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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview K-0509, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Billy Ray Hall, as President of the Rural Economic Development Center, coordinated North Carolina's clean-up and recovery efforts after Hurricane Floyd. In this information-rich interview, Hall discusses the scope of the damage in eastern North Carolina. He focuses on the economic effects of the flood, but briefly discusses the environmental impact as well, claiming that the much-feared hog lagoon flooding actually had only marginal impact. Hall describes how a lack of preparation stifled North Carolina's response to flooding and wind damage, but he thinks the ongoing recovery effort is going well and is optimistic about North Carolina's future preparedness. Hall does not describe at any length how North Carolinians affected by the flood responded to the disaster and its aftermath, and he does not go into detail about on-the-ground rebuilding programs.
Billy Ray Hall, president of the Rural Economic Development Center, discusses the scope, environment and financial, of the flood damage in eastern North Carolina.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is Charlie Thompson on January 20, 2000 at 1:10 PM with Billy Ray Hall who is the President of the North Carolina Rural Center. Mr. Hall will you tell us what your present position is here is at the Center and also something about your work as director with the hurricane re-development center.
Sure. The Rural Economic Development Center was created in 1987. Mr. Bill
Friday and others and said we needed a long-term look at the rural
economy of this state and we needed an organization who would have as
its mission to promote the long-term economic development of rural North
Carolina with a special focus on low income individuals. So as a typical
non-profit we've been at it for thirteen years and we've become a bit
atypical in the sense that we've run economic programs funded by
national foundations, funded by the private sector, and most recently
significant funding by the public sector. We administer part of the
clean water bond issue, passed by the citizens of North Carolina last
year, or year before last. We also administer micro-enterprise loan
program at a level around two million, funded by the Ford Foundation,
and we get about eight million a year from the General Assembly to
administer. So while we're a non-profit, we're a fairly significant
non-profit in doing research and capacity building in rural areas. And
so we've been doing that for thirteen years. Most recently thought, the
Governor asked me to come over on loan, which I agreed to do, to head up
his re-development effort following hurricane Floyd.
Right. You're mostly likely I think from rural North Carolina?
I'm from eastern North Carolina, the heart of pickle country, which is Mt. Olive, a town of 4600. It was 4600 when I was born in 1948 and in the last census it was around 4600 so it's a typical eastern town with a railroad track down the middle and about 60 percent majority and 40 percent minority population. So, that's where I come from—this is my accent.
And did Mt. Olive get flooded?
No. Mt. Olive is nine miles south of Goldsboro. Goldsboro is the city, like most cities, that grew up around our rivers. And Goldsboro sits on the Neuse River—it was significantly flooded both by hurricane Floyd and previously by hurricane Fran. So, some of my kin people were living in the area were flooded, but not me. In fact, I had a second cousin that was killed going to work in Goldsboro. So this disaster, besides all the other attributes, got very personal very fast.
Describe Governor Hunt's process that he went through to appoint you to this position.
Well, Governor Hunt's process probably has as a byproduct appointing me, his process is to, as he has done for the fifteen years he's been Governor, first and second times he's served as Governor, his focus has been to understand government and what it can do for people. Can you hold for just a second—.
[TAPE IS PAUSED FOR A MOMENT]
The Governor's experience at dealing with hurricanes and disaster, I
think, is probably the most significant thing in terms of positioning
this state's
For another hurricane?
For hurricane Fran. I did the re-development effort under hurricane Fran
also. We were able to go get federal money and put together a state
response package and improve the way we respond to disasters after Fran
that a lot of people say helped us a great deal in getting ready for
this disaster. The redevelopment effort now picks up that speed, and
with the Governor's leadership,
Well, let's talk about the flood itself.
Sure.
What are the effects of the flood as you describe them?
I think anytime you start talking about numbers they are only
understandable when you put them in relation to something. For example,
if you say you had a hundred dollars worth of damage and you're in a
developing nation where you house costs 150 dollars and is made out of
natural materials, it's a lot different than in America when you have a
hundred dollars worth of damage. So the first thing to do is let's put
perspective. This was a six billion dollar disaster in North Carolina.
The entire agriculture output for the state of North Carolina last year
was seven billion dollars. So six billion dollars is huge relative to
this state's economy, relative to our resource base. And that is big by
any stretch of the imagination—60,000 homes being damaged, 17,000 are
uninhabitable and 7,000
That still doesn't make up for the seven billion.
