‘Everything I looked at just made me cry,’ says Wilmington resident after Florence Sep 22, 2018 Betty Coleman, 71, has lived in Wilmington her entire life. Two trees fell on her trailer right before Hurricane Florence made landfall in Wilmington, and now she has to leave. By

In the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, thousands of people in the Carolinas are still waiting to return to their homes. Those who have are assessing the damage. Catastrophe modeling firm AIR Worldwide estimates insured wind and storm surge losses for Florence between $1.7 billion and $4.6 billion. The exact financial impact will become apparent over time as insurance claims roll in. For policy holders, it’s important to know what exactly is covered. Insurance industry experts…

When the floodwaters from Florence receded, half the Starlite Motel was gone. A ragged lip of concrete edged parking spaces with no corresponding rooms, just a void of standing water and debris. The surge swept away personal belongings of the owner’s family — even his father’s wheelchair. And it wiped out the investment that three brothers from India had spent years working toward. “We put all our life savings in there,” co-owner Kishor Depani said…

Dewey Scott was flying a drone to survey some of his family’s farm fields after Hurricane Florence this week when he saw that a small pond had spilled over into one of their sweet potato fields. Information like that will be useful when he’s able to harvest. Sweet potatoes don’t like being submerged, and Scott’s crews will skip places where water has stood for days. The problem for North Carolina’s sweet potato farmers is knowing…

It will likely be at least a week before transportation officials in the Carolinas know exactly how badly Florence has damaged roads and bridges. But based on past storms, the repairs will likely take months and cost tens of millions of dollars. As of Friday, more than 840 roads in the Carolinas were still closed, including 169 in South Carolina and 656 in North Carolina. Among them are stretches of Interstate 40. Sections of Interstate…

DURHAM, N.C. (WTVD) — All week, volunteers have been dropping off donations at the General Aviation Terminal at Raleigh-Durham International Airport as a part of Operation Airdrop. The organization was founded last year after Hurricane Harvey to deliver relief supplies to hard-to-reach areas in need. On Friday third-graders from the Duke School took time out of their day to go to the airport to unload what they had gathered up. Much of the supplies are…

Federal officials declared emergencies in three northern states Friday as heavy rains from a tropical depression caused flooding that killed at least three people. The Interior Department initially declared a state of emergency for 11 municipalities in Sinaloa state, where the deaths were reported. Later in the day, it extended the declaration to 11 municipalities in Sonora state, which borders the U.S. state of Arizona, and two in Durango states. Government officials issued a warning…