As per a report, Laurel Bank Campground (North Carolina) is still months, if not years, away from fully getting back to normal after Tropical Storm Fred.
Adam Pressley has been living next door to Laurel Bank Campground in Cruso for some time now. He keeps an eye on the campground when owner Sherrie Lynn McArthur is away.
“Very glad I was here with all of this and close by her with everything going on,” Pressley said.
He was referring to the destruction caused by Tropical Storm Fred in August.
Most of its residents huddled at Pressley’s house when the campground was flooded.
“Sherrie called me about two o’clock. [I] climbed some power lines and trees and then got to the house,” he said. “Sherrie had walked over the mountain and gotten my ATV and ferried people from over here.”
You may think that it will appear a bit different nearly a year later. But, piles of debris all over the campground show the scars remain.
“It’s hard not to see the scabs every day,” Pressley said.
Those scabs multiply due to the silence that surrounds the campground.
“May 1 would have been the opening day for the campground, and that was always a day we looked forward to,” Pressley said. “It was a hard winter and then an easier spring. But now that it’s campground season, it’s definitely hard to see the other campgrounds and not have our people here.”
Pressley said that FEMA isn’t able to assist in the repairs since the road is considered private, even though it’s only about 100 feet from the main road.
“We haven’t heard anything from the Corps of Engineers,” he said. “It’s just way too much for any individual. Everybody’s willing, but this is just way too much to clean up with a skid steer. We do feel a little forgotten up here, at times.”
Even if this is a rare occasion in the mountains, the community will never forget.
“Totally different kind of flooding than the coastal flooding, but equally as damaging,” Pressley said.
And for Pressley, this will always be home.
“No matter what, it’s still home,” Pressley said. “Sherrie and her sons are my family.”
“We did lose people, so those reminders are multi-faceted,” he said. “It just… it never goes away.”‘
This story originally appeared on Spectrum Local News. Featured image from Laurel Bank Campground.