After comeback from Floyd, couple's farm destroyed by Florence

By Mitch Carr, WRAL contributor

Allison and Warren Cavenaugh usually take Frog Pond Lane to drive to their Wallace home.

Since Saturday, though, they’ve only been able to get there by boat.

“I don’t know how deep it is on the road,” Warren Cavenaugh said.

The Cavenaughs owned a home, an electrical contracting shop and a poultry farm with 80,000 chickens.

Now, after Florence, it’s all underwater.

“Everything in there is going to be turned upside down,” Allison Cavenaugh said. “And all this, whatever is in there, like we were talking about, will be inside my house.”

They returned home for the first time this week.

Their chickens drowned. The Cavenaughs were greeted by a snake at their backdoor.

Inside, their floors were saturated with water. A nightstand had fallen sideways, and the a lamp that stood on was on the ground. Everything touching the floor was wet.

“Definitely messed up, ain’t it?” Warren Cavenaugh said.

“I don’t know what to say,” he continued. “But I do know one thing: The Lord, he’ll close the door on this, but he’s going to open something else.”

The couple have been living in their house for 26 years, Allison Cavenaugh said.

“It’s all gone,” she said.

The Cavenaughs already rebuilt once after Hurricane Floyd.

“This is just bringing back memories from 1999,” Allison Cavenaugh said.

Round two with Florence, the couple said, is their breaking point.

“Once it’s happened twice, it makes you think,” Allison Cavenaugh said.

Their neighbor, Bryan Dixon, was in a similar situation. After Floyd, he bought mobile home insurance with flooding coverage. He raised his home up 1 1/2 feet, even though he thought Floyd’s flooding was only once-in-500-years situation.

After Florence, less than 20 years later, his mobile home was in 3 feet of water.

Dixon feels like he’ll have to move out of the only home he’s ever had, he said.

The Cavenaughs don’t know what they’ll do next, they said.

“You know, we’ve been here 26 years,” Allison Cavenaugh said. “My husband’s been here his entire life. We got married 30 years ago, built a house out here 26 years ago. It’s all we know.”

But they said their comfort is faith, which they say helped them through Floyd and through Warren’s recent bout with cancer.

“When this happens, I know He’ll do the same thing,” Allison Cavenaugh said. “We will get me through this again – get us through this.”