Proyección de la Estructura Organizacional

3.1. A Forgotten Place

I walk alone on a grid of empty streets connecting vacant lots. Trees are growing where houses used to be. Rubble at the curbs. It is hot. Humid. Nobody seems to be here but me. In the distance, I hear the urban sounds of the small City of Kinston in eastern North Carolina. I see some maintenance-type crews driving around in trucks, apparently ready to cut down some trees.

Figure 11: Empty streets connecting vacant lots, City of Kinston, North Carolina. Photo by Danny de Vries (2002)

I come across a street sign laying flat on the ground. Thrown flat on its back by the unprecedented flood of water which rushed through these streets in the fall of 1999, the sign aptly reads: “Dead End.” The symbolic summary of a place where human Culture met its match in Nature (or so it seemed). The remnants of Culture—the paved streets, curbs, and fire hydrants, the empty lots, the office desk standing straight up on its legs in an empty field—make it an eerie place to visit.

Figure 12: Dead End sign amidst remnants of culture. Photo by Danny de Vries (2002)

Then there are the homes still standing. A pile of debris surrounds every one of them. Behind overgrown grass and bushes, a white, wooden structure is visible. Next to it a huge branch is

cracked off an old tree. The home is empty. “Jesus loves,” graffiti claims on the shed standing to its side. On the door hangs a “NOTICE” from the City of Kinston:

Dear property owner, based on damage assessment inspection and the best available information, the structure located at […] suffered significant damage as a result of the recent flood and is classified as “SUBSTANITALY DAMAGED” as defined in the City of Kinston Unified Development Ordinance and/or “CONDEMNED” under North Carolina General Statute 160A-426 and is unsafe to occupy in its present conditions.

Inside the smell of mold is overwhelming. The walls and floors are covered with algae. A pile of kids’ toys in the middle of what seems to have been the living room. Tables, chairs, a moldy couch upside down. Clothing, books, curtains, bedding, laundry baskets heaped on the floor. All kitchen drawers and cabinets open. Once a family lived here, I imagine. Playing, crying, laughing, cooking, being. I take a photograph. I wonder what people might think when they see me going in here. But nobody is here except me, and the birds.

Figure 13 : A flood house. Photo by Danny de Vries (2002)

When I walk on I notice one still apparently inhabited home in the midst of the desolate emptiness. A young, black man stands in the yard. “How are you doing?” I ask.

See the birds? Those are my gift. God gave the gift to me. I am taking care of them too. Yeah. I am doing okay. I talk to the birds. They come to me, anyway. I am taking care of them. Lots of birds now. Less people. They are more friendly. They are more friendly then the people.

He appears to be one of the boys staying in a group-home. Then I meet nurse Williams, the staff person, in her fifties and graying, her white, uncontaminated nursing outfit a stark contrast against the moldy, algae filled empty home I just visited. She explains to me that the owner of the group home building simply replaced the deck and continued her business. “There were houses everywhere. It was a nice neighborhood,” she says mournfully. “Really pretty over here. Until the flood came. Now they are tearing everything down. They torn quite a few down already. And all back on Holloway Drive, have you been there?” I nodded. A Kinston official had driven me around earlier, and had showed me some of the worst flooded places. Afterwards he had told me I better not go this way. “Why would you?,” he had said, “unless you want to buy crack.”

The buyout manager had been a key player in the federally and state sponsored acquisition and relocation program, which had bought out over 400 Kinston properties (3,6% of the total number of Kinston households) after they were declared substantially damaged. “Buyouts” are one way in which communities respond to natural disasters (Hunter 2005). Such buyouts generally refer to the acquisition of property (land and/or buildings) using federal and local funds, including in some cases additional financial assistance for relocation to complementary housing in a less hazardous site. Next to buyouts, communities can move to restoration and rebuilding efforts whereby pre-disaster culture is restored, or a response

which includes partial reorganization, taking into account variation of risk by means of, for example, flexible land use zoning regulations. In the latter cases, alternative mitigation strategies such as elevation or flood proofing of floodplain homes are common. When it concerns risk mitigation, buyouts remain a popular mitigation strategy in the USA: since 1993, participating communities have purchased more than 20,000 properties as part of this program27. The buyout of Kinston was one of the largest buyouts in the pre-Katrina history of FEMA sponsored mitigation programs. It bought out all of the homes which made up the prominent, historical, black28 neighborhood I had just walked through. Called “Lincoln City” by Kinston locals, the neighborhood had now ceased to exist. Or almost.

Nurse Williams tells me that the owner of the group home declined to participate in the buyout program because the City—the project manager—did not offer her enough for the property. “It is sad,” she continues, “people lost everything they had. Some people now, they still don’t have any place to go. They have these little FEMA trailers. It was really bad. Really bad.” Do you think the people realized a flood of this magnitude could happen, I ask her?

