Opinion

What it’s like to walk through the ruin a hurricane leaves behind

Cars were crushed like cans, steel shopping carts were pressed paper-flat, and shipping containers were bent like origami. Everything around me had been annihilated. If not for the catastrophe, I might feel awed by the destruction. Instead, I am overwhelmed by guilt for the curiosity that led me out to explore in the wake of the storm. There’s no one to be angry with, and there is no pleading with someone for this to stop, but the guilt of not doing enough, of not suffering like my neighbors, haunts my mind.

As I trudged forward, crawling over broken buildings and climbing through holes that used to be walls, it seemed as though the destruction was endless in every direction. The lives of thousands of Appalachian people lay destroyed on the ground around me, their stories washed away. Standing on these mounds of debris, trying to hold my footing against the shifting ruins underneath my feet, I wondered what, exactly, I was standing on.

There were so many fragments of the lives ruined or lost, little puzzle pieces and clues to the stories of people I will never know. The hardest part for me as a young father was seeing children’s toys and clothes tossed about in crumpled buildings. I saw a stuffed animal caught in the underside of a home, hanging next to an elementary school-size JanSport backpack. I don’t know whether this child of the mountains survived.

The chaotic scene made me want to cry, but the dust kicked up by rescue and relief vehicles as they churned through the grinding mud dried my eyes so they would not produce tears.

As I inched forward, crunching and crackling through broken glass and shattered homes, I had an epiphany. The word “flood” conjures drowning, but down by these rivers, it was clear that people were crushed by debris, too. I realized I had asked myself the wrong question earlier: I shouldn’t have been asking “What am I standing on,” but “Whom?”

Austin Campbell, Asheville, N.C.

The writer is a photographer who took the photos that accompany these letters.

A storm-tossed fraternity

Communities along the Southeastern coast are members of an exclusive club that no one wants to join. Every year, we collectively hope and pray to be spared from the wrath of the Big One. For us, it isn’t a question of whether we’ll get hit by the Big One, it’s a question of when, so our houses are built to withstand hurricane-force winds and rains, and our flood insurance is priced accordingly.

We tend to make light of our precarious situation, because if we thought about it any harder, we would lose more sleep to worry than there are hours in the night. As high school kids in Charleston, S.C., my classmates and I would quietly hope for the days off from school known as “hurrications,” but of course, there were limits; the best outcome was when a forecast storm would turn back out to sea, leaving us with no school and clear skies. Yet even during the sunniest of hurrications, the specter of Hugo — our last Big One — still hung over our heads.

It’s hard for people who haven’t been affected by a Big One to relate to folks caught up in a major hurricane. Yes, TV stations broadcast the same rote analyses of the destruction left in a hurricane’s wake, the same macabre images of flattened buildings, the same sweeping declarations of strength and hope. But that’s not the same thing as preparing for a storm or living through one.

When storms such as Helene spin up in the Gulf of Mexico and make a beeline to the coast, folks back in the Lowcountry pray for the safety of our compatriots in Florida’s Big Bend. But we take solace in the fact that, like us, they are prepared. Many of their houses are required to be on stilts, and have bulletproof storm shutters or hurricane windows. If folks don’t evacuate, then they know to pack the fridge with ice, fill the bathtubs and get enough candles to last a few nights.

I wish we could say the same thing for southern Appalachia. The death and destruction wrought upon Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas are harrowing and agonizing. Kids were still in their dorms at Appalachian State University’s campus in Boone, N.C., when a sflash flood hit. Chimney Rock’s main drag is now a riverbed, parts of Interstate 40 slid into the Pigeon River, and Asheville’s River Arts District is now at the bottom of the French Broad.

Now we must adjust to a new truth: No place is safe from the wrath of a hurricane. We used to have to worry about excavators lopping off mountaintops to fill coal cars. Now we have to worry about Mother Nature doing it herself and turning the summits of the Blue Ridge Mountains into a careening mass of rock and mud that drowns the valleys below.

We need to do more to address the long-term effects of climate change. And in the meantime, we need to strengthen our defenses, because this will happen again. Preventive measures are for the civil engineers and government officials to decide. But the people of southern Appalachia must adjust their building codes and their spirits to prepare for the next one, because there will be a next one.

Welcome to the club, southern Appalachia. We’re sorry to see you join. We wish we could blackball you, but Mother Nature has the final say over all membership disputes, and we can’t override her veto.

Hale Kilborn, Charleston, S.C.

Stop the conspiracies theories

It’s pretty normal to want to blame someone when things are tough, and that someone often ends up being the government. It’s also normal that most people are fairly clueless about how bureaucracy works. But the misinformation and conspiracy theory rants I’ve seen in the wake of recent hurricanes, from stories of body parts floating across rivers to the idea that the storm was “engineered,” are just despicable.

Maybe it’s because I’m a systems guy. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the D.C. area and worked with many government departments. But in my view, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is doing a pretty damn respectable job.

This is not a little disaster; it’s the biggest. And hurricane relief efforts don’t typically involve some of the roughest terrain on the East Coast. Add to that Asheville being a key access point to much of western North Carolina and Tennessee. Three of four interstates, which serve as the only ways into Asheville, were not passable in the days afterward. Because the interstate that connects Asheville to the eastern part of the state, through which disaster relief would normally flow, was closed, aid workers had to go south into South Carolina and then north via the only open road into and out of the region.

State aid came first, but as The Post reported: “FEMA has deployed more than 1,500 personnel to respond to Helene. As of Friday, the agency had shipped more than 11.5 million meals, more than 12.6 million liters of water, more than 400,000 tarps and 150 generators to the affected region.” And thousands of National Guard members and active-duty troops are on the ground.

I’m proud to have such an agency supporting our people, even if we can quibble about the timing. And rather than falling for partisan angles or social media rumors that get a little darker and stranger every time they’re retold, this is a moment when we should feel good about being Americans because of what we’re able to do for each other. Maybe, if we step back from the blame game, we can all come out of this caring more for others.

Tim Brady, Weaverville, N.C.

Feed the hungry

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, we need to support food banks that are on the front lines of relief. While families displaced by flooding urgently need food and water, food banks need the supplies to keep up with the sudden increase in demand. The food banks of these communities suffered extreme losses, too. The Manna FoodBank in western North Carolina was devastated by the flooding and has been working out of temporary facilities as it tries to replenish lost supplies.

The needs of the impoverished families the food banks were serving before the storm will increase, and new families will need help. Food assistance in the form of government benefits will be needed for a while to come, as recovery could take months or even years.

It is also vital that Congress supports food programs to help victims of Hurricane Helene and other storms, including Hurricane Milton. The Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as D-SNAP, allows families in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to replace food lost to storms and other catastrophes. D-SNAP also gives benefits to families who suddenly find themselves in poverty and needing food assistance because of the storm.

Dealing with the damage of Hurricane Helene is hard enough. We can’t let hunger become a growing crisis in the aftermath.

William Lambers, Cincinnati

The writer is the author of “Ending World Hunger.”