FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. Florences rain came down in sheets unrelenting, and for days on end.

The water inundated homes, many still boarded up from Hurricane Matthew two years earlier. It swallowed farm operations, killing millions of chickens and turkeys and overflowing open pits full of hog feces. It flooded coal ash ponds, sending the toxic byproduct of burning coal into area waterways. The smell of human waste tainted neighborhoods; in the small town of Benson, 300,000 gallons of raw sewage spilled into the streets.

On Friday, Charlotte-based Duke Energy reported that a dam containing a lake at one of its power plants in Wilmington had been breached by floodwaters, potentially spilling coal ash from a nearby dump into the Cape Fear River.

Many parts of North Carolina are still unnavigable, with entire stretches of highway turned to rivers. Rural roads have been washed out.

From a bridge in east Fayetteville on Monday afternoon, residents watched as a plastic barrel, basketballs, fishing gear and a decapitated duck decoy floated down the swollen Cape Fear River toward the Atlantic Ocean, some 80 miles away. Along the bank, mattresses, a dog kennel, a frying pan and scores of garbage bobbed among the trees.

Mitch Colvin, the mayor of this inland city of more than 200,000, spoke with members of the media and law enforcement officials on the bridge Tuesday and marveled at the height of the river. By that point it had reached the bottom of a railroad bridge, causing trees and debris to pile up behind it.

Colvin told HuffPost hes no expert on climate change, but the frequency and magnitude of recent storms have made it clear that something has happened.

You know, this is our second 500-year storm in two years, the 45-year-old mayor said as he leaned against the bridges concrete railing. We need to reassess the classification of these storms. But we also need to plan as a community and as a region for how to prepare for this.