Tore Up: Storm-Tested Keith Bruno of Oriental, NC Pays it Forward

Reprinted and edited from Tradewinds Magazine, 2019, B. Garrity-Blake. Photo by B. Garrity-Blake

Keith Bruno of Oriental, North Carolina has been blown about, battered, shaped, and made wiser by storms. The brawny fisherman from New York moved south because remnants of Hurricane Floyd washed pesticides – sprayed to combat mosquitoes carrying West Nile Virus - into Long Island Sound and killed off all the lobsters.  

Having lost his principal fishery, Bruno and his wife decided to make a go of it in North Carolina. They moved onto a tributary of the Neuse River in Pamlico County, geographically-shaped like a catcher's mitt for storm surges, just in time for Hurricane Isabel. 

“Isabel was our introduction to North Carolina,” he laughed. “I didn’t have anything yet, so we didn’t have anything to lose.” 

Bruno launched Endurance Seafood by trying his hand at crabbing. He had a rough start.   

“I had a 43-foot boat and went all the way down the sound to set crab pots. A guy out of Hatteras or Ocracoke came over to me in his skiff. He said, ‘You can’t set there!’ Why not? He said, ‘There ain’t no crabs there. Man, you’re wasting your time! I got a line of pots a quarter of a mile from here, set next to me.’”

Bruno was sure he was being set up for failure and ignored the advice. But sure enough, the next day when he pulled his pots, they were empty of crabs. 

“Same fisherman came out to me again and said, ‘I told you! Go pull one of mine and see for yourself – that’s where they are.’ I said nope. After three or four times, he didn’t come to me anymore. Finally, I moved my pots to his area, and started making money! He waved and said, ‘Man, I’m glad you finally got it!’ It’s crazy how accepting people here have been of me!”

Bruno and his two young sons fished nets and pots for the next few years, growing the business.  Then came Hurricane Irene in 2011. 

“Irene was the worst storm we’d seen ever,” Bruno reflected. “We sat in the house and watched as she pulled the dock slowly apart. Then the cooler started rocking and threw the ice maker into the creek, a very expensive piece of equipment. And then the entire cooler started floating away!”

The next morning, once Irene’s nine-foot storm surge receded, Bruno took in the destruction. “All our crab pots were beat up against buildings, across the street, stuffed in trees, miles away. Gillnets were strewn across the street, thousands of yards of net entangled in branches. We were tore up.” 

But that same day people began arriving to give him a hand. More came the next day, and the following day as well. 

“The storm is terrible,” Bruno said, shaking his head. “The community after the storm is mind-blowing. People come together for no reason other than to help.” 

Bruno was especially moved by the generosity shown to him by his neighboring seafood dealers. He said that George Brown, from Marshallberg, showed up with his crane and set Bruno’s cooler back on its foundation. 

“I was of course elated and grateful, but with an uncertain future asked, ‘Can I pay you half now and half later?’ And he said no. I said, ‘Well okay, what’s it going to cost?’ No charge. He told me that Sherrill Styron over here at Garland Fulcher Seafood sent him to help me and said to put it on his bill. Chokes me up to this day.”

As bad as Irene was, Hurricane Florence was even worse for the Bruno family. “Irene had a nine-foot surge, but Florence was nine and a half. Florence had more duration and more destruction. I had more stuff, so I had more stuff to lose.” 

Recalling what happened during Irene, the Bruno family moved all their nets, pots, and boats to higher and safer ground in anticipation of Florence. They had converted an old box truck into a cooler with an ice maker on top, hoping to tow it to higher ground for the next storm. But as Florence got closer, he discovered that the box truck was mired deep into the soft ground and wouldn’t budge. 

So Bruno removed the ice maker and hoped for the best. 

“We stayed in Arapaho and tried to get back the next morning, but the water was still high,” he explained. “My two sons stripped down and swam down here on a reconnaissance mission. They said, ‘The house is still there, but we can’t find the cooler.’ I said, ‘How can you not see a giant 30 foot white box?’ I was afraid my cooler got swept off the foundation into the marina down the creek, full of yachts - millions of dollars in damage my stuff could have cost other people! But turns out the cooler had been beat to little pieces and swept away.” 

Bruno and his family thought long and hard about how to better prepare for the next storm.

“What can we do going forward to make it better? Storms have gotten progressively worse over the years. I liked the mobility idea because it was clear that we can’t keep anything safe. I got the idea of a tractor trailer.” 

