I see I’ve got a fellow Hurricane Floyd survivor here. Here’s my story:

I was living in eastern NC at the time. What I remember is they expected the storm to pass through during the night. So we hunkered down, went to bed, I remember waking up a couple times during the night and hearing the wind but I didn’t get up to look.

In the morning I stepped outside and discovered that I couldn’t go anywhere. My apartment was at the top of an incline near a creek and most of what was below us was underwater. So many of my neighbors lost their homes, their cars…the streets were flooded. It was like living on an island. We had no power so I cooked with a little propane camping grill. I remember power being out for a couple days. Only once the power came back on did we realize the full extent of the damage. I vividly remember aerial footage of dead livestock floating in floodwaters.

I worked at a small music store at the time and it got completely gutted. Flood water came in the back entrance, went out the front entrance, and carried almost all our gear away with it. We had to reconstruct the entire interior of the building and purchase all new inventory. We weren’t able to open for business for almost two weeks.

Funny story about that: A few weeks later a guy came in carrying a power amp he said he found about a quarter mile away alongside the highway. He assumed it was ours. We checked the serial number and it was in fact ours, but by that time we had already received insurance and emergency funds and were able to write off almost all the lost inventory. So we said he could keep it. Couple weeks later he came back, said he disassembled it, let it all air dry for a couple days, reassembled it, and it worked fine. Dude scored a $700 power amp for free.