Well, you want to put it another context, tobacco took its third—, we were in the crop season and it was roughly eighty or ninety million dollars worth of tobacco still in the field—it was flooded, destroyed. But that was the second year for the farmer who, three years earlier, was farming at X amount in two years he took a thirty-five percent reduction in quota. This year we're in now, he had disaster strike him and take his tobacco crop, and now he's got a reduction in quota again. So, the farmer is the one, if I had to guess, in a terms of a way of life, farming is the most at risk as a way of life for being lost in major areas of rural North Carolina.
So, really the eastern part of the state was already under siege economically and so forth—it's a huge challenge for your Center I'm sure.
Well, the rural Center, ironically, was producing a report that was to
look at the good and the difficult in rural North Carolina. And the good
was about the growth around our urban areas and some of our other areas
like Wilson and Greenville, that seemed to be digging their way into or
up to a better economy. But it was also talking about places left out
which a lot of eastern North Carolina was. Which meant that they really
had a long way to go and then you hit them
Right so the flood has helped fine tune the efforts of the Center?
Helped fine tune a lot of efforts. The Rural Center, obviously, we're focused very tightly now on some major responses to eastern North Carolina and trying to look at the disaster as a way of not only focusing on those problems, like the need for water and sewer and information technology and others, but also as an opportunity to say, “OK if we're going to go in an rebuild let's at least rebuild correctly, let's do it smart or smarter.” Let's also take advantage of at least the public focus, the Erskine Bowles Commission that just been faced—, looking at rural development issues, it fed in very well. So, if you're going to have a disaster, certainly, if you wanted public attention focused the national attention from the governors, press, to the—, just the national media looking at a disaster, all the way down to just good timing, if there can be such a thing, around the disaster. A lot of ideas were on the table and cooking. And so I think it's a good opportunity. I mentioned earlier wearing two hats with the Rural Center and the disaster recovery. I also have a third hat. The tobacco settlement created the North Carolina Tobacco Foundation and I serve on that Foundation that's chaired by Mr. Friday and we worked together to create this Rural Center. And so we have an opportunity there to focus their attention while we're focusing the state and national attention.
You said, “Let's do it correctly, let's do this”—, can you describe what some of those efforts would be?
Correctly, means that when you're in a community that's growing slowly
and let's say you're learning as you go. In other words, first of all,
you're diversifying out of agriculture and so you're learning your way
into a small manufacturing base and you just put it wherever you can.
You're limited planning background and planning professionals as a small
community, so you really don't avail yourself of say long range planning
and defining flood plains and getting flood maps. You develop
infrastructure as the growth takes place, so you follow rather than
shaping the growth by placing the infrastructure in. And in eastern
North Carolina we've done, I think, a very good job of following some
opportunities. Now the problem is you don't need to follow some
opportunities to have smarter growth, you need to lead opportunities.
You need to decide this is a good area for industrial growth and you
need to build the industrial support structure. Similarly, you need to
look at hazardous areas and get out of them. It would have been great
had we had strong professional planning and understanding among the
citizenry about the danger from floods and understood it and not
developed in those flood plains. Those 11,000 units of property are
going to cost over 440 million dollars of public money to acquire—they
would have been much better had they been built outside those flood
plains and not flooded with this disaster. And so, I think, whether it's
looking at infrastructure and planning for the development of a
community, this time have the benefit of, hopefully, to lead
opportunities or lead in terms of the growth of the area with a
A lot of the highways follow those bodies—, those rivers and creeks as well, right?
We had a thousand roads closed during this disaster. We had three
inter-states that were affected, two that were closed—sections of
inter-state highway, roads that were washed completely out. But we
learned. One, that water is incredibly powerful: whether it washes a car
off the road as it did when the eighteen inches of water washes a
vehicle off and kills the family of a highway
So, is it safe to say that future development should not be along rivers at all? That when this buyout happens we're going to restore those to wetlands or what exactly?
No, I think what it says is that there have to be appropriate uses made.
Certainly, the creek beds and other areas are appropriate for natural
resource activities. It is not a bad thing to grow crops and especially
if you are cognizant of when the flooding is likely. The same thing is
true for recreation. Recreation that is built when flood proofed a park
can withstand a flood pretty easily when it goes back out. When we look
at reservoir camping facilities they're flooded every year five or six
times and they go right back into production. There are things that are
appropriate uses in those flood plains and there are things that are
totally at risk when you develop them in the flood plain. And what we've
got to do is figure out a way to make those uses apropos. By contrast,
wind as opposed to water, we know creates havoc. And when you look at
the coast, it's always amazing to people to see some houses standing and
the house next door torn down. It has a lot to do with the construction
standards that are employed.