I really don’t think so, no. Something just, like, happened. The tropical storm came, I think it was Dennis, and went back on the ocean to come again. Then Hurricane Floyd, all the water when the ground was already soaked. And then the river flowed over. And, I understand they had this reservoir in Raleigh they had to let the water out, otherwise it would burst, you know. It just happened. The river kept getting higher and higher and higher. Some people tried to wait it out but it got so high they had to bring boats to get them out. It was really terrible.

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Since the early 1970s, buyout programs have been implemented through FEMA grants in hundreds of communities across the United States. It was not until the devastating Midwestern flood of 1993, however, that public acquisition of flood-prone property really took off. Since that record-breaking flood, voluntary buyouts, which include purchase of vacant property in floodplains, purchase and relocation of existing structures, and purchase and demolition of flood-damaged structures, have become a major new focus in FEMA's overall strategy to mitigate flood losses. Property owners are paid pre-flood fair market value for their homes.

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I will use the term “black”, not African-American, following an article by Whorter in the Los Angeles Times (2004).

I walk on. Back to find the car I left behind in one of the empty Lincoln City streets. When I leave the area, I wonder; why am I so intrigued by this disaster? Why was I inside this house? Is it some sort of obsession with empty landscapes? Some obsession with the wrath of Nature? As soon as I leave Kinston to head back home I realize that the questions which keep my curiosity alive have to do with history and memory. How come an apparently thriving, nice neighborhood was located in an area of such tremendous risk? Did residents not know they were living in a floodplain? Was there no local memory able to warn them about the impending doom? And why does the place seem so forgotten, almost contaminated?

Figure 14: Bought out lots of Lincoln City. Photo by Danny de Vries (2002)

3.2. Powers that be

Four years later. 2005. I go to the City of Kinston Town Hall. When I walk in, the buyout manager happens to walk out of his office. He is on his way the same direction as me, and I have a hunch he is, like me, heading towards the Planning Director of the City. The

planning director is a pleasant man. He is older, calm and smart, and he seems to have a curiosity in him about things. He and the buyout manager are good buddies. When the manager sees me he nods, but he does not remember me until I speak to him. I met him first in 2001 when he showed me around the flooded areas, after Hurricane Floyd in 1999 obliterated the impact of Hurricane Fran. I tell him I am doing some historical work on Lincoln City, the black neighborhood. He knows what I am talking about. “They are all dying out now,” he says, “every time I open the paper and see the obituaries there is a name I recognize from them.” I empathize with him how difficult that might be. He agrees. For many years he has lived in Kinston. He has seen these people come in with problems many times. They knew his father, his family. He mentions Linda and Charley Wade, two elderly Lincoln City residents I tried in vain to contact for an interview after Charley had gotten very ill. “Charley Wade used to teach me,” he says, “they died within one week of each other.” I wonder. Wonder if there could have been a link to the floods, the relocation, the stress, the trauma, the reality of contamination. The buyout manager then speaks about how great their FEMA funded buyout program has been, how successful: “Our program was so good, that once we did 12 of them, or so, the word came out and they all went.“ And: “when I first came to talk to them about the buyout and told about what we had to offer, they looked at each other like this is too good to be true.”

I know he believes it. And I know it is true for the majority of homeowners as well. Ninety-five percent of the property owners relocated as a result of the program, a remarkable success for any mitigation program. Fellow planning students at UNC-Chapel Hill have documented at length the self-congratulatory rhetoric of City Officials and other Kinston stakeholders (Olivera 2006). The State of North Carolina included Kinston as one of the

examples of their “Hazard Mitigation Successes” (NCDEM 1999). FEMA put out a CD- ROM detailing the amazing story of Kinston which integrated Geographic Information Systems into a model floodplain management program (FEMA 2003)29. Who would not believe these credible sources? I don’t. Nor does my colleague Jim. Working as a Research Associate with staff at University of North Carolina’s Center for Urban and Regional Studies on a buyout survey in Kinston (among other places), the study results only partly confirm the official’s reality (Fraser et al. 2004). Eighty six survey respondents and buyout participants from Kinston responded in a random

telephone interview. Most of them originally lived in Lincoln City. Six of them were white, 80 black. The data show that 36% of the 86 respondents answered “yes” to the question “Would you have stayed and rebuilt if you had been given a chance?” A ratio of one out of three respondents. Only 20% mentioned they were provided with choices other than a buyout. When asked what these alternative choices were, 20% answered “eminent domain,” “get nothing,” or “sue the city.” Thirty one percent thought buyout information was not very clear. Thirty six percent felt participation was not voluntary, and 21% mentioned they felt some to a great deal of pressure to accept the buyout offer. Twenty five percent did not trust the people doing the buyout. Thirty two percent was “not very” to “not at all” confident that the local managers had the best interest of the neighborhood in mind. Forty one percent noted “some” to “a great deal” of opposition to the buyout. Thirty one percent mentioned that the price offered for their home was “not very” to “not at all” fair. Overall, 17% mentioned to be “very” to “not at all” satisfied with the way the buyout went overall.

