I had the pleasure of attending college in North Carolina’s mountains.  One of the quirks of the local weather was that several times each week we’d get a rain shower.  It wouldn’t last long at all – a few minutes to an hour at most – before the sun reappeared and heated things up enough that we’d see steam rising off the paved areas.   It would get hot quickly and I can remember thinking “so much for the mountains being cool.”  In an hour or two you wouldn’t even know it had rained.

 

Our mountains had a different experience in September, and it has lingered into October.  We’ll know it rained in the mountains for a long, long time to come… thanks to Hurricane Helene.  

 

The Category 4 storm made landfall on the Florida coast on September 26 with and wreaked havoc before heading northwest on the 30th.  It was a powerful, enormous monster even after it weakened to “tropical storm” status… so much so that the states in its path requested Federal assistance before it arrived.  We knew it was coming and that it would be bad… but we could never have imagined just HOW bad it was going to be.

 

Western NC had already received 7 months’ rain in the period from September 25th to 27th… which was a “once in a thousand years” event.  What followed has been described as a “once in FIVE thousand years” occurrence.  One source said that enough rain fell to have covered the entire state of NC to a depth of 3 ½ feet.  The destruction left behind is unimaginable… roads washed away… trees uprooted… rivers flooding … houses washed away… bridges destroyed… and as of this writing, well over 200 humans dead, many more missing and countless pets and wild animals lost as well.  The property damages will run far into the billions of dollars. The survivors are in desperate need of food, clothing, shelter, power and medical care.  Many are in areas that are inaccessible except by air.

 

What can we do to help these people?  They need everything from diapers to water to blankets to medicine… almost anything you can imagine.  The government will help, but it takes them time to get moving.  The National Guard was called out and 1,000 active-duty soldiers have been dispatched, but in the meantime, it has been YOU and your neighbors who have been on the front lines of this battle, often right in there with the first responders.

 

My wife spent yesterday working with Samaritan’s Purse in Boone.  Her group was assigned to work on the flooded home of a Boone firefighter… pulling up wet flooring, removing soaked sheetrock, removing mud, cleaning things inside and out.  They were hard at work when the firefighter came home… he had been on duty, doing those same tasks for others but unable to work on his own home.  He broke down in tears when he saw strangers hard at work on his house.  My wife spoke to a man from Kansas City, MO who had been on the way to a beach vacation with his family.  They saw the devastation on the news and said, “How can we sit on the beach doing nothing while these people are in such need?”  The family is spending their vacation working to help strangers.  She met another man from Upstate New

 York who came down to help.  People are far better than we sometimes think…

 

What can we do as Bermuda Run residents?  

 

You can always volunteer to work on the disaster sites. If you want to do that, do a little research and decide what organization to volunteer with… and register in advance to help.  Don’t just show up at random locations.  You can donate money to legitimate relief organizations such as Samaritan’s Purse.   Regardless of your skills – or lack thereof – Samaritan’s Purse will find something you can do to help.  You can donate material things – food, diapers, and the like – but check the lists of needed items before you begin buying and then take them to a designated collection point .