🌊 Helene's Victims: Already Forgotten?

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The anguish expressed by Kristin was unlike anything else I’ve experienced as a reporter.

We had pulled over next to a destroyed trailer park near Asheville, North Carolina, and were flying our drone to survey the damage. A car pulled over and a woman hopped out and came running forward. She had been searching for someone with a drone to help find a friend’s dog that had disappeared during the storm.

Soon after Kristin started talking, though, she broke down.

“The only thing that saved us,” she said, choking back tears, “is that we're up on the mountain. But our street was wiped out and our roads are gone.”

She had been scheduled to adopt a dog from a trailer that had been on the lot where we stood. Now, there was no trailer.

“It’s just toxic dust,” she said. “Our neighbors are gone. Neighborhoods, homes. They're pulling bodies out of trees.”

Kristen was nearly hysterical.

“Is the government helping?” we asked.

She gestured to the rubble around us: “Do you see them?”

She began sobbing.

“Thank you so much for coming and doing this because it’s not out there,” she said. “People are like, ‘Send me a picture.’ This is my life! They’re like, ‘Get out!’ We fucking live here!”

“[The government is] not here,” she said. “Someone was like, ‘I saw they were there.’ I was like: I’m here and I don't see them. They’re not here.”

Since hurricane Helene struck three weeks ago, thousands of lives in the Asheville region have been destroyed. Yet it seems like it hardly registered on the national media. We are constantly reading a range of outlets to see what they are covering and little coverage gets past us. And wow, did they miss this. 

The scale of the destruction wrought by Helene has hardly been uncovered. Every single local we spoke to – regardless of political affiliation or anything else – told us that the death toll is drastically understated. Officially, just over 300 people have died. Locally, people told us to add a zero to that. 

Everyone had disturbing anecdotes: One woman told us about a nursing home that had been abandoned by the management, leaving the people inside for dead as the river broke through the windows. Another told us about a man who had been stuck in the mud for 48 hours before anyone had realized he was there. A third told us about friends who were camping along the river when it spilled over its banks. The friends haven’t been pronounced dead but haven’t been heard from since. 

People repeatedly asked us the same thing: Why isn’t the national media paying attention? Because after all, without media attention the government won’t act. And if the government won’t act, the suffering will be worse. 

In the coming installments of this newsletter, we’re going to cover the most important lessons we learned during our visit to post-Helene North Carolina. We start with the heartbreaking conversation below.

“The water was up to my lip, 25 feet high,” Sylvia said. 

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