Bruno bought a 48-foot semi tractor-trailer in New York and had it brought to Oriental. 

“It sat in the driveway for two months while we thought about our plan. We have the mobile part, but how do we make it function has a fish house? Went down to Bally Refrigeration in Morehead City and talked about compressors, evaporators, and refrigeration needs. They ran a bunch of calculations, R values, and we measured foam thickness on the side of coolers and so on.”

The Endurance Seafood team came up with an innovative “fish house on wheels” that sits perpendicular to the water, with a roofed loading dock built around it.  

“Half of this is a cooler, half is a freezer, and the back half is my ice room,” he explained. “Lots of halves there! Front piece is dry storage – closet for cartons. So it’s four parts.”

Still, Bruno worried about repeating his earlier mistake of getting mired in the soft mud. 

“The thing is insanely heavy,” he said. “So, I talked to my friend at Prescott Marine and asked, ‘What do you think about pouring a slab back there?’ But there are permitting issues with a slab so close to the river. Bobby Prescott said, ‘Doesn’t have to be called a slab - how about a boat ramp?’”

Bruno got permission to pour a concrete boat ramp. He carefully leveled his mobile fish house on the slope.  

“We’re fishermen and dock builders, not skilled at higher equations, but we got it all figured out,” he grinned. 

Then, one year later came Hurricane Dorian. 

“Dorian was coming up as a Cat 3, so we prepared like it was another Florence. The slab made it so the trailer wouldn’t sink in the mud. I called a friend with a tractor trailer to pull my mobile fish house up to the head of the road. He hooked it up and said, ‘Man, it won’t move. Your brakes are locked up! They’re rusted to the hubs!'”

Bruno and his sons got under the trailer with hammers and PV blaster and finally managed to break the brakes free. The truck driver told them in three or four years the brakes would have been frozen permanently.  

“He showed us how to back the brakes away from the hubs so it’s not possible to freeze shut again. Turns out I’m lucky we had Dorian here because it taught us another lesson!” 

Dorian was a good dry run. As the storm lost strength, Bruno calculated that the surge wouldn’t be as high as Florence. They towed the mobile fish house up the driveway to higher elevation without having to pull onto the paved road, where power lines would have necessitated disconnecting the ice machine from the roof. 

“Dorian put four feet of tide here by the shore, and water just touched the wheels where we had the trailer up by the road. If Mother Nature didn’t force me to move this thing now, I might not have been able to move it later! We’re lucky it worked out.”  

But with news of Dorian’s wrath on the Outer Banks, Bruno’s sense of relief was short lived. 

“I saw the devastation on the news and felt for them. The Ocracoke fish house had been tore up just like I had been in the last two storms,” he reflected. “I don’t know them, but I know what they’re going through first-hand - it really affected me that I was over here fine, and they were devastated and there was nothing I could do for them.”  

Bruno wracked his brain about how he might help the Ocracoke fish house. He thought of Farm Aid and the fundraising Willy Nelson has done for farmers. Could he sponsor something like that on a smaller scale? He called a musician who’d bought fish and shrimp from Endurance Seafood while visiting Oriental and floated his idea.  

“Early this spring I met a guy named Charles Humphreys, bass player in a bluegrass band called Songs from the Road. Dude’s a Grammy winner. I called him and said, what do you think about a benefit concert? It didn’t take a second for him to say yes!” 

The band found an open date later in September. It was on. 

“They finished a concert at midnight, drove down, got here at five in the morning, took a nap and played here on my dock,” Bruno said. “The whole community helped – Piggly Wiggly donated the pig, water and soda came from New Bern, company called Wicked Weed from Asheville donated 1500 cans of beer! My refrigeration guy cooked the pig. Even the porta john was donated.” 

He had over 250 people show up to support Ocracoke. They donated whatever they could, tossing cash and checks into a fish carton with a slot cut into the top of the box. 

More than $10,000 was raised in one afternoon at oft-battered and hurricane-tested Endurance Seafood. The money would go to the Ocracoke Working Watermen's Association, the non-profit set up years ago to save the island's last fish house. Bruno reflected that helping the Ocracoke fish house rebuild allowed him the satisfaction of “paying it forward,” considering all the help he’d received in the wake of storms.  

“Finally I could give back; I could help the next person,” Bruno said. “Other than getting married and having kids, this was a highlight in my life.”