KINGSTREE, S.C. (AP) – A world away from South Carolina’s booming coastal resorts, hundreds of homes remain unrepaired in the county hardest hit by last year’s floods. Now they’re getting one last push of help.
A Christian group of about 1,500 carpenters, plumbers, electricians and other volunteers that formed in response to Hurricane Katrina is on its way to Williamsburg County, where flooding damaged 28 percent of the homes badly enough to qualify for federal aid.
“We’re coming here to rebuild homes and help their souls out too,” said Steve Tybor III, the president and co-founder of Eight Days of Hope, which aims to fix 150 homes with moldy walls, leaky roofs and holes in their flooring.
The volunteers are responding to a critical need. As wide-scale weather disasters become the new normal, rural communities like Williamsburg County are being left behind not so much by federal and state officials, but by the skilled workers they need to repair their homes. Most repairmen followed the money to urban areas, or to the next disaster.
The nearly two feet of rain that swamped the state last October caused the slow-flowing, tea-colored Black River to rise 18 feet in five days, cresting at double its flood stage, three feet above what anyone alive had ever seen.