Remembering Hurricane Floyd from 1999:
“We’re a small town without many resources, but we were determined that we are going to get back in. And we talked with the head of Emergency Management, and he told me that if I could convince them that Princeville needed to be saved, they would send somebody here that would work with us that had been involved with floods before.
And then FEMA came in. We had a lot of controversy because a lot of people wanted to sell out. And the Council had to make a decision what we were going to do. And my thought was, knowing the people in Princeville, how many people could….
FEMA, they put you back to where you were but they don’t give you lots of money to do everything you need to do. So my assessment was: How many people could take FEMA would give them for their propoerties and be able to move somewhere else and build another house, start over? My assessment was, not many, because we had a large population of senior citizens, but we had a large populations of people that houses were passed from family to family, so that meant that there was a lot of heir property that was owned by siblings, so that would cause a problem. So we had to vote and we had two councilpeople, two men that wanted to sell out, and then we had two women who had been lifetime residents of Princeville that did not want to, so the men voted to sell, the women voted not to. And So that left it up to me, which way to go. And as I said before, My assessment was that there were not enough people who would be able to go out and start new life without hardship, so I voted to stay, because I felt like the history of Princeville, and thinking about the citizens, and in their best interest, I decided to stay.
After that vote, we still had controversy, people were upset …
When President Clinton came to town I met with him and talked with him. He asked me what we needed and I said ‘everything,’ so he did a resolution to rebuild Princeville. … We did, we got a lot of help; we got about 25,000 volunteers to come to Princeville during that period of time.”