Hurricanes

Two weeks after Florence, evacuees in Cary can't return to Pender County home

Nearly two weeks after Hurricane Florence hit, a Pender County resident's home is still flooded out. As she and her sons stay with family in Cary, she doesn't know how to tell her children they can't return home.

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By
Mikaya Thurmond
, WRAL anchor/reporter

Nearly two weeks after Hurricane Florence hit, the only way to get in and out of a Pender County resident’s home is by kayak.

Meredith Nance said her flooded home is “like a horror movie.”

She and her 4-year-old and 7-year-old sons evacuated to her mother’s home in Cary.

Other family members stayed behind. When the storm hit, they sent Nance pictures of her flooded house and of their kayaking to safety.

“All your baby pictures and your kids’ things just sitting there being flooded,” Nance said.

Most everything she owns is ruined, she said. She does not have flood insurance.

“I should have been more prepared,” she said. “I should’ve gotten everything on the tables upstairs, even.”

Nance and her family have been sleeping on a sofa at her mother’s home as they wait for the flooding at their own home to recede.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has offered the family help, and community members have dropped off clothes. Nance’s older son has enrolled at Cary Elementary School. The school gave him supplies and a backpack.

Nance hasn’t told her sons about what happened; she doesn’t know how to tell them, she said.

“It’s just a lot,” she said. “I'm trying to be strong, but it's them that makes it heartbreaking, when they just want to go home and they ask every day when they can go home, and I don't have an answer for them. And as a mom, you want to be able to give them an answer.”

Nance knows, though, that they can’t go home.

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