Effects of Hurricane Florence

Amara Harper, features writer| October 2, 2018

Sophie Smith

The strong winds blew over trees and collapsed houses, bricks and shingles floated in high waters as white papers float by. They are torn halfway through, and red and blue crayon streaks down the page, the fridge magnet just barely hanging on to the side.

As Hurricane Florence recently swept through the Carolinas and other areas of the east, it brought mass destruction both on a local and national level.

Hurricane Florence began forming off the coast of Africa in the Cabo Verde Islands as a Category 1 storm. However, as it traveled across the Atlantic it developed into a Category 4. It made landfall in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, on Sept.

 

14 at 7:15 a.m. and caused devastation up the east coast. According to The Weather Channel, the storm’s rainfall broke records in towns through the Carolinas; Elizabethtown, North Carolina, received 36 inches of rain.

According to the New York Times, Hurricane Florence took the lives of 43 people. As well as that, many animals were left behind due to refuge shelters not being able to support the influx of pets. However, shelters across the country have offered to help house animals during hurricane season. In some large scale cases, whole farms along with their animals were hurt by the flood. According to The Guardian, over 100 farm animals such as cows, chickens, horses and pigs have died in the storm.  

“This is devastating,” Lily Nunes, sophomore, said. “Those animals did not deserve to die, but they had no other [option].”

Hurricane cleanup is currently underway with locals and people from all over the world lending a hand to clean up, which involves cleaning up houses after floods, picking up fallen trees and counting losses.

“I have family in the Carolinas,” Nunes said. “I wish I could go out and help them. [According to my family, many] houses are completely destroyed. It’s sad to hear. They don’t deserve [what happened to them].”

As stated by, the New York Times, every time a hurricane sweeps through America, most  citizens have a heavy weight of sympathy in their hearts. The repercussions are not limited to the site of the incident. Hurricanes bring widespread weather extremes, causing thunderstorms to hit towns like Kirkwood. Flooding even occurred in flat-plained, rural areas of Missouri. As natural disasters hit gas prices go up. According to NBC , gas prices usually rise throughout the nation; when a hurricane storms through. As reported by, the Federal Bank of St. Louis, this is due to the fact that hurricanes often hit a gas-refining region, which disrupts the output for a short amount of time.

Hurricane Florence not only affected locals, but most american people, hitting some hard in their towns and others in their hearts.