Episcopal Press and News
Hurricane Fran Inflicts Swath of Destruction
Episcopal News Service. September 26, 1996 [96-1567]
E. T. Malone Jr., Editor of The Communicant, Newspaper of the Diocese of North Carolina
(ENS) At gray, overcast daylight, in sporadic showers and wind gusts, clergy and parishioners ventured forth through downed power lines and splintered trees to check on how Hurricane Fran had dealt with the Episcopal churches of the Diocese of North Carolina.
It could have been a lot worse.
Despite hurricane-force winds that penetrated more than a hundred miles inland and inflicted widespread property damage in their path, most Episcopal churches suffered nothing more serious than downed trees and leaking roofs.
But some parishioners in both the dioceses of North Carolina and East Carolina lost their homes in the early September storm that was followed by wide-spread flooding. Food banks in the area are exhausted, and the weather that destroyed crops and disrupted fishing also destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of migrant farmworkers.
In Chocowinity in East Carolina, the Rev. Bill Etters of Trinity Church said of some of his parishioners' homes: "There is nothing there; they have disappeared." Emergency grants of $25,000 each were sent by the Presiding Bishop's Fund for World Relief to both dioceses as well as to the Diocese of the Dominican Republic.
The plight of the predominately Hispanic migrant farmworkers has become increasingly desperate, reported Holly Christofferson, director of Episcopal Farmworker Ministry in Newton Grove, North Carolina, a ministry of the dioceses of North Carolina and East Carolina.
"The last tobacco that was still on the plants was just destroyed," she said. "Some people just recently came up three weeks ago to pick it, and they haven't yet been able to work."
In camps scattered around the area, about a hour south of Raleigh, trailers for housing the workers have been badly damaged, but the workers "still have to live in one half of the trailer," she said. "It's starting to get cold, so we're delivering a lot of blankets."
The Rev. Antonio "Tony" Rojas, working to establish worship services in the camps, said his congregants "have suffered very much. They need to pay rent. They need to buy food. They are almost crazy."
Along the coast, seasonal workers in the crab-packing plants have also hit hard times under an industry slow-down, reported the Rev. Nicholas Ibarra, vicar of Hispanic ministry at St. Matthew's Church in Yeatesville, North Carolina. Operators of crab boats pulled up their traps before the storm, he said, and were too busy dealing with their own damaged and flooded homes to fish again.
"Most of the people got into survival mode," Ibarra said. "Many have them have started leaving already."
In the nearby town of Belhaven, he said, St. James Church was extensively damaged, and "60 percent of the houses were flooded."
The major exception for North Carolina church damage was in Burlington, in the eastern piedmont, where a 117-year-old frame, carpenter gothic parish house of the former St. Athanasius Church was crushed by a massive limb of a giant oak that fell during the storm. The old building, on the National Register of Historic Places, was a meeting place for Girl Scouts.
The former parish house is on the property of the Church of the Holy Comforter, where an ad hoc committee was quickly formed to decide whether to attempt to repair the building, valued at about $25,000.
"Contractors have told us that it would take about $100,000 to fix it," said the Rev. David Williams, Holy Comforter's rector. "And the parish has been through two recent capital campaigns."
Preservationists hope to save the building, but others are reluctant to spend that much money when the parish's other buildings -- used for the day-to-day operations of the congregation -- are in need of renovation, he said.
Another parish, St. John's, Wake Forest, lost part of its roof and had heavy water damage, estimated at about $30,000 in the nave. Despite that, the congregation was serving free hot meals to the community, which was particularly hard hit by the storm. "We want people to feel welcome and know that we're open to everybody who's in need," said the Rev. Jerry Fisher, priest-in-charge.
In East Carolina, two Muslim Bosnian refugees had an opportunity to repay the hospitality they received. Brothers Baki and Mesa Karabegovic, sponsored by St. Andrews-on-the-Sound Church of Wilmington, lived for a year with Betty Klemn, a 74-year-old widow living in Wrightsville Beach. With 115-mile-per-hour winds and 16-foot tidal waves threatening her home, they took her into their new apartment in Wilmington, and then helped her clean up the three feet of water the storm left in her garage and storage room.
When the brothers called their parents, still in a Croatian refugee center, to tell them about the hurricane, their mother's direction was firm: "She took care of you. Now you MUST take good care of her."
"People were trading off places to go and have showers," Fisher reported. Almost everyone had food spoiling in refrigerators and freezers. One family had to toss out about 600 ears of corn they had in a freezer.
"Since we had power and a big commercial gas stove at the church, we invited folks to bring their food there," he said. "We cooked up all this food and invited in the community. Some of it we carried down to a subsidized housing unit. We did it again on Monday night and for lunch Tuesday, until we used it all up.
"Some parishioners opened their homes to Southeastern Baptist Seminary students or to local families to come in and take showers," Fisher related. "One nice, older lady in the congregation had no food -- she had to come to church to eat -- but she had two bathrooms, a shower upstairs and one downstairs. She was extremely gracious, opening her home, the house was full of people -- most of whom she didn't know from Adam's house cat -- standing in line to get into her showers.
"In the middle of all this tumult there came a knock on the door. When she answered it, there stood two Mormon missionaries," Fisher said. "'We've come to ask if you know about Jesus,' they said."
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