(Image: The location of Hurricane Dorian as of 10 a.m. today courtesy of Fox News.)
The author, John Marek, is executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
As you read this, Hurricane Dorian is lashing the North Carolina coast. This marks the fourth consecutive year a fall hurricane has impacted Wadesboro since I came here in 2016.
The first one, Matthew, struck town just a week into my tenure, and it was impressive to see how the community came together in the aftermath. For Wadesboro, Matthew was largely a wind event, and the number of downed trees and limbs was something I hadn’t seen since a fierce storm spawning multiple tornadoes rolled through my Ohio hometown on the 4th of July, 1969.
My dog, Laika, was living with me here in the uptown during Matthew and as we took long walks through the neighborhoods surrounding our apartment in the days following the storm, our path was blocked, first by downed trees, then by stacks of limbs and brush put out for disposal, but by Halloween two weeks later everything was more or less back to normal.
Whether fairly or not, these storms have become an economic development issue for coastal Carolina communities, and to a lesser extent, more inland areas like Anson County. Companies are understandably reluctant to locate facilities where their business operations might be shut down for days or weeks due to the impact of hurricanes. My response as an economic developer is simple and informed by my experience growing up in the Midwest; on average, businesses in Ohio lose more days to winter storms each year than North Carolina businesses lose to hurricanes. That’s not to downplay the devastating impact these storms can have on coastal communities, or make light of the personal tragedies they cause, but strictly in terms of business days lost to weather, you are still better off in Wadesboro, N.C., than Wadsworth, Ohio.