It really was. The unbelievable part about Floyd was, you know, Floyd was a monster when it was formed. Floyd was a storm that approached Andrew and Hugo, the kind of storm that can kill tens of thousands of people. As it formed and you saw the satellite images of it, and it was a category five which is the most powerful, it's really quite frightening. Rarely do we have a perfect storm form, and when I mean perfect I mean the size of it and the shape of it. It's almost beautiful in a powerful, scary kind of way.

A macabre way.

That's right. That's right, but to know that nature can create something with that perfect symmetry of the power. As it began to form and as it began to threaten Florida, and then Georgia, and then South Carolina, and then North Carolina, and I'll get into more detail in this but the path within North Carolina changed itself three times. Then ultimately the wind part of the storm was really no big deal. I remember having watched through this having a tremendous sigh of relief and heading home about three o'clock in the morning to take a break, change clothes, take a shower, grab a nap, and I walk in—this is a home that my wife and I have here in Raleigh—and I walk in, and I'm just about to go up the steps, and I hear the sound of a waterfall, and I can't imagine what it is. So I go down the basement steps, and that was a waterfall in my basement rapidly filling up. Apparently the storm drains, the sewer system was backing into our home which, of course, happened all over North Carolina, but that was my first personal indication that something different was going on in this storm.

You didn't get off as easily as you thought you were going to.

No, no, no. Like a lot of people in the emergency management business, I had a couple of neighbors come over. We moved a couple of pieces of furniture up, but basically I had to tell my wife, "You've got to handle this. I've got millions of folks counting on stuff I've got to do," and basically left a mess at home, as did many, many, many National Guardsmen, and law enforcement and emergency workers.

Absolutely, and I've actually talked with some in the eastern part of the state who had their own homes flooded, and they didn't know where all their family members were, and they were going out and helping other people. It's quite remarkable.

It really is.

It happened with you, too.

It did. It did. It happened with me, and that's just the thing that is just so remarkable about Floyd in particular, that you see the very, very best in human nature. I think that's what's been so powerful for me because in many ways because of the time I spent on TV and radio in my role, I kind of became the public face of the storm, and I'm the person that got all the thank yous, and I didn't deserve them. I had a real connection that you rarely have in government or public policy to feel the outpouring of gratitude from tens of thousands of people all over eastern North Carolina because of all these Herculean efforts. People just didn't care. They wanted to do whatever it took to help their neighbor, who they didn't even know.

Right, right, but got to know. Can you describe the bureaucracy for me?

Sure.

In terms of the organizational structure in the state, what agency was charged with providing what relief service?

Sure, and it's actually one of the things that I'm most proud of. We, with the help of Eric Tolbert who I hired to be the Director of Emergency Management, with Governor Hunt's blessing of course, a North Carolina native who had gone down to Florida after Andrew and really had incredible organizational skills. One of the things that we had done between the time that Hurricane Fran hit and the time Hurricane Floyd hit is we had changed the way we were organized from a bureaucratic standpoint. The emergency management system in North Carolina and, indeed, in the country is set up as a chain of command. The on-the-ground position is a county emergency management coordinator. The only way that the system works and the reason that it works so well is if you're in a county and you've got a problem with the school, or with the city, stop lights, or anything you need to channel those requests through one person in a county, and then that person channels that request to emergency management here in Raleigh in the basement of the administrative building, the bunker over there where we've all spent so many hours. Thank goodness no one has spent any time there the last couple of years. So the problem or the needs come up through the county. We did a lot of education [of] the principal of the school or the mayor of the town so they knew they didn't need to call Raleigh directly. They needed to get that person, and most of the counties had an emergency center, and most people knew where it was. Then at the receiving end we control the tasking of all state, federal, and local resources. We prioritized and then send it back down. That, in a nutshell, is the way the system worked. But one of the things that we had changed tremendously is we used to do business by telephone. Gosh, we'd have seventy-five phones over there in the basement of the administration building. Just that summer we had gotten software written. We had gotten a grant from the Federal Government. We'd given a laptop to every county emergency management coordinator. We had training on how to use it, so when the request came in at the county level they were typed in by the EM coordinator, and in many instances we have regional EM state employees that were out there with those folks, but then the software automatically prioritized the request. It was so weird to have been through Fran, Bonnie, Bertha, not Dennis because we had the new system in place for Dennis but Dennis was just so concentrated on one area, so instead of hearing the phone ring like crazy and having all these people, we took this whole room, and we gave all the agencies a room outside, and there were about four of us sitting, and just about as quiet as it is now at this table, with the clicking of a laptop looking at the screen helping prioritize with the computer. But we cut our response time down from, in some instances, ninety-minutes, two hours to always less than five minutes. It's great comfort that I know as we were battling against this slow tidal wave of Floyd, sending volunteer fire departments into towns in the middle of the night, waking people up, getting them out of their house[s], that that time savings in that software I know saved lives. It's a wonderful feeling.

