Yancey County, North Carolina, a rural mountain expanse carved with rivers and creeks, bore the brunt of Helene’s devastation. The area experienced 30 inches of rainfall over three days and the hurricane’s highest recorded wind speeds. Yancey experienced the storm’s highest death toll per capita in North Carolina.
Despite the dire forecasts leading up to the storm, there were no evacuation orders in the county. ProPublica South reporter Jennifer Berry Hawes, research reporter Mollie Simon and I spoke to dozens of survivors and analyzed hundreds of messages from local officials to understand why.
What we learned became the story we published earlier this week, which retraced the storm’s devastation through the people who experienced it. We summarized the story’s main takeaways in another post. Those takeaways include the fact that North Carolina does not require training for local emergency managers, that previous attempts to map areas for landslide risks were thwarted by powerful interests and that evacuation orders varied from county to county.
We learned that while some people in Yancey did receive a door knock in time to scramble up the hills before flooding, many did not. A common thread among those who were alerted to danger and those who were not was that almost no one had a chance to grab the belongings they cherished most.
One woman along Cattail Creek told us that she lost family heirlooms and it felt like losing her loved ones all over again. Another lost photos and documents of the town’s history. Another who survived the landslide along Tudy Creek lost her late husband’s ashes.
I listened to people grapple with these losses. As an engagement reporter, part of my job is to think about how our reporting can better reflect peoples’ experiences and how it can offer something of use to their lives. As we dug into the warnings and lack of clear evacuation orders, I kept wondering what might have been saved if things had gone differently and whether, after the fact, there was a way to memorialize what was lost.
Inspired by some of the recent local efforts to preserve community memory, such as a lost and found Facebook group for areas affected by Helene or local artists creating models or watercolor paintings of the landmark B.B. Wilson store, we decided it would be worthwhile to continue asking locals what the storm destroyed that they would have saved given the chance.
If you live in or near Yancey County, consider leaving us a voicemail at 828-201-2738 to share your answer. If you don’t live in the area but would like to share your experience with disasters, evacuation and preserving the physical items you love, you can reply to this email.
We’ll also continue reporting on Hurricane Helene’s aftermath to understand what lessons could better prepare these communities and others for future storms, as well as how the rebuilding effort is unfolding.
Thanks for reading,
Cassandra Garibay
Engagement reporter
