They laughed at my flood berm, so I scheduled it for demolition. 3 days later, a storm rolled through and turned their laughter into $2 million worth of water damage. That’s not me trying to sound dramatic. That’s just how it happened. My name’s Daniel Harper. I’m 46, retired civil engineer, spent a little over 20 years working storm water and infrastructure for a midsized county in eastern North Carolina.
drainage basins, culverts, retention ponds, FEMA maps, that kind of thing. I’m not flashy. I don’t golf. I don’t belong to a country club. I like diesel engines, black coffee, and knowing exactly where water is going to move before it gets there. About 8 years ago, I bought a small house on a stretch of riverfront land just outside town. Nothing fancy.
Vinyl siding, metal roof, gravel drive that crunches loud enough to wake the dead. But it sits 12 ft higher than the subdivision downhill from me. That subdivision is called Rivers Bend Estates. Big brick colonials, threecar garages, manicured lawns so green they look photoshopped. Every mailbox matches.
Every holiday wreath is approved by committee. And yes, there’s an HOA. Now, I don’t live in the HOA. My property predates their development by decades. My place is upstream, technically outside their jurisdiction, but water doesn’t care about jurisdiction, and neither do gravity or physics. The first time I met the HOA president, her name was Cheryl Whitman.
