LUMBERTON — Bill Greene mopped up the excess water near the door at the front of Somewhere In Time Antiques on Kahn Drive in Lumberton on Monday.
With the murky flood waters surrounding the shop that he and his wife Becky own, Greene said he didn’t think the possibility of his shop being flooded from Hurricane Florence was something to be worried about before the weekend. The antique shop was built in 1990 and survived the floods that came less than two years ago when Hurricane Matthew devastated the city, giving him the belief that his shop would be fine as Florence made its way to the Carolinas.
“The waters came up to the street level, but it has never come up to the building or the parking lot,” he said. “It’s definitely disheartening.”
He was informed of the news on Monday morning that flood waters crept up farther than they did in October 2016, and had reached 6 inches on the bottom floor of the two-story antique shop that faces Interstate 95. The Greene family, which includes Bill and Becky along with their sons, daughter and three grandsons, were at work hours after they found out about the damage, trying to clear what the receded flood waters had left.
“We checked it yesterday and there was no water, but then this morning there was water,” Bill said. “We are getting the rugs up because they will smell the worst.”
For the Greenes, such hardship is nothing new. On New Year’s Day 2005, their home in Fairmont was lost in a fire. The family took a light-hearted approach to the news of the flood damage after loading up the rugs on the back of a truck bound for the dump.
“If a famine comes, then we are all going to heaven because it is right out of the Bible,” one of the Greene’s sons said.
Bill said it was hard to estimate the damage to his shop after the rugs in the front portion of his store were removed, but he did know that replacing some of the destroyed antiques would be impossible.
“Some of the water got up about 6 or 8 inches and caused the wood to separate and the tables collapsed, and then some of the glassware fell on the floor and broke,” Greene said. “We took a few things off the floor because we thought that it might come in, but I really didn’t think it would.”
With most of his inventory raised off the floor in cabinets and on shelves for display, Greene’s losses weren’t as extensive as some businesses that were swamped by the floodwaters. He plans on assessing how to get the store reopened soon.
“It’s going to be a slow process,” he said. “There’s a lot of work ahead of us.”