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According to FEMA (2003): “Successful floodplain management depends on a combination of detailed documentation, mitigation planning, community education, and project marketing. The City of Kinston-Lenoir County, North Carolina, used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to integrate these elements into a model floodplain management program. The results, as you will see, are very impressive.”

It is hard to reconcile the attitude of the brash official with these data. But I can’t say anything about this. I could not even propose to speak about it to the people of Lincoln City, Kinston, or any of the nearby towns. Not only would it be political suicide to my efforts as a local ethnographer gathering stories to understand what is going on, but I also had been told by other powers that be—this time within the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill— that they do not want this data to become public. The reason: FEMA funding. FEMA does not want it to be public. The buyout study report had gone to FEMA where “final approval” had stalled. During this period, the Principal Investigator—Jim—published some of the findings in a local newspaper (News & Observer 2003) and UNC news (UNC News 2003). Receiving note of this, FEMA Mitigation Officials made clear to him that this sort of critical reporting was not the intention of their funding support. While in negotiation on another grant and dependent on soft-money funding to continue his employment, Jim—reluctantly— took note. When I started to officially work with him on the next FEMA grant he received late 2003 from the same FEMA Division (Mitigation)—a study on repetitive loss properties—the Buyout Report had still not been “approved.” While the UNC-FEMA contract probably would back Jim up in his wishes to publish and Jim made clear that he wasn’t going to stop publishing from the buyout report, the political pressure from his grantor certainly affected his ability to freely discuss the results. For example, when I took the initiative to set-up local community meetings to discuss the results, the obvious hint was that this wasn’t a good idea. Now implicated myself, my employment came through FEMA funding as well, I let it go.

But beyond the survey numbers, I had already encountered qualitative information on the troubled Kinston buyout. For example, I visited Mr. and Ms. Spurlock at their new,

relocated home in 2001. The house is surrounded by grass, all around it, and is situated on a hill, upslope. It reminds me of the old Dutch elevated hill (terp) on which the 12th century farmsteads were located, safe from the frequent floods turning their world into mud. “This place ain’t going to flood,” I think to myself. Ms. Spurlock is outside. She sits on her porch in front of the yellow house. A large woman, dressed in a blue and flowery blouse and white trousers. She has short hair, glasses, and a kind face. "Just come in," she says.

Figure 15: The Spurlock’s new house, built upon a hill. Photo by Danny de Vries 2003

Inside, I meet Mr. Spurlock, who is sitting on the couch in the living room waiting for my arrival for our scheduled interview. They tell me that they lived together on Shine Street, at the edge of Lincoln City. They had met each other in Lincoln City as children, married, and bought a house adjacent to the Adkins canal, a tributary to the Neuse River. Recurring flooding had damaged the foundation of their old house, but with Mr. Spurlock being a carpenter, it could hold and looked fine. Out of precaution, they left their house during

hurricane Fran in 1996. Afterwards, they chose to participate in the federal buy-out program designed to move properties out of the floodplain. To their dismay, the city did not want to move their old house to a safer place. Instead, it was burned down30. Many people in the neighborhood did not understand why. It was a perfect house. They told me they missed the house and community of Lincoln City. They were born there, grew up there, met each other there, bought a house there. Now it is all gone. Lincoln City is gone. "There is a lot of bitterness in the community," Mr. Spurlock tells me.

Many people lived there for years and years and years. After Fran [1996], of course, a lot of those people, they did not want to sell. They wanted to really just have their homes redone and they wanted to stay there. We were on the first flood, Fran. So that made a big difference. You did not have that many people, you know, involved with it, because people made the decision not to sell, even though they gave them opportunity. They were told not to.

But it wasn’t only the flood which made people sell after Floyd. It was also an attitude. Why did people sell after Floyd? Mr. Spurlock:

The same thing. The flood comes again…and they would get no assistance. You would not get any assistance. Even though you had raised your house on poles next to the canal. But it would not have made a difference. We could stay! They could stay! But what was made clear, if you choose to stay, you were on your own.

According to the Spurlocks, to many, the buyout money was a way out of a impoverished situation, but it wasn’t only the money:

And one of the things that I appreciate, and that they appreciate I am sure, is they don't have to worry about their floodwaters. That was behind, you know. Even though we lost our community, we did not have to worry about the next year when it rains. So those are some of the good benefits.

Lack of assistance. Money. Everybody’s gone. Floods. A poor population does not have a lot