In this episode, we look at what a year of recovery has looked like for people in Southwest Virginia, and how communities are looking to ensure they are better prepared during future natural disasters. We’ll hear from an expert in disaster response explain why emergency planning during disasters can be challenging, particularly when storms are unique to a location. And we’ll explore the challenges of long-term recovery, and ensuring communities are better prepared in the future.
Nearly a year after the storm, some survivors are still struggling, said Doctor William Mark Handy, who’s been checking regularly on residents in Damascus and Taylor’s Valley.
“It is harder for some to move on than others, emotionally and physically,” Handy said. “Because they don’t have the money. There’s people that can’t go back to where they lived at before because it was washed away completely. And just damaged so bad you can’t build a house back there or put a camper there at all.”
Handy has a practice in Abingdon, about 15 miles from Damascus. After Helene, he started going door to door, checking on survivors.
“So I’d never really been in a big devastation like this before. Didn’t know what to do, and everybody started coming to me. I should know this. Well I didn’t. I wasn’t trained in disaster.”
He and a group of physicians traveled up hollers throughout Damascus and Taylor’s Valley on a van with The Health Wagon, a non-profit that brings health care to people in Southwest Virginia.
They set up in the Damascus town park, delivering oxygen and insulin, and helping folks get refills for their medicines. We hear a song Handy wrote about the experiences he saw, called “Helene.”
“The last of it goes, ‘mountain proud, mountain strong, mountain people with our hearts of gold, lift up our hearts to heal our mountain home.’ So I just wanted that to be the last lyrics to identify the song as a thing to uplift us. And give people hope,” Handy said.
In the immediate aftermath, just about everyone Handy saw was struggling. Even those who were volunteering to help their neighbors.
“We’re all living on adrenaline when it first happens, and we’re rushing to do things,” Handy said. “But then when things calm down a couple days, and you kind of look at everything that you’ve got going on there, that’s a big thing with that.”
As the months went on, and cold settled on the mountains, some of the people who had been flooded were still living in tents.
“I had one family that we took care of. I went out there and it was snowing,” Handy recalled. “And I’m like, ‘oh, can’t have this.’ I mean, she was shivering, her son was shivering. I was like, ‘I can’t stand this, cause you can’t be out here and it be like 20 degrees and it pouring snow, and you live in a tent on the side of a creek.’”
He and other volunteers donated money to get the family into a hotel until they could find more permanent shelter.
The survivors we followed for this series said they had trouble feeling settled, long after the storm. “And I still, I still want to go home,” said Deanna Wolfe, who lost her mobile home in Damascus and is getting a new house through the Trails to Recovery program.
“Everybody tells me once I get in the house, that that feeling will go away, that it will become home, but like I say. I want to go home.”
10 months after the flood, she was still living in an apartment outside town, waiting on the sewage system at her new home to be completed.
“And I mean I’ve got a great house built, it’s really nice. It’s like I can’t get closure yet,” Wolfe said.
Linda McMurray, who has been in her new home since this spring, said she too is still adjusting.
“Sometimes when you come in, it doesn’t feel like home. And nothing in it is ours. It’s difficult getting used to all new things,” McMurray said.
One thing that helped was a small family reunion McMurray and her husband hosted in their new home. They had to get used to less space for everyone, but it felt good to be surrounded by their children and grandchildren.
During the summer, a group of high school students from Northern Virginia traveled to help them paint, as part of a volunteer project through their church group. She shared with them that she and her husband had volunteered themselves with their church group all over the country, after Katrina, and other natural disasters.
She said those experiences have made her feel humble, and she knows many others have experienced worse. They’re grateful to have a home, and each other.
“Every day I think it’s easier. Especially after this week seeing the work that these kids did,” McMurray said. “And knowing that they’re making memories that will be with them the rest of their life that they helped someone, and they heard our story, and see what it means to us. For someone to come in with compassion and eagerness to help rebuild.”
The homes people like Linda and Carl McMurray have now are built to withstand high winds, and are better equipped to hold up after a flood. The bridges and roads that were washed out during Helene are also being built back stronger, said John Bechtold, a bridge engineer with the Virginia Department of Transportation.
In Damascus, the Orchard Hill bridge broke apart from its foundations and washed downstream. This is the bridge where the water gauge recorded the water rose 12 feet in 45 minutes.
“The foundations were undermined,” Bechtold described. “These original foundations for this bridge were built probably back in the 20s, about a hundred years ago. You know they went down as deep as they thought the stormwater would ever go, at that point."
"And we had a bigger storm than probably they ever expected, and so that caused unfortunately the bridge to get washed downstream. But the plan is to go back with a deeper foundation. They’ll have some piles that go all the way down to the bedrock, build something back that we shouldn’t have that kind of problem in the future.”
Outside Damascus, another VDOT employee, Christopher Byington, drives along a stretch of Route 58 that was massively destroyed during Helene.
“All of this was just gone,” Byington said. “If you just imagine this was a large hole that went all the way down to the bedrock right here.”
This road runs between tall mountains on one side, and a creek on the other. They considered trying to reroute the road in some places, to build it on higher ground, away from the creek, but Byingdon said that would have been nearly impossible, because of the geography of the land that’s available here.
In one part of the Route 58 rebuild, they used boulders the size of cars, weighing a ton a piece. They used a crane to build a wall with these giant rocks. Byington says this technique isn’t new, but it is effective, and it will do a better job in future floods at keeping the road in place.
“It builds a very solid platform to build the road on,” Byington said. “And a stone of that size, you know it’s gonna take some major force to move it. So we are very confident that we’ve built back better than what we had before.”
Virginia’s Department of Transportation has been working for several years to develop a resilience improvement plan to identify the areas of the state where increased flooding could lead to road and bridge failures.
