Pandemic, shortages keep hurricane victims in limbo
RALEIGH, N.C. — Nearly six years after flood damage from Hurricane Matthew displaced Thad Artis from his home in Goldsboro, North Carolina, he has still not been placed in permanent housing.
Living alone in a motel for the past two years, growing increasingly frustrated with what he considers empty promises of swift action from government officials, the 68-year-old spends every penny on his wife’s health care after a stroke left her unable to walk.
Before he moved his wife into an assisted living facility, the two lived in their decaying house, roughly an hour southeast of Raleigh by car, for several years after the storm — both developing respiratory illnesses as mold spores grew in the ceiling and bird droppings spattered atop their leaking roof. Roaches and “other creepy crawlies” inhabited the kitchen floorboards. The back of the house was so rotten, Artis said, that the washroom was about to fall through the floor.
“We stayed sick for a year,” he said in an interview. “The house and all the furniture, it’s gone, it’s rotten. We ain’t got nothing. I take everything I can get right down the road to see her, to take care of her. I don’t give up because I got to help my wife.”
Waiting on an unfinished modular home in nearby Pikeville, Artis is among hundreds of low-income homeowners enrolled with the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency who are living in temporary accommodations years after the 2016 storm and Hurricane Florence in 2018.
A bipartisan General Assembly committee tasked with investigating these delays in disaster relief held its first meeting Wednesday — the four-year anniversary of when Florence made landfall in North Carolina.
Co-chair Rep. John Bell, a Wayne County Republican whose district along the Neuse River incurred some of the worst flood damage statewide, said he’s seeking accountability on behalf of displaced constituents like Artis.
“We had to deal with multiple hurricanes, tropical storms and a pandemic, but those are the realities, not the excuse,” Bell said in an interview. “We’ve been back and forth on this issue for years now. We’ve made some headway, and then we take a step backwards and then politics gets thrown into it. It never should’ve gotten to this point.”