Lawyers Weigh Impact Of Hurricane Floyd's Devastation

By Michael Dayton

In the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd, lawyers who were hit by flooding are digging out of waterlogged offices and have begun to size up the damage to their businesses and communities.

The scope of the devastation from Floyd has now been widely documented, with thousands of persons displaced from their homes and 48 lives lost.

In the 34 counties most seriously affected, water submerged roads, bridges, fields -- and in some cases, entire towns.

The preliminary damage assessments, which do not include all areas, are staggering: nearly 1,500 homes destroyed and another 2,000 with major damage; crop and livestock losses of more than $1 billion, with dollar estimates for all losses running as high as $6 billion.

Hundreds of business have been flooded and thousands of persons are without their regular paychecks. Dozens of communities are still feeling Floyd's effects. Among them are Rocky Mount, Kinston, Greenville, Smithfield and Goldsboro.

One of the hardest hit towns was Tarboro. Bordered by the Tar River on three sides, it was that town that President Clinton visited to survey the damage. Water inundated homes and trailer parks, and demolished crops of cotton, soybean and tobacco.

Flood waters also swept through the city's business district, where a dozen general practitioners have offices clustered around the courthouse. Last week, eight of those offices were still shut down.

The interruption of so many practices in Tarboro, and other Eastern North Carolina towns, comes at a time when local residents, suffering from their own losses of homes, cars and jobs, have a critical need for legal services. That has prompted individual lawyers, law firms and bar groups to offer emergency assistance (see related story, this page).

With the flood waters receding, power partially restored and some phone lines working, Lawyers Weekly visited Tarboro and talked to several lawyers hit by the flooding.

Standing beside curbside piles of furniture, ruined files and law books, attorneys in the downtown district described the impact the flooding has already had on their lives and businesses, and what the long-term prospects look like for their communities.

Almost every law office near the river had damage in some places, water was five feet deep. The short-term implications of that are obvious. With offices shut down for two weeks or more, those lawyers are out of business for now. Also closed until further notice is the courthouse, where many of those lawyers ply their trade.

Jack Hopkins, a general practitioner two blocks from the river, was one of the more fortunate in the courthouse area. His office sits on a slight knoll. He had three inches of water across his floor. That ruined a rug "that needed replacing anyway," he said. After pulling up the carpet and drying the offices, he reopened when power was restored.

"We've effectively been shut down for two weeks," he said. "That's four percent of your annual income, but not four percent of your annual overhead. Like any business, the expenses keep going on. What I am going to do not pay my employees, or the light bill, or the malpractice insurance?"

Meanwhile, Hopkins' bread-and-butter cases have all but disappeared.

"I'm an emergency room kind of lawyer," he said. "Clients come to me when they're bloodied, beat up, got two black eyes, or been kicked out of the house. It's a front-line practice where the rubber meets the road, and right now, folks can't get to me. They're not driving their cars, they're not getting speeding tickets, they're not getting in fistfights Friday night after work.

"You want to help me out right now?" he joked. "Drive your car 80 miles an hour through Edgecombe County."

Exploding File Cabinets

Down the street, Perry Jenkins, a general practitioner for 29 years, had much more extensive flooding damage. About 3 1/2 feet of water poured into his office, but Jenkins measured the water level another way.

"It was two file-drawers deep," he said. Swollen, watersoaked paper blew the fronts off his cabinets. Jenkins estimates that he lost between 3,000-4,000 files.

When Lawyers Weekly visited Jenkins, he had just reopened his shop.

"When I say I'm up and running, I mean I can answer a telephone and people can walk through the door," Jenkins said. "Someone came through and checked my lights out, and told me what was safe to use and what was not. They'll all have to be replaced, but we're able to use a few of them in the interim.

"If we are back up by Christmas, even running at a basic level, we'll be doing good," he said.

Jenkins emphasized that he was not complaining about his plight. His main concerns, he said, are for the families who simultaneously lost their homes and employment.

"I want people to understand we lawyers are not sitting around here whining," he said. "We've got so much to be thankful for. Our clients will be terrifically impacted by this adversity. They may find it tough or impossible to recover.

