The Lumberton, North Carolina Flood of 2016: A Community Resilience Focused Technical Investigation

Abstract

In early October 2016 Hurricane Matthew crossed North Caroline as a category 1 storm with some areas receiving 15-18 inches of rainfall on already saturated soil. The NIST-funded Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning teamed with researchers from NIST’s Community Resilience and Applied Economics programs to conduct a quick response field study focused on the small city of Lumberton, NC and the flooding they experienced from the Lumber River. Lumberton is an ethnically diverse community with a higher than average poverty and unemployment rate, an average civil infrastructure for a city of 22,000, and possesses an organized governance structure. This field study is the first of a series of annual field studies to document and better understand Lumberton’s recovery. This type of longitudinal is critical to study community resilience and ultimately provide data and insight into making U.S. communities more resilient to natural hazards. This community resilience-focused field study presented herein as Volume 1 of a report series, had two major objectives: First, to establish and document initial conditions for the longitudinal resilience field study of Lumberton’s recovery with a focus on the most heavily affected area located within a particular school zone; and secondly, to facilitate and document the development and first application of a combined engineering-social science field study protocol that provides a quantitative linkage between flood damage and socio-economics including race/ethnicity, income, tenancy status, and education level. Population dislocation probabilities were found to be higher for black and Native American households than for white households given the presence of the same residential damage state following the flood.