Like many Floridians, Vicki Haynes Campbell knows what’s it like to face a natural disaster. She and her husband were living in Grande Lagoon when Hurricane Ivan clobbered Pensacola in 2004 . The storm wiped out her home along with many others across Northwest Florida and claimed the lives of eight people in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties.
“We lost our house, everything we own. We had two changes of clothes,” Campbell recalled, “but everybody helped us after Ivan.”
Now she wants to help others, including members of her own family, who have been devastated by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina. As of Monday, Hurricane Helene has already claimed more than 100 lives since the powerful storm roared ashore in Florida and swept through the Southeast leaving a trail of devastation and chaos in its wake.
North Carolina has been one of the hardest hit areas where entire towns in and around the Asheville area have been swept away by raging flood waters and mud slides. Campbell has dozens of cousins in the area, and she is organizing a supply drive for people there with the help of several area churches.
“It was unbelievable. It just happened so fast they didn't have time to get ready,” Campbell said. “The water just came so fast, and it came from all different directions. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but Asheville is kind of a valley and there are rivers that run down, and all the water, the levees couldn't hold it and the dams couldn't hold it and it just totally flooded the entire valley.”
Communities are still assessing damage and barely beginning the recovery process. They’re still without power, food, medications, and many other basic supplies. This week, Campbell and several partner churches including Marcus Pointe Baptist Church, Brownsville Church, and St. John’s, are asking folks to help them fill a 53-foot truck with supplies that will be distributed to people in need in North Carolina.
Brownsville Church and Marcus Pointe, where the truck is parked, are the main two drop off points. The churches are working with another faith-based organization in North Carolina called Hearts with Hands to reach the people who need these supplies the most.
“We were already helping some people over in the Big Bend area of Florida,” said Gordon Godfrey, pastor of Marcus Pointe Baptist Church. “We said, ‘Sure, we want to help out Asheville because they have been absolutely flooded up there.’ There are thousands upon thousands of people that have been put out of their homes. Churches are destroyed, businesses are destroyed, so we put it out immediately to our church and we're going to start helping. This community has jumped in, as they always do, and they're starting to bring in supplies and donating money, as well,”
Remembering Ivan the Terrible: Hurricane Ivan still haunts Escambia, Santa Rosa counties after 20 years.
The church will accept donations at its main campus building to make it easier for people to drop them off. They’re looking for things like pull-tab canned goods, shelf-stable breakfast items, paper products, buckets, hygiene items like diapers and feminine products, water, generators, and flashlights and batteries. They say monetary donations are helpful, too, because the money can go to the organizations who are working directly with victims.
On Friday, a driver will take the truck to meet partners outside the disaster zone in Asheville, who will then get it to those in need. Web Trucking is donating the truck and the driver.
“If you were around here in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, this was a bus route for hurricanes through here,” said Danny Webb, with Webb Trucking. “We learned how to rely on outside help. It's time for us to help and to reach out to these other communities and dig in and do whatever we can. Whenever they give us the word and it's full and ready to go, we've got a driver on standby, two drivers on standby that are ready to go whenever they tell us to go.”
If you’d like to donate you can bring items by Marcus Pointe Baptist or Brownsville churches. Envision Perdido also has a website listing items that are needed and a link to donate.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola churches collecting supplies to aid disaster victims in North Carolina.
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