You said that there was thirty to fifty million dollars worth of damage to the land itself—?
You want me to define that?
Yes, please.
Well, whenever you are looking at farm land that's been shaped, roads
have been built in, it's been structured, terraced, it's got wind rows
in it, it's got drainage fields built so that it's productive, raw land,
but still productive with a lot of work done to it. When that water came
up and washed away all those roads and all those ditches and those wind
rows and the things that were done, that land that was damaged—eroded
substantially, has to be pulled back in place. Where I got the figure of
thirty to sixty million dollars is what we're still aggregating the
effect on, as farmers go in and try to restore that land to production.
And that's not to mention land that was destroyed that's around the
highways. That highway is not counted as a land destruction but it was
destruction to an infrastructure on the land and the land. But I was
speaking
You've talked a lot about the various figures that are coming from—, the dollar figures from federal and the state governments. How will those monies be allocated? You mentioned 7,000 homes and so forth—,
Well, most all of the programs you talk about are specific in where they
go. And what you're trying to do is to identify needs in those
categories and match them up with appropriate federal agencies. For
example the emergency, which is to get people in temporary housing, to
get the roads restored, the debris removed, the health care, the mental
health counseling that needs to go on. That's the normal disaster
response. That's about a billion dollars worth of effort and it's
administered through our emergency management operations at the state
and federal level. It goes directly to individuals or governments that
are trying to respond to disasters like the washed-out waste water
treatment lines that have to be rebuilt. So that's figure comes into
play. Then you back and think about additional needs. And we divided the
initial needs or needs that are out there in three categories: housing.
We know that while people's houses were destroyed and their in temporary
housing they've got to get in permanent housing, they've got to have
their house that was damaged rebuilt. So, when you look at the federal
money coming in, we asked for and got additional money from our General
Assembly to help deal with the housing problem. In fact, 350 million
will go
So the first billion includes those trailers people are living in—.
Those are temporary housing and stuff like that and cleaning up the roads
and redoing the water lines and that type of thing. The next set of
resources starts with housing, which we are getting help, in this case
from the state for about 350 million, the next category of need is
agriculture and the farm community. The package that was passed by the
General Assembly has 150 million in grant money going to the farm
community to help pay for their crop losses and their equipment losses
and restoring their land. And that 150 million will go directly into the
farm community to help them survive, based on paying like seventeen to
eighteen percent of their losses. That's what you'll actually get. You
won't get anywhere near what you need to restore, but you'll get some
money. So the economy was second and then equal but third on the list is
public health and environmental issues like making sure we go out and
close up landfills or junk car places. We're going in and making sure
that they're—, first of all, environmentally sound. So we have to close
them off and test them and that type of thing. But allocating money
through those agencies that deal with the public health and the
environmental health is sort of a third area. So those programs were
administered by the normal program administrators but with a target
toward dealing with the flood disaster. And so in each case where we had
resources we were trying to attack housing as a first priority and then
health, environment, and economy sort of followed that and
How can people apply for that money? How do you find those very poor people out there who have no experience calling into—.
Well, you find them two or three ways. One is you engage a lot of grass
roots community to get the word to them. And you work very aggressively
to get them to register as having been damaged. We've got 80,000 plus
people now registered as having been damaged by this disaster. We're
getting very close to, I'd say, the larger majority of these people.
We're in probably the 90th percentile now of
people who were damaged. We're still doing outreach working with
schools, with churches, with non-profits to find the elderly and others
who may not have registered. Once you're registered you're sort of in
the system, and we can track you, we can find out if you're getting
assistance. We can look at your housing need and we can come back in and
say when we hold a meeting and talk about housing, or set up housing
councils, which we are doing in twenty-six counties, those people are
available, they have your name, they know you had housing damage. So
they're checking looking for you and we're getting the word out so
you'll look for them to come in and apply for the housing assistance.
Similarly, I'm working with the agricultural community and we'll be
holding regional meetings with agricultural leaders to say, “Here's how
you get agricultural help. Go apply here, this is how it will work, and
this is how you get the money.” But fisherman, fisherwomen, the same
thing. We're putting out rules
You are going to have hearings coming this month?
