Camelot Village, located off South Estes Drive in Chapel Hill, was one of the portions of Orange County hit hardest by flooding during Hurricane Florence.
In fact, since the apartment complex was built in 1967, the area has seen major flooding repeatedly, since it sits between two floodplains and borders a portion of Bolin Creek that overflows its banks during heavy rains.
According to Chapel Hill Mayor Pam Hemminger, the town attempted to broker a deal with FEMA to purchase the complex in past years due to flooding but those negotiations were ultimately unsuccessful.
“Those units are either individually owned or group-owned; no one person owns them all,” said Hemminger. “You’d have to have a lot of negotiations. We thought we’d reached an agreement. We pulled everyone together with FEMA, our town staff, the homeowners association and both tenants and landlords to agreed to move forward on a couple of the buildings. Apparently that did not go forward from the homeowners’ side.”
The complex was built just one year before regulations were put in place that would have stopped it from being built, the mayor said. The only likely solution now is to tear it down, which would lead to the displacement of tenants, some of who live on the second floor of the units and do not deal with the brunt of the flooding.
But after a June 2013 flood damaged over half of the condos in Camelot Village, the town decided a FEMA buyout was it’s best-case scenario.
“I think that whole situation needs to be reevaluated,” said Hemminger. “I want us to take a look at pulling people back together and saying, ‘let’s see where we are now,’ because as we learned when we pulled FEMA and staff and everyone together, the only option was to tear down a couple of those buildings.”
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