The big blowup: Hurricane Fran sent construction work soaring. But, as one neighborhood found, it was too much of a bad thing.

• Author: Maley, Frank

After Hurricane Fran knocked down some of her trees, punched a hole in her roof and littered her yard with limbs and leaves, Peggy Meares decided to give credit where it was due. "Landscapes by Fran," read a sign she placed on her lawn. Fran worked cheap and fast, but sloppily. Her taste ran somewhere between bad and tragic.

When Meares and others in Raleigh's upscale Hayes-Barton neighborhood came out of their houses Sept. 6, the morning after Fran roared across North Carolina, they found trees everywhere: across streets, on cars, on houses, on power lines. Sturdy oaks that had weathered 100 years were knocked down like pins on the Pro Bowlers Tour.

Meares had water leaking through her roof. Around the corner on Iredell Street, an old oak smashed a hole in Susan Hill's roof. Catty-cornered from her, a giant oak that once shaded Jeb Jeutter's front yard covered parts of his lawn, his neighbor's yard across the street and Jarvis and Iredell streets. An old pecan tree had smacked an apartment behind his house and started a leak. "I never thought we'd recover from it," he says of the neighborhood. "It was so depressing."

Fran's destruction tally in North Carolina: $5.2 billion - including $2.24 billion to 30,275 homes. In Wake County, roughly 4,000 homes suffered major damage. Living in an exclusive neighborhood didn't keep nature's wrath away. Hayes-Barton, just northeast of where the eye passed, fared worse than most. Not since Hurricane Hazel ripped through in 1954 had residents seen such damage.

In Durham, Bob Pickard braced himself for a flood of phone calls to his Pickard Roofing Co. None came. His phone had been knocked out. Even after service returned, it took a few days for the deluge to begin. Many of those first callers, including some from Hayes-Barton, had to get trees off their roofs before repairs could begin.

Nearly 600 miles away, in Crescent City, Fla., William "Bubba" Jacobs called his brother-in-law in Wake Forest for a survey of the damage. "He called me back five minutes later and said he couldn't get out," recalls Jacobs, who rounded up his two employees and took Jacobs Tree Service & Stump Removal on a road trip. After working a few jobs in Wake Forest, they headed to Hayes-Barton at the suggestion of a man who had a friend there.

Fran's onslaught had forced Hayes-Barton residents into new roles as social workers and laborers, helping their neighbors recover, and as full-time property managers, restoring their homes and...