When you first step into Great Outdoor Provision Co. at Eastgate Crossing, you would never guess that anything had happened there. There are rows of hiking boots and sleeping bags piled high in the corner; wood paneled walls give the whole place a rustic feel at odds with its urban shopping center location. But look a little closer, and you’ll notice something isn’t quite right. The wide, creaking boards that gave Great Outdoor a general store-like feel have been replaced with a smooth, echoing expanse of concrete. A thin stripe of mud runs across the front windows of the store, and at the very bottom, sandwiched between the double glass, sits two inches of water.
Four months after Tropical Storm Chantal dropped one foot of water in a single night, the town of Chapel Hill has largely moved on. The businesses of Eastgate, however, are picking up the pieces. Still.
One side of the shopping center looks pretty ordinary: customers streaming in and out of Trader Joes and Guglhupf, drivers vying for parking spots and people pushing carts of merchandise back to their car.
On the other side of the parking lot, where the stores are barely one meter lower in elevation, the situation is starkly different: plywood covers doors and windows, piles of furniture still sit outside the store fronts, and sections of the parking lot have been roped off.
Two weeks ago, when Great Outdoor at last reopened on the lower side of the shopping center, it did so amidst an empty row of stores.
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It was about 5:30 pm on July 6th when the rain began. Johanna Breed, assistant store manager at Great Outdoor Provision Co., didn’t think much of it at the time. It was a Sunday night, quieter than usual in the store, and she closed up much like she would on any other day, locking doors and turning out lights. There was a storm on the radar, but no one thought it would be too serious. Creek levels were low, and the nearby Booker Creek Basin Park, designed to handle runoff, was dry.
By 8 p.m., the rain became a downpour. Breed was supposed to spend the night at a friend’s house to house-sit, but when the power went out there she figured she would drive home and check on the house in the morning. Outside, the area was already in chaos. “Ambulances were flying through the water and the lightning was just crazy.” she recalled.
About midnight, one of her coworkers, an expert in search and rescue, tried to drive to the store to check on the damage. The water level was at its peak, covering the entire parking lot and the adjacent roads. The shopping center was unreachable.
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FEMA, the organization in charge of managing disasters, has a series of maps that use past meteorological and geographic data to predict the likelihood of flooding. Areas in the hundred-year floodplain, marked in blue, are designated as high risk Special Flood Hazard Areas, or SFHA’s. Because of their risk, these areas often have special flood insurance regulations or limitations on building. On the FEMA map of Chapel Hill, almost all of Eastgate Crossing is colored in a bright, vibrant blue.
The shopping center should be in an ideal location: nestled between East Franklin Street and Highway 501, it’s perfectly positioned to funnel potential customers from all directions into its parking lot. Beneath the parking lot, however, is a hidden risk: Booker Creek, an offshoot of Eastwood Lake, runs directly across the lot.
Over the years, the town has developed a series of culverts and basins designed to divert the water. A 2017 study, however, found that that the infrastructure was not enough to handle major rainfall, and recommended almost $20 million in updates. After a round of reviews and community feedback, the town updated the infrastructure, expanding the basin and adding areas to absorb runoff. This new construction, however, was only capable of handling a 25-year storm.
Businesses in Eastgate knew that flooding was a risk, but they were confident that the center could handle another storm. In addition to the updates made by the town, their landlord, Kite Realty, had recently redone the parking lot’s stormwater infrastructure. On the day of the flood, the assistant store manager said, the landlord hadn’t even come out to give out sandbags like they usually would before a major weather event.
That evening, Tropical Storm Chantal dropped between 6 and 12 inches of rain on the town of Chapel Hill over the course of several hours, creating what North Carolina officials described as a 500-to 1,000-year flood. The culverts and basins designed to handle runoff from the creek were no match for the fury of the rain. By midnight, the Eastgate shopping center was covered in almost five feet of water.
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The morning after the flood, the Great Outdoor team huddled on the sidewalk outside the remains of the store, ready to begin what they knew would be a hellish, muddy clean-up. But they needed firefighters to confirm the building was still safe to enter.
While they waited, they were briefed on what to expect. The water may be gone, they were told, but the mud may be laced with bacteria and disease. Everything they wore would have to be immediately removed and cleaned, and while inside they should avoid touching their eyes, mouth, or skin.“We were told that it was pretty unsafe for us to even really be in here,” recalls Johanna Breed. “They basically said, yes, you can go in, but if you get sick, we may not be able to fix you.”