We start January 31st and go into early
February. We'll hold six regional meetings and the primary purpose is to
share with individuals, the media, local leaders, if you have a housing
problem here's the program that is available at the state level, and
here's how you apply. If you are a farmer and you have a loss due to
disaster, here's where you go to apply and here's what's going to be
available to you. Then we'll take time and stop and say, “OK, this is
what we're doing, what else do you think, or what comments do you want
to give us to take back and work on in Raleigh?” And we'll listen.
So it will be a public forum where people will go to the microphone and ask questions?
Absolutely. Ask questions, make comments. They may have some things that we can probably do better, and we'll be listening for those ideas. They may point out problems we are not aware of, and we want to be able to respond to those. But it seems to me it's a two-way thing. One is to bring your state programs out there and make sure they can avail themselves of it, and second, is to bring their ideas back to improve the way you are responding to the disaster.
What are the communities that are the sites for those hearings? Can you name them?
I can't name them off the top of my head. I said I had all the
information a while ago but—, what we'll do is do two in the southeast,
one will
Maybe one in Greenville. I remember seeing—.
I'm betting one's in Greenville. There's a list around here.
Right. I've heard a lot about the FEMA representatives as I've traveled around, and some of those have been sensitive and some haven't. And some people are very dissatisfied with how FEMA has calculated the amount of loan or grant that they are going to get. Will state people go back in behind those federal people?
Well, first of all, most of the FEMA people are working with a state
counterpart in one way or another. Now the reason why the people are
dissatisfied is a lot of things that we naturally take for granted are
not necessarily true when you are doing a response to a disaster. First
of all, you expect people to understand you, to be comfortable talking
to you. And what you do in a disaster if you are a federal agency with
only 2,500 employees, 2,500 I believe nationwide, is they have a huge
number of employees that are on call—they come in just for disasters and
help do this work. Now they generally do very good work but they may
have a bad day plus an accent and for most of us in the South that does
not go down well, and so everything—, given you're in a disaster and
you're already having real problems and frustrations, now you got a
person across the desk that
A lot of these people are so poor that there's no other way for them to go anywhere that they—, unless they get some money for their house and land that they have, how can they reestablish themselves?
They can't. And if you were a renter—.
They're stuck in these trailers.
If you are a renter in eastern North Carolina you got a double whammy.
First of all, you we're renting very low-income property as a general
rule. There is no rental property—, basically there's just thousands of
needs for rental units in eastern North Carolina. Very few of them are
low-income rental units and there you are. You used to live in a very
small house at seventy-five to a
Let's talk about agriculture. Agriculture, obviously, is the largest industry in eastern North Carolina, it's been hit very hard as you've outlined. You didn't mention the poultry and livestock industries.
Well, I should have. Livestock suffered about a 12 million dollar destruction. Two million chickens and turkeys were killed—flooded out. You see pictures of them. About 30,000 pigs were drowned and you see pictures of those where they were standing on top of their pig parlors and the water was at the top and they were out on top of them. I think seven hog lagoons ran over. I don't think we had any breaches that I remember off the top of my head. But the water level just rose up, rose up and over.
Only seven flooded? Only seven lagoons flooded?
Seven breaches in the sense that a breach is defined as either breaking or overflowing. And our sense is the technology did relatively well in a terrible disaster. I think the question for all of us though and as a public policy commitment, the Governor and those of us working to promote rural development, are looking at ways to either retrofit them with new technology that is not susceptible to flooding or to move them out of the flood plain. And we pursued, and are still pursuing federal money, to do buyouts. The state Clean Water Trust Fund provided some money to begin buying, doing the buyout.
I think I read fifteen farms were going to be bought.
The estimate was fifteen would be bought, with the five million or so that was made available. I think the key here is that, given the magnitude of the disaster, the loss of livestock was not as much as anybody would have guessed. The fact that we've developed in the flood plains and are at risk environmentally in the flood plains is just hyped. I mean the awareness is super-heightened by the lagoons washing. Same thing is true about the public wastewater treatment plants. When they went out and the line was dumping raw sewage, everybody down that creek that depended on that creek realized it not just the hog farm. But the hog farm is part of it—so it Kinston's public wastewater treatment plant, Seven—, Seven Springs doesn't have one, Goldsboro, Kinston. If you're sitting in New Bern, you're about to get all their waste coming at you. And if you're the fisherman sitting just beyond in Oriental, you're sitting there watching that plume coming down there and—.
Somebody described the color of pink—, Pepto Bismal or something.
