Hurricane Florence made landfall on 14 September 2018 and it caused inland flooding of historic proportions that produced major disruption through large regions of North and South Carolina. The hurricane cut access to Wilmington, NC, a city of 120,000 when bridges failed, and all roads leading to it were flooded. As thousands of residents wait for flood waters to recede before they can return to their homes and begin cleanup and repairs, natural hazards researchers are combing through damaged areas to collect and preserve damage information for future research. While thousands of North Carolina residents are living through the shock of this disaster hundreds of peer-reviewed papers exist extolling the inevitability of such flooding and proposing solutions to mitigate damage.
This damage assessment report, the 20th produced by the University of Florida’s Wind Hazard Damage Assessment Group summarizes the damage observations using publicly available information from the National Weather Service , national and local news sources. and social media. For the first time, WHDAG students collaborated with the recently formed StEER: Structural Engineering Extreme Event Reconnaissance Network, sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
