Janeen Williams waited Tuesday morning for the water to go down inside her Carolina Beach business before attempting to see the full extent of the devastation.

“I got it really bad,” said Williams, who has owned the coffee shop Majik Beanz, 10 Lake Park Blvd. South, for 22 years. “It's like knee deep inside of my shop. I still can't even get in there.”

Potential Tropical Cyclone No. 8 had dumped more than 20 inches of rain as of Tuesday morning on parts of the New Hanover County town of Carolina Beach, according to the National Weather Service, flooding businesses and homes. A post on the NWS Wilmington feed of social media site X said 18 inches of rain in 12 hours happens on average “once every 1,000 years!”

Business owners weren't prepared, Williams said.

“We would never have sent our children to school if we thought we were in that much danger,” she said. “So it's a freak thing. We got more than we expected.”

For a time Monday morning, “I was actually trapped in (the coffee shop) for a little while because I was afraid to open the door because the water was more outside than inside,” Williams said.

A friend with a high truck rescued her at about 10:30 a.m.

On Tuesday afternoon, Duke Hagestrom and helpers worked to salvage what they could of the equipment and goods in The Fudgeboat, a business that sells fudge and ice cream at 107 Carolina Beach Ave. North at one of the entrances to the Carolina Beach Boardwalk.

"I would have never guessed we would have had this much impact from that storm," said Hagestrom, whose Carolina Beach home was also flooded Monday. 

For his business, he self-insures for storm damage, meaning he and his co-owners squirrel away thousands of dollars just in case.  He said he does this because in his experience, insurance companies "fight you tooth and nail...and you don't get a fraction of what you should get out of it."

Hagestrom said he hopes to reopen The Fudgeboat as soon as possible, pending a thorough examination of the flood's impact on its equipment and making sure everything in the shop is clean and safe.

Around 8:30 a.m. Monday, the owners of the Veggie Wagon, Max and April Sussman, began receiving calls from employees when water began entering their building at 608 Lake Park Blvd. South. 

The Sussmans were out of town. Max Sussman immediately contacted Carolina Beach Fire Chief Alan Griffin, who advised that the employees should shelter in place and that their location would be recorded with the department.

By 10:30 a.m., the water had reached nearly 4 feet and had begun to enter the building from the walk-up window. He said his employees knew at that point that they had to get to higher ground. The two girls climbed through the walkup window and onto the roof, where they waited amid thunder and lightning for about 10 minutes until a New Hanover County rescue unit arrived.

“Our staff is safe, our staff is healthy, and everything else is replaceable,” Max Sussman said. “We continue to be amazed by our staff and are so proud of the way they continue to show up for us.”

Max Sussman said he expects the flooding to result in a total loss of the products and equipment inside the building. The couple has been down this road before, having suffered severe flooding damage from the rains following Hurricane Florence.

“With (Hurricane Florence in 2018), we knew it was coming and were able to remove all the food and donate it to the emergency operations,” Max Sussman said. “But with this just coming out of nowhere all of the food is wasted.”

Max Sussman said he doesn’t think officials could have done anything differently, that it’s just something no one saw coming. He also noted the overwhelming support he and April have received from the community by way of text and Facebook messages.

“It took April over an hour this morning just to respond to all the messages that came in overnight,” he said.

The Sussmans planned to close the Carolina Beach location for about a week this coming winter for updates, but now the interior of the store will likely need to be completely redone.

“Each time this happens we learn how to make the building a little more storm-ready,” Max Sussman said. “We know there are so many people out there that are in a worse situation than we are – this is a bummer, it’s a headache, but it’s just stuff and it’s stuff you get to replace.”

Carolina Beach’s plight made national news, with photos and videos showing the extent of the flooding, which covered its main streets and the Carolina Beach Boardwalk.

Carolina Beach Mayor Lynn Barbee stated on Facebook around 8 a.m., “We need our own name for this storm. Anonymous 2024 just doesn't do it justice. Crews are out doing damage assessments right now. We are still under a state of emergency, and some roads remain closed.”

Williams, who has liability insurance and renter’s insurance, said she plans to pick up the pieces and reopen.

Reflecting on how severe the flooding became Monday, she expressed regrets, saying, “I prepared a little, but I didn't bring out the sandbags. I wish I would have done that. I kind of wish I had put up my storm shutters, but nobody knew, you know?”

While "1,000 years" sounds like this type of flooding might not happen again for, say, 1,000 years, that's not really the case, experts say.

"Any given year, you can have a flood event, but looking at the climatology and the projected storm information, we should really see these events few and far between. Yet we’ve had about eight of these types of events going back to Hurricane Floyd," said Steve Pfaff, meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Wilmington. "The frequency of these events is unfortunately trending toward becoming normal."