Yep. Fortunately, the Lord was good. He sent Irene on the tail end of
Floyd, and while she didn't come in land, she stirred up the water and
surprised everybody. It kept it from actually creating as much
environmental damage to the coastal waters as we had anticipated. In
fact, that's probably the highest profile political debate right now
with the package that we've got. We had estimates where we had the
federal officials and the state officials look at this flood right after
it occurred, they estimated nineteen million dollars worth of damage.
We're still gathering numbers, but it's very clear some of our
fisheries, like white shrimp
OK, in other words people aren't getting a free ride off this.
The farmer has to have a certified loss of his cotton crop, he's got to show you what got lost, he's got to show you how much he had planted, he's got to show you the loss. He gets certified and then we mail him a check for seventeen cent on the dollar. The fisherman has got to be in a fishing industry that was declared a loss industry. In other words, the white shrimp is not going to get any money. If he happened to be in fin fish and he was in trout or whatever that got hit hard, there's a loss in that industry and he makes an application, and he can show that he lost his equipment, his nets, or did not have the catch he had last year, then he's eligible for some help. That's how the system will work. This is a good whipping boy right now.
What are the long-term prospects for agriculture in eastern North Carolina?
Great. I think there are two or three things to keep in mind. One, the devastation to our tobacco industry is proceeding. And so will we grow other crops? I believe so. Will we have to be creative in how we grow those crops? Absolutely. Is biotechnology and forestry and niche markets with products ranging from catfish to toulapia (?) to others all going to be part of that mix? Absolutely. Have we got ingenious farmers in eastern North Carolina who know how to package things? Yes. So, my outlook for farming is that we probably will have a group of niche marketers. The larger farmers will continue to aggregate, so we will continue to decline in the number of farms. And people ought to remember we went from 225,000 farms to 45,000 farms in the last thirty years. We've been going down every year as people move out of farming and take advantage of new technology and new fertilizers and equipment and so on. But I would say the agricultural industry is in a severe state of flux. But is the potential there? Yes. Do we have the resources to couple with that potential? I believe we will. That's not to say we're not in a bad cycle though. You can't be raising cotton, corn, and soybeans and selling everyone of them for less than you got in them and not know we're in a bad cycle.
Right. And the major alternatives, hogs and poultry, have taking a beating.
Catching hell aren't they? They're catching it aren't they?
I'd like to talk a lot longer, but let me get to the last question. How do we prepare for future floods? Have we learned something that?—.
Oh, God yes. I think it's like when we came together after hurricane
Fran. We learned a lot of things about our ability and our public
capability, if you will, to respond to a wind disaster, a hurricane. We
realized that we had been so fortunate for thirty years not to have a
major hurricane, that when it came budget time we didn't put computers
into the disaster office. Whenever we were talking about a disaster we
said counties work together and plan but we didn't call on them to adopt
flood ordinances. Think about it, we didn't have a flood. We didn't
require them to develop interagency agreements. We didn't develop the
aircraft capacity to deal with some of the issues that would emerge. We
learned all that from Fran. We made a lot of proposals and addressed—,
this disaster came along and said, “Wow, you did a really good job, but
you forgot what happens in this kind of disaster.” For instance, we
staged several tractor trailer loads of ice when the storm started
coming in, ready to disperse because we knew power was going. Smart idea
right? Who would have guessed that the road would be out? So, now we've
got another plan. The plan is how do you fly it in? And we learned that
with this disaster. With flooding, we also learned that twenty-year-old
flood maps are not good. They're not good for public policy, they're not
good for individual decisions on where to locate. We learned that if
you're in the path of hurricanes, you as a state need to address how you
deal with it as it comes forth. The Rainy Day Fund, which was our
answer, was 326 million dollars. Now think about it, we had a six
billion dollar disaster. We used every dollar that was available to us
in the Rainy Day Fund without draining it, and still had to pull 500
million dollars out of regular state programs. We've got to address that
question, because if the
Piggybacking on that question, will we see manufacturing plants and other development entities want to locate in North Carolina, knowing about these floods, or is that putting a damper on it?
The good news about all this, I guess, is that if you at manufacturing,
whether it was Fran, Floyd, Hazel, a manufacturing facility is not
usually significantly damaged. Now the ones that are sitting in the
flood plain and got flooded, very few, in fact the survey that was done
by our Department of Commerce said the major manufacturers were
minimally impacted by the disaster. Given that you build outside the
flood plains, generally, and given that we're getting smarter about
this, our potential as a manufacturing location if you add a weather
risk I don't know that it's even substantially different. First of all
Thank you very much.
END OF INTERVIEW