Rising Sea Levels Are Already Remaking Reality in This North Carolina Community

This project was supported by funding from the Center for Contemporary Documentation

Lovie Miller doesn’t remember a time when floods weren’t a part of life in Scranton, N.C. A native North Carolinian, Miller left the area after high school. But when she moved back home in 2009, she quickly realized that the floods were nothing like the interludes she remembered experiencing as a child, legs dangling over the water as it lapped at the porch, a close enough approximation to a swimming pool. So, every year, when the news brought warnings of a summer storm, she would pack her bags and evacuate to higher ground. But when Hurricane Irene hit in August 2011, she decided to stay. “I just wanted to see what happens,” Miller says. “You could not see the fence,” she reports. “The water [was] over the knob of the garage door. It [was] like I’m sitting in the middle of an ocean.”

That may be apt. Rising sea levels have put this rural, historically Black community on the front lines of the climate crisis. Scranton lies in a low-lying county defined by waterways on a coast where seas are expected to rise by 10 to 12 in. by 2050. The waters on the U.S. southeast and Gulf coasts are among the fastest rising in the U.S., reaching record-breaking rates of half an inch per year since 2010. On North Carolina’s northeastern coast, where Scranton is located, sea levels have risen about 2 in. per decade since 1978, and the impacts are already being felt. 

Scranton often experiences “sunny day flooding,” when high tides cause water to spill over onto land, closing down roads and flooding homes with increasing frequency. When hurricane season arrives, the town sometimes sees flooding even when it’s not in the path of a storm. Photographer Cornell Watson has been visiting Scranton since 2022 to document how flooding is being felt there. 

“We don’t suddenly go from dry land to underwater overnight,” says Miyuki Hino, associate professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has studied the impact of sea level rise in North Carolina. “The way that this happens is that little by little, over time, the water level rises, and in this slow, pernicious, hard to see way it creeps up on you and all of a sudden you’re flooding 10 days a year, then 30 days a year, then 50 days a year.”

National adaptation measures tend to focus on large economic hubs, like New York City and Miami. “A lot of the major flood-risk reduction projects have largely been federally funded and been in metropolitan coastal areas,” says Hino. “For a lot of the rest of the country that doesn’t have that level of concentrated urban development, it’s a really different picture.” 

In towns like Scranton, scant federal funds mean many people have to take on the costs themselves. Lelon Howard, who saw 3 ft. of water enter his home during Hurricane Floyd in 2018, hasn’t been able to raise his home off the ground, and has made home repairs himself. 

The vulnerabilities compound. Studies have found that those living in poverty are more likely to live in flood-prone areas, and rural areas facing population decline often have fewer resources to devote toward climate-resilient infrastructure and disaster preparedness. Scranton’s population is aging and dwindling—with many younger residents leaving to make a life elsewhere. “They go to other places because there’s no work here,” says Ann Mann, who has little immediate family left in Scranton. Many residents, though, won’t let the floods drive them away. If anything, it’s something they’re resigned to. “When [water] starts coming in, it gives me a headache,” says Gretchen Davis, who previously lost a home to flooding in Hurricane Florence in 2018. “I’ve been in [Scranton] all my life. I was born in it, and I guess I’ll die in it.”