In September 2021, what was left of a weakened tropical system stalled over a rural stretch of the Piedmont region in North Carolina
and dropped eleven inches of rain in under nineteen hours. Creeks that hadn’t flooded in forty years broke their banks before dawn. By noon, water was moving through homes that had never seen a drop inside their walls.An elderly woman, 74 years old, living alone in a single-story house at the bottom of a low…