TROY, N.Y. ( NEWS10 ) — It’s almost been three weeks since Hurricane Helene struck the southeast, but many areas are still recovering from the storm damage — including North Carolina. A Troy native who recently moved to North Carolina, has been displaced from her home and doesn’t know when she can get back.
Get the latest news, weather, sports and entertainment delivered right to your inbox! Jenn Fisher described the morning of Friday, Sept. 27, in her town of Swannanoa, North Carolina, as “heartbreaking.” She said neither her nor her neighbors expected the storm to hit as badly as it did.
“I woke up to crackles and snaps and bangs at about 5:30 in the morning on Friday,” said Jenn. “Monstrous trees were all over my yard, pretty much missing my house missing my daughters bedroom by a foot, so if the tree had fallen a foot more it would’ve been catastrophic damage to our home,” said Jenn.
The floods took out homes, schools, parks, roads and more. Jenn said the evacuation notice didn’t come in until around 6 a.m., and by that time it was too late for many people.
“We couldn’t even get out all the trees were down on the road, active power lines were down,” said Jenn. “A lot of our highways are still closed.”
Jenn and some neighbors drove through town and recalled being completely overwhelmed by the damage.
“We were not prepared for what we saw, it’s heartbreaking, we were literally driving up and down the roads seeing bodies in trees because the river water was so high and we could still see homes washing down,” said Jenn.
According to Jenn, it took five to six days before help came from the government — something she believes was detrimental to many lives. New York’s Swift Water Rescue team recently got back from helping in North Carolina on Friday. Some forest rangers said they witnessed damage that they could’ve never imagined.
‘Battle of the Badges’ in Schenectady to support American Red Cross “It was the most amount of catastrophic devastation I’ve ever seen and it was overwhelming, with the loss and damage to infrastructure and lives but how widespread it was geographically,” said Scott Sabo, a Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Forest Ranger in Essex County.
Many members of the rescue team said they thought everything was okay when they first arrived and had no emergency calls. However, John Makin, a fire protection specialist in Buffalo, explained how they quickly learned that was wrong.
“The reason we weren’t getting calls, the reason we were in this phase of ‘We’re okay,’ was the 911 system had gone done, the cell system had gone down, the roads were washed out,” said Makin. “Every piece of critical infrastructure was wiped out in just a couple hours.”
Jenn’s home is one of the few that is still standing, however she doesn’t know when life will return back to normal. Many families are still displaced as crews work around the clock, continuing to rebuild the area.
“They’re calling it ‘A-thousand-year flood’ in our area because its just not something any of us have ever seen,” said Jenn. “They are literally rebuilding the entire infrastructure from scratch everything was destroyed.”
Through it all, Jenn is proud of the way her community has stuck together. One of the most important things to her is getting her daughter back to school.
“I want the ability for my child to go back to school and be with her friends and socialize all over again,” said Jenn. “We do understand that it is going to take a long time but I just hope we can get there a lot quicker.”
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