As things go with any hurricane, you pray the paths that are projected aren’t accurate, that they’ll fizzle out at sea with no harm done to life and land, and that at the end of the day, they’ll be relegated to a mere footnote in meteorological history.
But more often than not, that’s not the case, and it certainly wasn’t for Hurricane Helene, which made landfall on Sept. 26 in Perry, Florida, as a Category 4 storm and left a path of destruction from there throughout many southeastern states even after being downgraded to a tropical storm.
Western North Carolina was particularly hard hit, with more than 100 lives lost as of this writing and dozens more still unaccounted for. Entire towns were wiped out, homes, businesses and bridges were lost, and the topography was dramatically changed in some areas in what some have called a “biblical devastation” of the North Carolina mountains.
The images and videos on social media are heartbreaking, particularly the ones pleading for information on loved ones and pets that are still missing.
As the assessments of the scale of the damage continue, the picking up of the pieces and attempts to get back to as normal as one can have commenced, with the outpouring of support being a sight to behold.
Though there have been some questions about the timeline of the state and federal responses, the responses from private citizens both in the state and beyond our borders have been encouraging and uplifting at a time when so many are wondering, “What happens next?” and “Where do we go from here?”
There have been the helicopter rescues and the air drops of supplies. There have been the convoys rolling through. There has also been the coordination of relief efforts, with churches in western North Carolina playing a central role in storing the things needed and getting them to where they need to go.
There has also been the ingenuity of members of some of the harder-hit communities. In Elk Park, for instance, neighbors banded together to build a temporary bridge made out of flatbed trailers and wood in order to make supply runs to and from nearby neighborhoods after a connecting bridge was wiped out by the storm.
One neighbor told WCNC, “You can’t get a truck across the bridge we built, but you can get side by sides, so a bunch of side by sides, we’ve been getting together and running supplies back and forth.”
The Mountain Mule Packers have also gotten a lot of attention, with videos of mules transporting supplies to devastated communities going viral.
“Locals rented heavy equipment themselves, and helped Mountain Mule Packer Ranch get a path started to get the mule string through to Laurel Ridge with water and supplies for families,” they noted in one Facebook post.
The restoration and rebuilding are going to take years. But North Carolina is a tough, resilient state, and she will see this through thanks in large part to neighbors banding together to help neighbors and community members stepping up to the plate to do what is needed to make things happen and get the job done.
As the social media hashtag goes, we are #NCstrong and proud of it. And as devastating as this was for western North Carolina to go through, she will emerge even stronger once all is said and done. Count on it.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
