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Winter storms in December produced flooding that waterlogged homes and businesses, washed out roads and overflowed rivers across the U.S.
Home improvement retailers haven’t been exempt from the damage, and have been rebuilding or cleaning up businesses in states including North Carolina and Missouri.
Wilson Carter Supply in Denton, North Carolina, was a business that flooded in December, but its staff saw the generosity of the community as they cleaned up afterward.
Requests for help on the store’s Facebook page brought an outpouring of support—people showed up with brooms, squeegees and generators on the first day to get the water out, and then followed up with large fans and volunteer hours to sort wet merchandise and catalog ruined and salvageable inventory.
The help came the same day the heavy rain began falling “really, really hard” on Dec. 30, store manager Anne Carter Bean says. Her father, Wilson Carter, started the business in 1965.
Within an hour and 15 minutes that morning, the entire store floor was under 4 inches of water that was steadily rising.
Bean was in the store and watched the water sweep across the yard of the business. Next, the water flowed over a concrete barrier and into the business’s warehouse behind the retail outlet. After that, the water quickly spread into the store office and onto the salesfloor.
Bean tried to manage the incoming water with a mop, but it kept coming.
“I thought, ‘OK, this is crazy. A mop and a bucket is not going to help,’” she says.
Bean, her father, son and two other employees scrambled to try to stop the rising water. They sandbagged the front entrance, moved as much merchandise off the lower shelves as they could and tried to sweep water out of the store with push brooms.
But water was coming in three of the four doors, and the fire department came by to cut off power to the building. About 8 inches of water was lapping against the front door, which was the only entrance with a seal strong enough to keep water out.
When the rain stopped that afternoon and flooding began to subside, Bean returned to the business. She found 16 inches of water covering filing cabinet drawers and lower shelves. Silt coated the walls and floor. Merchandise, including bags of concrete and plywood boards, that had to be left on lower shelves or on the warehouse floor, were ruined.
Community members helped empty the water. By 7 p.m., “we went from 16 inches of water to the floors just being wet,” Bean says.
The store lost thousands of dollars in merchandise—a loss not covered by insurance because the business never needed flood insurance in the past, she says.
Yet the damage, especially if Bean and her staff had been forced to leave water standing longer, was less than it could have been.
“It was really volunteers that helped save the day for us,” Bean says.
