No quick fix for what Helene did to North Carolina

A volunteer's-eye view of the damage from last year's hurricane

I’m just back from Spruce Pine, N.C., and there are dump trucks in my dreams.

Our volunteer group had been warned to treat every bend in the road like a blind curve because those trucks are enormous and moving fast.

They move fast because this little town — like many others in the mountains near Asheville — is frantically cleaning up from Hurricane Helene, and will be for years.

The storm came last September, with wind gusts up to 100 mph, downpours of up to 30 inches and several tornadoes

Helene basically re-landscaped some of the mountain towns near Asheville (also hard hit but better publicized). Seven months later, the cranes, dump trucks, excavators and dredgers are still removing storm debris, shoring up stream banks and repairing roads and rail beds.

As a member of a volunteer disaster relief team at North Broadway United Methodist Church in Columbus, Ohio, I’ve been to many hurricane sites. I’ve never seen anything quite as dramatic as what I saw around Spruce Pine.

The flooding caused rivers and creeks to cut new channels through the mountain valleys. It washed away tons of topsoil, deposited toxic mud on farmers’ fields, sent trees crashing through buildings, pushed vehicles into unexpected places, shut down sewage-treatment plants and ruined a lot of livelihoods. About 250 deaths were attributed to Helene, more than 100 of them in North Carolina.

In Bakersville, the owner of a combination gas station and auto parts business gave us a tour of her storeroom, where $300,000 worth of parts still sat on shelves, crusted with mud and unsellable. During the storm, the floodwater inside the store reached 6 feet or more. Now she has switched to selling soup and sandwiches instead of timing belts and spark plugs to bring in some revenue.

Al Miller, the director of Disaster Ministries for the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church, told us his organization had 50 or 60 active cases of people seeking help. Among them was Melissa, whose flooded house near Bakersville some of us were assigned to work on. It had been largely gutted by previous volunteer groups and was in the early stages of reassembly. She and her family were living in a small camper in the yard. We did a lot in that house but there’s still a long way to go.

Despite his extensive list of people seeking assistance, Miller advised us not to be in a hurry. He said even if we did nothing but listen to the stories of the people hit by the storm and spread the word about the need for more help we’d be doing a service.

Money might be the most practical way to lend a hand. In that part of North Carolina, housing large groups of volunteers is a challenge (our relatively small team of 15 slept in classrooms and offices at Spruce Pine United Methodist Church). Miller, who retired on our last day of work but promises to return as a volunteer, said all the hotels are filled with contractors, responders and other kinds of aid workers. If you want to send money, here’s one place. Here’s another.

Also on our last day of work, Donald Trump’s administration decided to deny North Carolina’s request for the federal government to continue matching dollar for dollar the state’s spending on hurricane relief. “Not warranted,” said his acting head of FEMA, the federal department that responds to disasters.

Not warranted? I think Spruce Pine would beg to differ.