The great flood: Hurricane Matthew created havoc across the South, nowhere more damaging than a place already down on its luck.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: UPFRONT

Two weeks after Hurricane Matthew dumped 18 inches of rain on eastern North Carolina, I tracked down Greg Cummings, not at his day job as Robeson County's economic developer, but setting up a disaster relief center.

"It'll be just like a Wal-Mart," he explains from a 60,000-square-foot former warehouse. "We'll have clothes laid out and organized on tables. Unloaded six trailers already, and I'm trying to get it set up so I can turn it over to the [Robeson County] Church and Community Center and get back to the office." Robeson's largest aid organization was flooded, one of a string of ironies in a community hardest hit by rising rivers after Matthew. Lumberton was without running water for a week. About 2,000 residents were rendered homeless.

More than two years after I got to know Cummings while writing about hard-luck Robeson County, I remembered that he lived on the banks of the Lumber River, "down in the swamp," he'd said, enthusing about its peace and quiet. At least three of the state's two dozen Matthew victims were from Robeson, drowned when the Lumber crested 4 feet above the previous record, so I was concerned. If you know Greg Cummings, it's easy to like him. Like most Robesonians I met, he's "as plain as an old shoe," the ultimate country compliment bespeaking sincerity. "The Lord spared me," he said on a recent morning.

As our story pointed out ("This is the Place," September 2014), Robeson County could use more blessings. The story was not popular in Lumberton, where local authorities organized a letter-writing campaign criticizing it for being too negative. It pointed out that Robeson is the state's poorest county, plagued by a reputation for crime. Interstate 95 is both blessing and curse, offering not only excellent logistics connections, but also access to East Coast drug traffickers and other criminals.

And, central to the...