PEMBROKE - Mary Alice Pinchbeck-Teets remembers the horrific sound outside the window while listening to her history professor’s lecture at UNCP 55 years ago.

“It sounded like a freight train coming at my ear,” Pinchbeck-Teets said. “I didn’t know what was going on and my classmates were frightened by the noise.”

Pinchbeck-Teets, 71, said she had never heard of a “hurricann” before Hurricane Hazel’s wrath in Pembroke on Oct. 15, 1954.

Hazel whipped through town as a Category 4, snapping trees and ripping shingles from classroom roofs on campus with strong winds nearing 125 miles per hour.

“We didn’t have a television on campus so we tuned into the radio for updates,” Pinchbeck-Teets said. “I distinctly remember the canal behind Jacobs Hall flooding over and soaking campus.”

According to records from the National Weather Service in Raleigh, N.C., Hurricane Hazel is the greatest natural disaster in the state’s history.

An estimated $136 million in property damage was sustained while 200 North Carolinians were injured, including 19 deaths.

“There’s too much concrete on campus,” she said. “We used to have ditches on campus. Now, there’s nowhere for the excess water to run off.”

Flooding is and has been a major problem at UNCP in recent years. Oak Hall, a new dormitory constructed in 2008, has flooding hazard areas around the front and sides. The picture below shows flooding during a storm this past spring.