Clockwise from above: Wrightsville Beach seen from the air after Hurricane Hazel. All that remains of some oceanfront houses are the pilings, others are washed out at the ground level, more have collapsed. A woman at Wrightsville Beach looks out over the remains of houses and a street end, which were all washed away. As it always is, the Salvation Army was on the scene after the storm. Along with finding their home intact, Ashworth and her mother were also reunited with her father and her sister Lib, who had just returned from a honeymoon in the mountains with her husband, Tancil Horne. “My father’s first reaction was, ‘Oh my God,’ and then his second reaction was, ‘I am going to be working 24 hours a day for a while I think,’” Ashworth says. “When my sister saw all that destruction she burst into tears and everybody grabbed everybody because we had not been able to talk to anyone and it was our first realization that we were all OK.” The Vestal family had a longer walk from the drawbridge to find their home relatively unscathed. However, Knowles says she still remembers how sad she was to find her beloved wooden inboard Chris Craft sunk in the marsh across the Causeway. “Everything I grew up with was gone,” she says. “They used to have public piers on Harbor Island and they were all gone. That is where I learned to dive, where we crabbed and we learned to do everything off those piers.” While Hazel took, it also gave back to Knowles in some small measure because a red and white slalom water ski had found its way into the family’s front yard, which she used for years afterward. When Silvey Robinson traveled to the beach after the hurricane passed to find her husband, she saw dislodged houses and roads buried by sand — and finally, near where Carolina Yacht Club now sits, her husband. “I saw my husband walking toward me. I dropped my chil-dren’s hands and ran toward him. By that time, I didn’t know what had happened to him,” she says. Assessing the damage the next day, the couple saw something extraordinary. “As we walked south from Station One, toward Lumina, there was a two-story house that had been up on pilings and those pil-ings had been washed out, so the house was almost on its knees. … And in the breeze were two strands of sand dollars, not one of them broken,” she says. The death toll for Hurricane Hazel totaled 600 on the storm’s path up the Eastern Seaboard into Canada with 19 deaths in North Carolina. Hazel’s landfall coinciding with an incoming lunar high tide caused the estimated damage to skyrocket to $1.1 billion for the state and $2.8 billion total. In spite of the destruction, life continued in Wrightsville Beach and southeastern North Carolina with the help of countless pub-lic servants like NCDOT district engineer Bob Ashworth and Fire Chief M.C. Vestal, who worked for days to clear the carnage and build anew. 27 www.wrightsvillebeachmagazine.com WBM
October 2014
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