smitherman said injuries included snakebites, hypothermia and dehydration. Some patients had been partly submerged in water for up to four days.

“Usually, this many days after a hurricane, we’re in a cleanup stage,” Schell said. “But we’re still in response phase. We’re still responding to what are considered emergency situations.”

More than 1,000 “swift-water rescues” have been performed. (Two women gave birth aboard National Guard helicopters as they were being evacuated to hospitals.) About 60 helicopters were still sweeping the area Monday, searching for people stranded in trees and atop roofs. A few of those stranded knew they were such tiny specks in a vast sea that, to catch rescuers’ attention, they set brooms afire and waved them above their heads.

Not everyone could be reached in time.

In the little town of Pinetops, Hoffman said, an elderly man did what many have done: He took his bass-fishing boat up and down his street, fishing out his neighbors.

“The water was rising so rapidly,” Hoffman said, “that he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to make a second trip. He put 12 people in the boat. The boat capsized, and he and his wife were both killed, along with his daughter.”

Only six in the boat managed to swim to safety.

As a flight nurse on a helicopter rescue crew, Smitherman saw many victims who were children, wrapped in only a thin sheet, asking for their mothers and fathers.

Many of the pilots she flew with were Vietnam veterans, who told her the landscape gave them chills. Just like Cambodia, they said. Water everywhere.

Many of Smitherman’s co-workers at the hospital have been on duty since Floyd first hit. They stay and stay, she said, motivated not only by their Hippocratic oath, but by a fear of what awaits them.

“There are nurses and physicians at this hospital,” she said, “who know that their homes are gone.”

The first person Smitherman helped to rescue was a woman in labor, who’d been partly submerged on the roof of her house.

“The only thing she had on was a T-shirt,” Smitherman said. “We finally got a boat to her. We flew her out and when I asked her, ‘Do you think your water broke,’ she said: ‘I don’t know. I’ve been standing in water for eight hours.’ ”

In fact, officials said, the reason so many people died in this flood, or found themselves hopelessly stranded, was that the water rose faster than they had anticipated, faster than they had ever seen.

“People didn’t want to leave their homes,” Hoffman said. “Then the rivers rose so rapidly that people literally would go up to the second floor of the house, and by the time they got settled there, they’d be looking to go up to the attic.”

That’s why Smitherman and others said the worst is yet to come.

“We’re not going to find our dead until the water subsides,” she said. “The full devastation of this will hit us a month from now.”

*

Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.