by Ren Larson, The Assembly
This story was originally published by ProPublica in partnership with The Assembly.
Dave Masters could no longer ignore the storm as trees cracked and the swollen river roared. It was dark outside, but through the window he could see his father’s house, usually 100 feet away from the Pigeon River, was surrounded by water. Masters, tall and slender, forded the frigid waist-deep water to wake up his father and convince the 63-year-old to evacuate.
From the son’s trailer on the hillside, the two watched the water rise as Hurricane Frances wreaked havoc on Western North Carolina in early September 2004. Within an hour, his father’s home floated up like a bobber on a fishing line and then sailed down the middle of the road before veering into a telephone pole and cracking in half. The two pieces finally stopped when they got caught under a bridge downstream.
Just 10 days later, Hurricane Ivan dumped more rain in an unprecedented double whammy for the mountainous region far from the coast. Haywood County realized it needed to prevent further harm. It condemned several neighboring mobile homes along with a wood-frame house across the river.
Recognizing the threat of flooding, the county eventually bought out that house, making the land near the town of Clyde permanent open space under a federally funded program to reduce the risk of future loss of life and property damage. The state also paid to relocate Masters’ father and another family from the trailer park on Hyder Mountain Road out of the floodplain “to mitigate the possibility of future damage to life and property should subsequent events occur.”
But although federal floodplain maps showed that the land where the trailer park sat was at risk, the county didn’t buy out the mobile home park or stop the park’s owners from again renting out the lots where trailers were destroyed, including the one where Masters’ father had lived.
It was a decision that would have great consequence. In 2021, the Hyder Mountain Road park flooded again during Tropical Storm Fred, damaging five of the six trailers that fronted the river, including one on the plot where Masters’ father had lived. Despite the damage, all the trailers in that first row remained. Then, in 2024, flooding from Hurricane Helene swept one of those mobile homes into the river, driving it into the same bridge and killing a resident and three of her dogs.
The repeated losses at the Hyder Mountain Road mobile home park are in part the result of a gap in disaster policy that allows mobile home residents to be put in harm’s way again and again.
The federal government’s programs to buy out disaster-prone buildings are “the cornerstone of the Nation’s system for emergency management,” according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But the program was developed with traditional homeowners in mind, and mobile homes, the country’s largest source of affordable housing, are often left out. Trailers, even when they become immovable and lifelong homes, aren’t typically considered real estate but instead personal property, like motorcycles and boats.
That still leaves people living on flood-prone land. For the state to actually buy that land, mobile home park owners have to take the buyout, and FEMA’s program offers little incentive for them to do so: They can’t collect from the government for lost rent or for the value of the mobile homes on top of the land.
Some park owners say the payouts are not high enough to allow them to relocate; others aren’t even aware of the buyout program. So park owners regularly allow new trailers to move into the vacant spots.
What to do about such properties is now a big question for counties and Renew NC, Gov. Josh Stein’s billion-dollar Hurricane Helene recovery program. Renew NC’s manual states that it can help relocate mobile-home owners whose damaged trailers face future flood risks. But the program doesn’t keep new families from moving onto lots with a record of flooding.
At the Hyder Mountain Road park, families now live in recreational campers on plots where mobile homes have twice washed away. “Where they’re at, it’s not if, it’s just when,” said Wentfard Henson, chief of the Clyde Volunteer Fire Department. “It’s going to flood again, there’s no doubt, because it flooded every time we’ve had a storm. It’s flooded four times.”
Foreseeing future disasters, local governments in at least 11 states have fully funded buyouts and relocation assistance for mobile home parks, benefiting the park owners and residents of the mobile homes. North Carolina attempted its own solution after Hurricane Floyd struck in 1999, funding a Crisis Housing Assistance Fund to relocate families in flood and landslide zones — but that program, too, did nothing to prevent new families from moving onto the same lots.
After Hurricane Helene, Haywood County required homes in the floodplain to be elevated and securely anchored into the ground to limit catastrophic damages. At the Hyder Mountain Road park, that means new mobile homes along the river would need to be raised at least 8 feet off the ground. So far, only staircases leading to raised electrical boxes have been added, but no mobile homes have returned to those lots as the elevation costs could reach tens of thousands of dollars. But the rule doesn’t apply to campers, which can remain in the floodplain so long as they can be driven or towed away in case of a storm — and several have since become year-round homes.
K.K. Bautista, a single mother who lost almost everything in Helene at another mobile home park, now lives in one of those campers on the same row where past floods struck. “When it rains, I don’t sleep and I watch the river,” Bautista said.
Mollie Simon contributed research.
Filed under: Climate and Environment, Regulation