"I'm tremendously worried about the people in the town," he said. "Of the 52,000 to 54,000 people in Edgecombe County, at one time 10 percent of them were in shelters. And we've heard rumors about what businesses or industries may be closed, and for how long. I've heard of one pretty large industry that was completely flooded out. There's talk it might close up and move out."

Hopkins had this perspective on the financial losses of many Edgecombe County residents: "If you have big damages, and your capacity to recover is zero, you're in a disastrous position. If a person lost a $3,000 trailer, $1,000 in furniture, $500 in clothes and a $2,000 automobile and on top of that lost a job they have zero capacity to recover. They cannot rebuild, particularly when they're living in a shelter without a toothbrush."

Floating Desk

Perhaps the worst flooding among downtown attorneys was in the offices of Gene Muse, a criminal defense lawyer who works out of a building between the river and the courthouse. The highwater mark is 5 1/2 feet up his office walls.

"Everything's ruined," Muse said. "The furniture, the computers, the files. I'm glad I keep a messy desk. It floated and I was able to save my current files on top of it because of that. And I managed to get a couple things off the conference table. It also floated."

Muse said his law office building may be a total loss.

"I don't know whether it's feasible to go in there and tear everything out," he said.

Floyd is the second storm in three years to hit Muse. Hurricane Fran sent a tree through his office roof in 1996.

"I managed to save a little more that time and keep on working," he said. "But this got everything."

Muse also had six to seven inches of water in his house.

"I've spent the last two weeks talking to insurance people, trying to get things straight," he said.

Muse is uncertain where he'll set up shop.

"I'm either going to work out of the house, or find temporary office space," he said. "I've then got to determine whether it's feasible to fix the old office building or sell it for enough to pay off what is owed."

Muse has had several offers of assistance but turned most of them down.

"I've had all sorts of help offered to me, but I don't feel real comfortable asking for a lot of help," he said. "I'll get by the best I can. I'll be okay, and as we go along, we'll get a better idea of what problems we'll have."

Asked what kind of help he and other local lawyers might need, he raised a decade-old issue the low hourly rates paid to court-appointed criminal lawyers.

"It's going to be hard to survive on those cases when the fees are cut-rate," he said. "You know, when it works out to $50 an hour on those cases, and the workers who come to your house to do repairs are making more than that, it's hard to get ahead."

Vital Role

The crisis in Tarboro has underscored the vital role that lawyers play in their communities, according to Hopkins.

"We've been fielding dozens of calls from people asking for advice on some subject just because they're used to looking to lawyers for guidance," he said. "We've become a brain bank for these people, and we've been preoccupied in just pointing them in the right direction.

"It's not even legal advice they always need," he said. "In one call, someone asked me where they could buy cement blocks. In a time of need, the town is looking to us as a source for problem solving."

Despite his own woes, Jenkins is giving free legal advice to clients who can no longer afford him.

"I've been here 29 years and represented these people, and their parents and grandparents," he said. "And I'm going to continue representing them. I'm not going to stop just because somebody doesn't have any money at this time.

"I had a woman in here yesterday who I'm handling a traffic case for," Jenkins said. "She got out of the house she lived in with her pocketbook and a change of clothes. Her car was destroyed. Her home was destroyed. She said, 'Mr. Jenkins, I don't know what I'm going to do.' I told her not to worry, I'd take care of her case. In the past, I would have gotten paid for that. But I'm not going to deny her legal services. She doesn't need a double whammy at this point in time."

That pro bono effort has spread to other Tarboro lawyers whose practices were largely untouched by water damage.

The law offices of Jimmy Keel and Susan O'Malley are in a historic house that sits on a slight rise. The building got some water in the basement. The upstairs offices were not affected.

O'Malley said she cleaned out closets and donated old clothes, pots and pans. She and another partner, Chris Kessler, also worked some shifts at a local shelter.

"People who've lived here all their lives are now having to rebuild from scratch," O'Malley said. "This will be devastating for a long time. And once the water goes away, the problems will still be here. Six months from now, people won't remember us, but this town won't be back on its feet."

Email this Page | Print this Page