GARLAND, N.C. — After Hurricane Matthew stomped into his trailer home and pulped his floors, walls and cabinets two years ago, Bobby Barnes Jr. spent $90,000 to rebuild and protect himself from another flood. He raised the house two feet onto brick pilings, bought $1,300 worth of flood fencing and said he complied with every federal recommendation.

But on Tuesday morning, his family was underwater again. The Black River, 10 feet above flood stage and still rising, was now a lake that had swallowed farm fields around the Barnes’s house. The water lapped at their front door and sloshed around the newly laid floors.

“It’s back,” Mr. Barnes said. “Same nightmare.”

It was the kind of tragic, expensive, depressing rerun that played out across much of the Carolinas this week, not only on the coast, but in inland communities like this one in Sampson County, blessed with tobacco and turkeys, not sea and sand.

Throughout the region, residents like Mr. Barnes were struggling to put soggy homes and soggy lives back together yet again, amid palpable anxiety that the Carolinas seem to be confronting a new normal of too many storms, with too much water coming much too often.