Determination helps Bridgeton residents overcome the odds

Sept. 19--Like many street sides today, those in Bridgeton and Sandy Point are lined with numerous piles of family stories and sculptures of anarchy, courtesy of a lady named Florence.

Mixtures of broken limbs and fallen trees give vivid splashes of color to the more mundane color of strong boxes, couches, weed whackers and easy chairs.

A storm surge flooded numerous homes along the water and even seeped into buildings three streets up as far as C Street, three streets beyond the Neuse River as it flows past Bridgeton.

In Sandy Point, most of the houses are on stilts, but those stilts are often enclosed and converted into garages, guest and shop rooms or storage areas. Nearly all of those were inundated with water.

"Everything's gone," Juan Solorzano a worker in one home said. Looking around, a pool table's sides were hanging loose, and beds and tools were ruined. He strove to move a horizontal freezer half full of water, beer bottles, sodas and meat, whose odor told him it was there even before the lid was opened.

The owner lives out of town, and Solorzano was one of the men hired to begin tearing out the sheet rock.

"We'll have to cut it all off from three feet down," he said.

A few houses over, Jean Wachter watches as workers carry out waterlogged tools and other items. The main living quarters of her house is 10 feet overhead, a height that just barely saved most of her home, she said.

She pointed to a closet on the ground level, and a shelf that runs across the top of the closet.

"Everything on that top shelf was dry," she said. Everything below it was wet. She lost her water tank and other mechanical equipment on the ground level, and the water, she said, went most of the way up her front steps.

She sheltered during the hurricane with a friend. So did everyone in Sandy Point, she added. "It's a good thing. It would have been horrible if anybody stayed."

Along the road: carpets and underlayment, curled up like fabric Ho-hos. Filing cabinets with ruined file pockets, some fluorescent lights.

Stumps and branches lie on either side of Riverside Drive where a giant tree had fallen across. In the debris of leaves, a large box turtle tries to thread his way -- until he hears footsteps and quickly closes himself up in his shell.

Wade Fuller, owner of Fuller Music, and his sister, Charlotte Fuller, are standing in the back of a beat-up pickup truck, raking piles of pine needles and leaves onto the roadside. They live in homes on what, in Sandy Point, is considered high ground.

Fuller said he grew up here as a child. "This house went through Ione (in 1955)," he said. "That was considered the record. But this was worse. The water was 12 inches higher."

The Fullers don't live on stilts -- their houses are on built-up yards and they didn't flood. "But everyone beyond us who didn't have a house on stilts was a total loss," Fuller said. "It's sad."

Charlotte added that the water came within 10 inches of her house. While Wade weathered the storm, Charlotte said by 11 p.m. Thursday she left to stay with a friend in River Bend. "I was scared," she said.

The water did get into her crawl space and she's lost all her duct work.

Fuller said he had to wade between the houses and added that, had he not moved his cars out to the road, he would have lost them.

A bicycle protrudes from one heap and two big couches face each other as if they're part of a talk show set, but the water has ruined them. A saturated frame holds a ruined photo.

Bridgeton Boat Works had a rough time of it. As to the offices, about a foot of water came in -- water had never come in during a storm before, Kayla Cannon, office assistant, said. But, "the worst of it was the boats."

Walking the grounds is like going through a city of boats. Upwards of 120 were stored there, coming in days before the storm until there was just no more room.

Ginny Weber, office manager, said, "we couldn't prepare for the amount of water."

The storm surge damaged a number of boats, sinking at least one and knocking some over and pulling 15 of them out of storage and into the river.

"We know where all but one went," Weber said. One lies in marsh grass south of the Trent River Bridge; three floated onto the railroad tracks at the trestle that passes from New Bern into Bridgeton -- they were destroyed by the railroad people who had to break them up to get them off the tracks for the trains, including a boat estimated to cost $200,000. Others wound up in people's yards.

On the boat works grounds, the Perseverance lies on its side in the lot, the Mighty Fine is on its side in water. The 4 Ever Linda was pulled into the river then up against a boat works dock where it half-sank. Linda and Andy Garrow, owners of the boat, believe it is a total loss -- and their total loss. "It's an older boat," Linda said, "and we only had liability insurance."

They spent a lot of time on the 4 Ever Linda and took second place in the Christmas flotilla, she said. She hopes to salvage fishing gear from it, but fears that otherwise, the boat will become scrap.

By one Bridgeton house, the entire yard is covered with furniture and family goods: along the curb and up the driveway, along with a dozen cars of the friends and family who have come to help the owners carry everything out: The scene is like a yard sale of ruination.

"We're going through the process of seeing what we can salvage," Mitch McKenzie, owner of the home, said. He had moved from Trent Woods to be on the water.

He got more water than he could have hoped for.

While the home is insured, nothing inside it was, and nearly all of that is lost. He was able to salvage most of the important mementos, he said -- when Florence had been predicted to come in as a category 4, he and his wife of 22 years had removed most of those to a safe place.

His home took three feet of water -- no other storm had ever flooded it, according to its previous owners, he said. He describes what he had. "We had a back deck that ran the length of the house." Pointing to some ruined structure lying to the house's side he adds, "There's some of it there." A crack runs vertically, about four feet, up either side of his garage. The hardwood floor inside is still soaked and you can feel the seams creeping upward under your feet.

But the items that define his family were saved, and he feels good about that. "Luckily it's just more of the furniture and stuff."

He said his greatest frustration is in having to dip deeply into savings to find housing while he waits for his home to be restored. "If this were a fire, insurance would have covered a place for me to stay," he said.

Businesses have suffered in various ways. The Nelson's Blueberry sales building is a wrecked lean-to of metal and boards, and a neighborhood woman looking at the ruin inside mutters, "Oh my God." But between it and the river, the Hardee's restaurant is fine and business is booming.

A dryer, washing machine and refrigerator are lined up along one curb. A couple of office chairs that once sat before family computers now await their trip to a landfill.

The little Bridgeton Christian Church has set at the corner of New and C Streets since its construction in 1909. Three streets up from the river, it has never had a storm bring water into it, but today volunteers are in the sanctuary ripping up ruined carpet.

There wasn't much water -- about a foot, but that was enough to ruin the little congregation's two organs -- one in the sanctuary, the other in the fellowship hall.

"When I was a little girl, in Hazel, the water came to the steps," Sharon Gaskins, a life-long member recalled. But it never got inside.

"You did not want to be here," Wade Fuller said, standing in the back of his truck, looking around.

But nobody is ready to leave.

"We'll get through it," McKenzie said.

A woman, his friend, was taking a short break by her car. "There are so many wonderful people," she said, watching others working their way through the McKenzie's debris. "It's a wonderful town."

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