Editor's note: This story is part of a series examining the social and health injustices resulting from increasingly intense storms and is the result of a collaboration between EHN and Scalawag Magazine, an independent nonprofit magazine that covers the American South.
NEW BERN, NC â Omisade Burney-Scott has white hair in skinny twists that wash forward on her head like a foaming wave, neat purple lipstick and eyeshadow. On a gloomy day in the fall, she wore a black shirt with white lettering on it: "Just a kid from New Bern."
Burney-Scott, a community activist, had driven from her home in Durham, North Carolina, the couple of hours to her hometown of New Bern, to spend the weekend talking to survivors of Hurricane Florence. A lot of these survivors were also relatives, close or distant.
"It takes two seconds to find your cousins in New Bern," she said, laughing.
Her 71-year-old sister, Mary Ann Dove, was among the people who rode out the catastrophic flooding in September. She knew Mary Ann wasn't planning to evacuate (because she had limited resources, and was under the impression that it was not going to be a catastrophic storm). But Burney-Scott got worried as news reports came in about the size of the storm surge from Florence, which made landfall as a Category 1 storm, then moved painfully slowly across the Southeast, dumping feet of rain.
To continue reading this article by Lewis Raven Wallace, go to: https://www.dailyclimate.org/l...titem=2#rebelltitem2
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