It's amazing. So one of the big decision makers was the computer?

Absolutely.

Very interesting, not just the elected officials or appointed officials?

No, but it was very easy for us to prioritize. You have real commonsense priorities, and it was easy to write the software. You looked after, obviously, an immediate life or death situation. It went to the top where you requisitioned a helicopter. Oftentimes that was getting somebody to the hospital or, in many instances, making sure that the hospital had what they need to treat the patients they already had, whether that was making sure that you dispatched a power crew to get the power back on or if a generator failed at a hospital. That's another thing that happened between Fran and Floyd. We went from having almost no generators whatsoever in eastern North Carolina to by the time Floyd hit most of the major institutions had a generator in good working order.

So there were actually some lessons learned from Fran that stood you in good stead for Floyd?

Oh, absolutely. It's a long list from having contracts in place in advance for ice, water, cots, to doing a complete inventory on where our shelters were. We actually had some shelters during Fran that would have been flooded during Floyd, but we had gone back over all of our official shelter sites that we do in conjunction with the Red Cross, and we'd actually taken a lot of vulnerable shelters off the list that no one had really looked at closely before. The changes go on, and on, and on. As I said, I think it culminated in extremely good customer service for our people in a life and death situation when they needed good customer service. I mean, government worked.

Good deal. What agency was responsible for what, because for a lay person it's kind of hard to figure out?

Sure, okay. Well, Emergency Management, once the governor issues that declaration, Emergency Management is the tasker of everything. That small division of people, it's about a hundred people, a hundred and fifty people. When there's not an emergency they spend their time planning, making contingency plans. Actually, in the last few years starting back when I was still secretary, we focused on bioterrorism and a lot of planning. Emergency Management has many roles, but when you kick into a hurricane declaration they task everybody else. Now the resources that are available to us, the primary responders in a situation like this are the Department of Transportation in moving their equipment from the western part of the state to the eastern part of the state. The Department of Transportation, the Highway Patrol who has the responsibility for roads that become lifelines in that situation.

Or death traps if you go through them.

That's exactly right. We also have a fleet of military surplus helicopters that we can blanket the skies to see what's open and what's not open, and that happened during Floyd. Then the other primary responder, the one that I don't know on the government side of things, I don't know how our people would have done without them, are the North Carolina National Guard. The neat thing about the Guard, the Guard are volunteers. They are North Carolinians themselves. We can draw them from the western part of the state as we did particularly on some of these. There was expertise in the western part of the state on rapid water rescue which is not uncommon in the mountains where you have valleys that channel water.

And the Nantahala River.

That's right.

That's extremely powerful.

But it's very uncommon. In eastern North Carolina it's flat as a pancake, and that's something that I don't think we'll ever see again in our lifetime, rapid water in eastern North Carolina. Those were the primary responder agencies. In the phases that come after, then you have the public health officials that step in, and [unclear] that steps in. In this particular instance I became the barbecue king of North Carolina. I think we set a record. I barbecued thirty thousand pigs in one day. We incinerated thirty thousand pigs that were dead, from a public safety standpoint. That's one that I used to catch—no pun intended—a lot of ribbing on.

Barbecue, but nobody got to eat it.

Nobody ate it. We cooked them, but boy we overcooked them.

You skipped the vinegar, and the tomato, and all those good spices.

That's right.

Okay. All right. I'm curious about one thing. What was it like down there in that bunker, the officials that were coordinating this thing? Did you all get closer because you were sort of comrades-in-arms? Was there a lot of stress in the room? What was it like?

