Andrea Richards and Jana Joksimovic both got flash flood warnings on their phones Sunday evening and didn’t think much of it.
Richards, a Durham resident, kept her plans for a family movie outing. Joksimovic, who lives in Chapel Hill, headed out to deliver for DoorDash.
Within a couple hours, both women found themselves stranded at University Place—one of the areas hit hardest by Tropical Storm Chantal and the historic flooding it caused in Chapel Hill. One decided to stay put. The other decided to try to drive through it.
It was the kind of night that makes you think about your disaster preparedness plan, the women say—and whether to double down on planning or accept that some things are beyond your control.
When Richards got to Silverspot Cinema, the dine-in movie theater at University Place, her family split up. She, her husband, and one of her daughters went to see F1. Her other daughter and a friend watched the new Jurassic Park in the theater next door.
Around 8:30 p.m., as F1′s credits rolled, the other daughter came in. “We think the bathroom’s flooding,” she said. The group walked out of the theater onto squishy carpet. When they rounded the corner to the lobby, they saw water rushing in, already half a foot deep.
They tried exiting through a different mall entrance, but hesitated before stepping outside.
“You could see that there was water on the ground, but nobody could see how much water there was,” Richards says. “And then somebody walked out, and it was like, OK, there is a moat around the mall.”
They retreated back into the mall where about 50 people had gathered in one of the few areas that isn’t under construction. Water was beginning to seep in from multiple entrances. Her husband ran outside and re-parked their car on the sidewalk.
“That probably saved the car,” says Richards, who is an INDY contributing writer.
The Silverspot staff were doing their best, bringing out bottles of water, but they were all really young, Richards says, and no managers stepped up to take charge. One employee told Richards’s daughter it was his first day at work. (INDY reached out to Silverspot but didn’t receive a response.)
Richards tried calling 911. It didn’t go through. That’s when she started to understand the scope of the flooding, she says.
Eventually, two security guards came by and told the crowd to move to the middle of the mall. An hour later, around 10:30, the water started rising rapidly, covering electrical sockets, and guards helped the crowd move upstairs. One hundred or so people spread out across the theaters on the second floor. Among them: families, elderly people, unaccompanied minors building forts with seat cushions, a diabetic man who’d just had a medical emergency, a nursing student who’d helped with the medical emergency.
“My daughter was like, ‘Mom, this is one of my nightmares, that I get stuck in a building that’s getting filled with water,’” Richards says. “And I was like, it’s not at that level, there’s nothing to be concerned about. This is just a waiting game.”
But as the night progressed, Richards started feeling more on edge. She kept thinking about how no one knew how many people were in the theater.
“You definitely got the sense, like, oh, nobody’s coming,” Richards says. “And there’s not a plan.”
Storms are good for DoorDash business, with lots of people ordering in. Jana Joksimovic was trying to make rent, so she headed out around six p.m. despite the weather.
She’d delivered one order and was on her way to drop off a pizza when she hit a puddle on Estes Drive that seemed to swallow her car. She was sure she wouldn’t make it—she drives a 2014 Toyota Corolla with 250,000 miles on it—but kept her foot on the gas and somehow pulled out, immediately turning into University Place’s parking lot. That’s when she saw a bunch of people stranded in the mall, Richards, a friend whose kids go to school with hers, among them.
“I was like, ‘Oh my god, I don’t want to get stranded at the U Mall’,” Joksimovic says.
She called her boyfriend and asked him to stay on the phone with her. Rain was pounding her windshield as she headed toward 15-501. As she approached Estes Drive, her boyfriend was looking at a weather radar.
“Go right, go right,” he told her. She veered away from what turned out to be a massive puddle that had trapped multiple cars.
Using back roads, she made it to her neighborhood near Booker Creek. But she didn’t go home yet. The pizza order she still needed to deliver was for a house five minutes from her own.
“I was like, these people are hungry and the power’s out, this pizza would be so good right now,” Joksimovic says.
She tried four different routes, texting the customer updates as she went. All were blocked by floodwater from Booker Creek, which was overflowing. Finally, she called DoorDash to cancel the order.
A few hours later, thinking things had calmed down, Joksimovic went back out to continue doing deliveries.
Things were okay in OK movie theater for a while.
But the smell from the floodwater was growing increasingly putrid. All of their phones died. Then just after one a.m., the emergency power went out.
They sat in total darkness for about 15 minutes. Finally someone with a flashlight came in and announced the waters had receded enough to leave. Even then, it felt like no one was in charge. People just followed each other down the stairs, through water still standing in the lobby, out into the night.
Richards was struck by how quickly the sense of community dissolved.
“We had just spent like five hours with people, like I felt like some of them I knew,” Richards says. “But then you’re just off on your own.”
Outside, people were trying to start cars that had been sitting in floodwater. Richards watched one man turn his ignition—water gushed from the muffler. The nurse who’d helped during the medical emergency was preparing to walk home alone.
The experience left Richards with an urgent desire to start doing real disaster planning, specifically around bolstering mutual aid networks. The individual responses she’d witnessed that night—from security guards, firefighters, and others stuck in the mall—were remarkable. The system was not.
“It’s how I feel about America right now, where it’s like, you just don’t know which way it’s gonna go. Like, people are great. They’re amazing. There are freaking everyday, incredible heroes all around us. So I’m like, we’re going to be OK. But then it’s also like, to be coming out of a theater that’s underwater and have nobody be like, ‘Hey’ …. There’s not an announcement you can make to the whole theater. That’s not how our society works. We don’t automatically think, ‘Who needs a ride?’ It’s everyone for themselves.”
Richards overheard some people discussing calling an Uber to get home.
“Is that how we handle natural disasters now? We just, we rely on Uber to get us out of them?” Richards says. “That’s crazy, because somebody’s driving the car.”
When Joksimovic decided to venture back out around 11 p.m., DoorDash was still pinging her with orders.
She accepted one for McDonald’s, only to find the restaurant dark and empty. Then the app directed her to Wingstop—a 30-minute drive from where she was, since Franklin Street was blocked off. When she arrived, an employee told her someone had already picked up the order.
“I was like, OK, something is telling me that I should just go home and not try to dash tonight,” Joksimovic says.
Joksimovic’s emotional response to the night was complicated—she felt both panicked and strangely passive about it all. She thinks this stems in part from being a refugee from the former Yugoslavia, having fled during the wars of the 1990s.
“I think coming from a war—not a natural disaster but a disaster in my life—I have a more relaxed attitude towards natural disasters,” she says. “As in, if it happens, it happens. We don’t really have control over wars or natural disasters.”
DoorDash gave her half pay for her delivery attempts. She went home and ate the pizza she’d tried to deliver earlier.
Correction: This story has been updated to clarify specific times and locations of certain events inside Silverspot Cinema and University Mall and note the presence of security guards and firefighters.
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