When disasters such as flooding occur, larger companies will often hire a company to clean up the damage. Trained professionals in hazmat suits clear out debris so the reconstruction process can begin. Smaller businesses like Great Outdoor, however, often can’t afford the steep cost of a professional service. Instead, their staff members don rubber gloves and rain boots and venture into the wreckage, doing their best to salvage what they can.
With no electricity, the staff used headlamps to light up the muddy store as they worked. The wide double doors of the store, which staff had locked before heading out the night before, had been blown away. Merchandise was strewn about, pushed to opposite ends of the floor and soaked in mud. Breed found bags of coffee from a Starbucks down the street, and a heavy planter that “definitely was not from Eastgate shopping center.” Dead frogs and fish also littered the store, and in the early July heat, the temperature rocketed to nearly 100 degrees.
For several days, the staff worked in the dark, sifting through debris. Very little from the store could be salvaged. For Great Outdoor, a company which primarily sells high price outdoors wear and gear, the impact of this was tremendous. “We probably lost almost a million dollars just in merchandise,” says Johanna Breed, “before we even started on repairs.” Once the cleaning process was done, the more difficult part began: the waiting.
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The Eastgate shopping center is no stranger to flooding. In 2018, Hurricane Florence dropped 6 inches of rain in 24 hours, sending nearly a foot of water rushing into businesses in the center. Recovery from that storm was fairly short—most businesses were open within two weeks, and Great Outdoor was back after just two days. “That was our only reference for what it was going to take in terms of the time frame,” says Breed, “We thought, if it takes a couple weeks, no big deal.”
Great Outdoor is a midsized business, with nine locations across the state of North Carolina. They could afford to keep on two full time staff, Breed and the general manager, and did their best to provide work for their other staff where they could, opening positions in their Raleigh Warehouse and offering some remote projects. Morale was high—the staff checked in regularly, updating each other on how things were going and what they needed. As the days stretched into weeks, though, there wasn’t enough work to go around.
Many of them depended on second jobs to pay the rent, hoping that the store would come back soon to fill the gaps. Others fell into a strange limbo—they had a job, but couldn’t get paid for it, and they weren’t sure when it would be back. The State of North Carolina, which requires active jobs seeking to qualify for unemployment benefits, withheld benefits from some of these employees—now a subject of litigation.
For the first month, they still had little information on when they might be able to reopen, or if the store would be reopening there at all. Said Breed, “No one can live like that. If you don’t know if you’re going to get your job back or when it’s going to come back or anything.”
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The name “one-hundred year storm” implies that this is the kind of thing that won’t happen very often. In fact, what it actually means is that there is a 1% chance that it could happen every year, and with climate change worsening every year, some have suggested that the predictive models may be underestimating this frequency. Businesses like Great Outdoor Provision Co. can recover from a few disruptions, but another flood could be disastrous for them—and for the people who work there. “So right now we’re crossing our fingers that we won’t have some other catastrophic, once in a lifetime kind of flood thing.”
On October 24, nearly four months after the storm passed through, Great Outdoor Provision Co. finally reopened its doors, the first business on its side of the shopping center to do so. Almost all of their core staff was able to return, and the company says it has received an outpouring of support from its customers. Open just in time for the fourth quarter, they’re optimistic that Thanksgiving and Christmas sale booms will carry through to the next year.
The store is not the same as it was before—its creaky floors are gone, and the smell of wood has been replaced with a sharper, new-store smell. The team is constantly missing little things: paper clips, or staples, or the pictures that once decorated their desk. In the ways that matter though, the place still feels like home. They were able to save the wooden dog statue that sat by the register, and the wide benches someone built just for them.
Chad Pickens, the general manager of the store, feels confident that for Great Outdoor, returning to the shopping center was the right choice.
“We may have lost some things,” he says, “but there is still so much history to be written here.”
Photo at top: Johanna Breed, assistant store manager, helps a customer in the newly reopened Great Outdoor store at Eastgate Crossing. Behind her, the windows still show lines from the floodwaters of July’s Tropical Storm. Photo by Annelise Bowers – The 9th Street Journal
