Hurricane Florence: Told by Joseph Purrington, Sisu Refuge

When Hurricane Florence came through eastern North Carolina in September 2018, I was living in Jacksonville. I was in the Marine Corps and I was recovering from a lot of medical issues. It had been raining for three or four days and our power was out.

We got on social media so we could figure out what was going on around us and we found out we were landlocked. Roads were shut down, flooded out, washed out.

And we caught wind of some animal rescues in the area that apparently had pigs that were washing up from the factory farms that had gotten destroyed. Pigs were starting to show up in residential neighborhoods. So, trying to give a helping hand, we linked up with one of the local rescues. We had trucks and we had trailers, and we knew the area pretty well. So, we started driving around in these neighborhoods and picking up the pigs.

And we met a guy who was a former Marine. He was retired and so was his wife and they had 22 acres of property.

About nine of these pigs had actually washed up on their property and started walking out of their woods. So, he let us use some of his land to create a staging area for them. We were getting calls in the middle of the day. I'd be at work and I'd get a call and someone would say, “Hey, there's three pigs in this area. There's 2 pigs in that area."

So, I would grab my truck, get the trailer, go and load up the pigs, then drop them off at our staging point, then I'd go back to work.

The New River is where the water from all the mainland goes to the ocean.

A lot of factory farms are placed along that that river. So when the river rose, the farmers were not able to get their pigs out of their barns and just locked the doors and said, okay, we’ll hope for the best. And on one of those buildings, the roof had actually been ripped off in the hurricane. So when the waters came up, the pigs started spilling out over the top. There were more pigs that were lost than pigs that were saved.

By the time we were done in that three-month span after hurricane Florence, we had rescued over 85 pigs, and 48 of them were actual pigs from the hurricane. The others were from a gas chamber that we had the opportunity to rescue from being culled from their herd. And by the time it was all over and done, we were able to place most of the pigs at various sanctuaries across the United States. We were left with 18. They were growing, they were healthy, and we ran out of places to send them.

Nobody was willing to take any more pigs. We weren't a rescue, we weren't a sanctuary, we weren’t anybody. Ironically, we met a guy who was a Marine and had gotten orders to move to Virginia. He was trying to get rid of his house and property, so we bought it.

And then the very day we signed the paperwork for the house, we were over here putting up fencing.

And then we brought the pigs the next day. And that was the start of Sisu.

We started out with 18 pigs we rescued from Hurricane Florence, and they are still here except for the few that have passed on.

Now we have 63 large breed pigs. We have 28 small breed pigs, and we've got other varying breeds. We've got two cows, some goats, chickens and ducks.