WILMINGTON — The first bands of Hurricane Dorian brought tornadoes and heavy rain to Wilmington on Thursday as the Cape Fear Region braced for the approaching storm.
Like many homes and buildings around the city, few downtown businesses had boarded their windows in preparation of predicted Category 2 winds.
Before noon, under the riverfront gazebo on Water Street, Randy Evans of Walking Trail Wilmington was delivering high-protein food and Gatorade bottles to a dozen of the city’s homeless population. Some would find their way to emergency shelters while others would tough it out on their own, he said.
But the streets of downtown Wilmington were otherwise empty as heavy rainfall and wind gusts from the outer bands of Dorian came in spurts.
Downtown Wilmington
Fire Rescue Station 17
Six miles to the northeast in Murrayville, first responders at New Hanover County Fire Rescue Station 17 responded to early afternoon calls of vehicles stuck in rising floodwaters in the North Chase community and Castle Hayne.
The station was equipped with two swift water rescue boats and two high-water vehicles as it prepared itself for continued heavy rainfall and increasing wind speeds throughout the day.
At 1 p.m., a Wilmington Fire Department crew put on specialized PFD dry suits — made to protect them from bacteria and chemicals found in floodwaters — and left the station in a truck pulling the two boats en route to a water rescue in Castle Hayne.
Throughout the afternoon there were reports of flooding down Murrayville Road in the North Chase community and tornado touch-downs in Porters Neck and Figure Eight Island. As fire rescue crews from Wilmington and surrounding beach towns faced an increasing number of calls over the next 24 hours, Station 17 was poised to serve those in the county that municipal units could not attend to.
Flood surveys
As Dorian approached the North Carolina border around 5 p.m., Captain Ben Bobzien and fire engineer Matt Hoffman set out in a high-rise water vehicle to map out flood and hazard areas in the county’s northern neighborhoods. After identifying a flooded area and estimating its water depth, Bobzien plugged the GPS coordinates into a phone app called Survey 123, used by rescue teams throughout coastal North Carolina.
“This lets everyone in the state know what’s going on this area,” Bobzien said.
They first surveyed Candlewood Drive, an area hit hard by Hurricane Florence last year when Smith Creek to the south had swelled. He said rescue teams swam through neck-deep water on several rescue operations during the storm. Mapping these vulnerable areas was a key step in preparing for the night’s work ahead, according to Bobzien.
“Knowing those areas from last year helps us plan what we’re going to do tonight,” Bobzien said. “If we do have to work tonight, we’ll go out and get people in the areas that had been flooded before.”
West of Murrayville on the other side of Interstate 40, they surveyed flooded streets and cul-de-sacs in the large North Chase neighborhood. Bobzien said this was one of the areas hardest hit by Florence because of the development’s many retention ponds overflowing onto streets and into homes because the water couldn’t drain properly.
He pointed to a house that sat next to one of these ponds. It belonged to another member of Station 17, he said, who had to rebuild much of it after flooding from Florence. Now, floodwater was coming up the driveway and into the front yard, and Bobzien and Hoffman hoped it would remain dry in the night ahead.
Mark Darrough can be reached at Mark@Localvoicemedia.com or (970) 413-3815
