WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) – Thirty years ago this weekend, on September 5, 1996, Category 3 Hurricane Fran roared ashore in southeastern North Carolina, massively changing the region’s landscape. Packed with 115 mph sustained winds and a powerful 13-foot storm surge, the storm did an estimated $5 billion in damages, becoming the costliest natural disaster in the state’s history at the time.
Fran hit just two months after Hurricane Bertha had already battered southeastern North Carolina, soaking the area with nearly a foot of rain, and damaging the area’s beaches, leaving them vulnerable to the generational strike that would follow.
In a special anniversary episode of the 1on1 with Jon Evans podcast, we look back at the devastation of Hurricane Fran through the eyes of the emergency leaders who guided our communities through the disaster—and the haunting stories of those who stayed behind, unsure if they would survive the night.
One moment that captured the terror of Hurricane Fran’s power is a recorded 911 call made from the north end of Carolina Beach. Daniel Gaulker had decided to ride out the storm in place, although emergency management had issued mandatory evacuation orders. Gaulker would later say he immediately regretted his decision as the storm surge from the storm began to swallow his home.
With the building shaking and water pushing up through the bathroom floor, Gaulker called 911 to leave a final message:
Daniel Gaulker: “Hi, I want to give a message for my next of kin.
”911 Operator: “Okay.”
Daniel Gaulker: “I’m on Carolina Beach at the north end… I don’t think we’re gonna make it. It’s just about, it’s up to our porch now, everything is gone. The building is gonna fall apart.”
“I remember 911 securing that audio tape,” says Dan Summers, who served as New Hanover County’s Emergency Management Director from 1984 – 2003. “We all said a prayer. We were all petrified… It was shocking to seasoned responders, and certainly shocking to the community to hear that level of concern, that near-death threat.”
Gaulker and others survived by huddling in the bathroom, but the experience underscored the primary enemy emergency managers face during any major storm: complacency.
“An emergency manager’s worst nightmare is complacency, or that false sense of security that ‘my home will survive,’” Summers reflects. “We’ve got to fight complacency. We’ve got to be truthful, quick, and convincing.”
Inside the New Hanover County Emergency Operations Center (EOC), then located in the county’s former law enforcement building at the intersection of Princess and North 4th Streets in downtown Wilmington, the force of the storm made itself known in a terrifying way.
“I will not forget the rumble that we heard… when First Baptist (Church, at Fifth Avenue and Market Street) lost the steeple,” Summers recalls. “Our entire building shook. We had bricks and debris hit the roof of the law enforcement center. That was frightening for the entire team.”
As daylight broke on September 6, the scale of the disaster became clear. The beaches were decimated. Streets in the beach towns were covered with feet of sand from the storm surge. Thousands of trees and power poles littered roads and yards across the county, some falling onto homes. The storm’s strength extended far inland, knocking out power all the way through Raleigh and into Southern Virginia. Because half of North Carolina was impacted, Summers says county leaders were forced to confront a brutal reality: help was not immediately on the way.
“Our slang is ‘the cavalry would be coming to help us,’ and the cavalry simply could not get there,” Summers says. “We were on our own for such a long period of time before we could get additional help.”
The aftermath on Pleasure Island and Wrightsville Beach looked like a war zone. Sand overwash buried fire hydrants and mailboxes. Massive grid reconstruction was required to bring power back to the islands.
Pender County also found itself in the powerful right front quadrant as Fran moved through southeastern North Carolina. Topsail Island suffered a devastating 12-foot storm surge that sheared 40 feet of beach away, leaving sand washed over from the ocean nearly all the way to the sound.
“Bertha kind of softened us up,” explains Carson Smith, who served as Pender County’s Emergency Management Director from 1994 to 2002. “By the time Fran came, we were looking at just complete washover on most, if not all of Topsail Island. If you weren’t here 30 years ago, I don’t think you know what Fran did to us.”
Among those who stayed on Topsail were two young women who decided to ride out the storm in their oceanfront Surf City home. As the conditions rapidly deteriorated, they called for help—but local police could do nothing but pray.
“The chief told us to get some rest, we’ll get out there first thing in the morning,” recalls former Surf City Police Chief Ron Shanahan, who was a young sergeant at the time. “No sleep that night. You’re pacing, you’re thinking, you’re praying that these young ladies would be okay.”
At first light, Shanahan and his chief walked nearly two miles through at times impassable, debris-filled streets to find the women. The home the pair lived in was ripped from its foundation, dragged across the street, and literally split in half by the storm surge. Somehow, during the storm, the two women had moved to a sturdier house and survived by sheltering in a bathtub.
“The look in their eyes was just stone-faced,” Shanahan remembers from when he and his chief finally reached the survivors. “They couldn’t believe what they’d just went through.”
For Smith, who went on to serve as Pender County Sheriff and now represents the area in the North Carolina House of Representatives, Fran remains the benchmark for wind and storm surge.
“It is the worst hurricane that I’ve seen since I’ve been here,” Smith says. “Fran is the mark when it comes to wind damage. It’s the only hurricane I remember that literally in some areas just decimated pine stands… they just start snapping off.”
Ultimately, the lessons learned in the wake of Hurricane Fran helped shape how North Carolina now responds to disasters. It led to the creation of the state’s modern mutual aid network, allowing resources and emergency personnel from the mountains and coast to easily swap places and support one another in times of crisis.
“It did indeed write a new chapter for emergency managers,” Summers says.
Three decades later, the physical scars of Hurricane Fran have largely been erased by years of explosive coastal growth, but for those who lived it, the memories of the howling wind and the rising waters will never fade.
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