An atmosphere of consummate professionalism, and the reason for that was so much practice, so many storms. I mean it was a markedly different atmosphere than I guess Bertha which preceded Fran by about five weeks, six weeks. Bertha was primarily an agricultural storm, but really the first storm that had laid North Carolina out in a while.

In a long time, yeah.

By the time we got to Floyd people knew their role. We were all friends. We spent a lot of time together. From time to time doing away with the Department of Crime Control and Public Safety comes up, and its the main reason that I think it's a horrible idea. These people know each other. They get around a table for staff meetings every two weeks. They're comfortable. They know each other's strengths and weaknesses. They know how to let off steam with each other. And when you get to a time of crisis, or particularly from an economic standpoint, if you get the beaches open one day sooner because the team knows what they're doing, that's fifteen years worth of savings, possible savings, of doing away with the Department. I don't know that we got closer. I think with every one of these storms we gained even more respect, I know I did, for the folks who were carrying out just incredible missions and doing it with such professionalism.

Exactly.

And you do have a lot of people shouting at you. It's part of the job that you let it roll off, and you kind of know who to key in, and who not to. I won't say there wasn't a tremendous amount of stress there. That was there also, but professionalism ruled.

How did it feel to you personally having to face such a daunting disaster that was unprecedented, just as a human being?

As a human being, I tell you, it's the most peaks and valleys that I've ever had in my life, ever had in my professional life, and close in my personal life. The peaks and valleys go from standing in somebody's front yard with them in Chinquapin in Duplin County, and hearing them tell a story about this elderly couple who both found out recently that they were terminally ill, knowing that they're never going to set foot in their home again, and knowing there's nothing you can do for them. Or finding out that people who you knew had been swept to their death, versus then the exhilaration of knowing that you successfully evacuated fifteen hundred people, and they're all safe, and dry, and getting a warm meal in a high school in Tarboro, and that people are coming from all over the country, and sending money from all over the world to help you. I mean it's peaks and valleys like you cannot imagine. As I said, for me in many instances it was magnified because I became, along with Governor Hunt, the public face of the storm.

Yeah, exactly. And you and Governor Hunt took that helicopter ride the day after the storm when the flooding was just beginning, right? What was that like? What do you remember seeing?

Oh, gosh. I'm not much of a photographer, but there were two things that we saw. I took an unbelievable photograph that I still have of a quarry between Rocky Mount and Tarboro that was just beginning to fill up. The water was pouring in from several sides, and it was louder than Niagara Falls. You could hear it over the helicopter. So you could see the power of the storm. We knew that we were getting a lot of rainfall. About five or six in the morning, the morning after, the meteorologists knew that something really unusual was going on. They were getting very strange rainfall readings, but we went out really not knowing what to expect. I remember seeing that waterfall. The other one that I think that I'll never forget was flying over, it wasn't even on our route, a private aircraft radioed our helicopter and said, "You have to go see Trenton in Jones County." We went, and it was something like out of an ebola virus movie or something. The sun was out. It was a beautiful day, and you approached this beautiful little town of Trenton with the courthouse downtown, and manicured homes, cars, but everything was covered with about three or four feet of water. It wasn't like some places where it was over the tops of the houses. You could see the store front windows, but the water was up to the front. The really spooky thing, not one person in the entire town. Nothing moving. Now, we found out later on that everybody had gotten out that night, and they were all in the civic center which was just outside of town, but just the image of that bizarre, still ghost town with nobody. That's the other weird thing about hurricanes and storms. They clear out all the birds. It's a really weird thing if you've never experienced it before. That next morning you go out, and the sun is pretty, but there are no birds. There's no chirping.

I know very little about birds, but one thing I think I do know is that they can sense barometric pressure falling before, well maybe meteorologists can, but before we can, obviously, and they scoot. They know how to get out of harms way before it hits.

You're exactly right, and that's one of the weird things that happens about hurricanes, having spent so much time close to them. Two things happen before they hit. On the many, many, many trips that I've taken flying one end of the coast to the other before storms come, you're right, the birds know to leave. The other thing that happens is the storm, the power of the hurricane acts as a vacuum cleaner on smog and dirt in our atmosphere. The evening before a hurricane comes the stars are crystal clear. The sky is crystal clear. I'll never forget that sensation before all of the storms hit.

Wow. Okay, just a little bit of a history question. I'm curious about Emergency Management. When was it created, and what did people do before that?