They’ve created a visualization tool to help engineers foresee the impacts of future flooding and landslides, said Chris Swanson, VDOT’s environmental provision director. The plan looks at what impacts climate change could have on the state’s roadways if more catastrophic storms happen in the future.
“The intensity may change, the duration may change, and the frequency may change,” Swanson said. “So all of that can lead up to, ‘do we need to be designing our projects a little differently to account for those changes?’”
Their modeling uses predictions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and FEMA’s flood plain maps. Because of unprecedented flooding from Helene, some of this data will probably need to be updated, though that process can sometimes take years.
“As a result of Helene we are trying to evaluate how to bring that in more readily and more responsibly to make sure that that data can be used again for informed decision making,” Swanson said.
With Helene, the weather predictions were fairly accurate. But it still caught many people by surprise. In Damascus, for example, the courthouse remained open the morning of the storm. Police chief Kermit Turner even had to go to court to testify in a case, despite the weather predictions.
Within hours, he was wading in water up to his chest, rescuing residents.
“We actually swam across power lines, phone lines and trees,” Turner said.
Meanwhile, Turner’s own son, also a first responder, was helping evacuate residents, when their fire truck was sucked into a sinkhole. His son and everyone escaped, but everything that happened during Helene taught Turner just how quickly flooding can turn into a crisis.
He says next time, he’s going to pay more attention to flood warnings. “I would definitely, I wouldn’t say hit the panic button, but I’m a little more prepared, I will be a little more cautious,” Turner said. “Because I’d seen high water multiple times in Damascus, and it had never been that high.”
Dawn Thomas works at CNA, a nonprofit research organization, where one of the issues she studies is how emergency responders make decisions during and after natural disasters. She said in addition to stronger infrastructure, like roads and bridges, communities need to have plans for how to interpret the impacts of flooding.
“And then, helping to make decisions based on that. That’s where really the breakdown is,” Thomas said.
She said after disasters, communities often come together with a lot of momentum to rebuild, but over time, that energy can get worn down.
“Long term recovery is incredibly complex,” Thomas explained. “Not everyone agrees on the way to recover. Not everybody agrees that you build back stronger, if that’s going to take longer, versus getting things back up and running faster. It’s always going to take a lot of time and effort. And yes, during that time, appetite for the burden definitely wanes.”
Damascus town manager Chris Bell said they have plans to work on several flood mitigation projects, to protect residents from future flooding, and they want to prepare a plan for what to do if there’s another flood, or a wildfire. After floods, there’s an added fire risk, because there is more debris in the forest. They’re hoping to start these long-term projects as soon as possible, before the memory of Helene fades.
“You always think, it won’t happen to us, it won’t happen to us. Until it does,” Bell said. “And so in 25 years that probably won’t be the case. The folks living here may not remember, or they’ll be new. And so, now is the time to take advantage of those funds that are available. And you know, kind of strike while the iron’s hot, to go ahead and start rolling out plans and programming to prepare us and be more resilient.”
But getting there is proving challenging. Damascus still hasn’t received some of their reimbursement money from FEMA.
“We’re still working through some emergency debris removal. In order to get reimbursed for all the work that was done,” Bell said.
For a small town, Bell said it’s really challenging to figure out how to pay for all this. “Residential wise we have less than 800 people. It’s a small small town.”
The secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, says she is personally reviewing any request for FEMA assistance and reimbursements over $100 thousand dollars. Some employees within her agency signed a letter in August, saying this is causing delays that make the agency unable to respond to natural disasters quickly. They also raised concerns with FEMA’s cuts to some programs that help communities do mitigation work to be more resilient against future natural disasters.
Noem has challenged these allegations, and says FEMA is more prepared than ever to keep people safe.
It’s tough to know exactly what the months and years ahead will look like for FEMA, but we do know some numbers of the funding they’ve provided so far.
The agency has provided hundreds of millions of dollars to North Carolina for recovery after Helene.
In Virginia, FEMA has awarded $18 million to residents, and $36 million to communities for nearly 200 projects, and that number is expected to go up, depending on how many grants the agency approves.
More millions will be spent to rebuild the Virginia Creeper Trail, though that money is coming from the U.S. Forest Service, not FEMA.
“Parts of the Creeper trail are gone,” said Linda McMurray who lives next to the Creeper Trail in Taylor’s Valley.
“I mean, they’re just wiped out. So when you think about that it’s amazing to imagine how they’re going to rebuild the Creeper Trail in those areas where the side of the mountain they were on is just gone.”Residents like Mary Gale, who have spent the past year rebuilding houses, are now hoping they can get Damascus through the next big challenge: keeping businesses open.
“I think we need to think outside the box. Because I think it’s gonna be awhile before this Creeper Trail is passable for all people,” Gale said. “So we’ve gotta start thinking elsewhere in keeping Damascus alive.”
A facebook group, called Fans of the Virginia Creeper Trail, have compiled a list of local lodging options in the area, in the hopes that construction workers rebuilding the Creeper Trail will spend their money locally.
In Wythe County, Elizabeth King recently moved back into her once flooded home, where she said her memories of her husband and their family are.
She received some money to rebuild from her insurance company, and with FEMA. The family has spent much of the past year gutting their mom’s house and rebuilding it. They did a lot of the work themselves.
And finally, a year after Helene, Deanna Wolfe in Damascus was also able to move into her new home. “I’ve lived all across the country and I’ve never been in a place that felt like this,” Wolfe said. “Damascus is just an exceptional place with exceptional people.”
Wolfe said she's starting to feel more settled, as she organizes her furniture. Her new house is in a different location than where she was before Helene. She’s on higher ground, not in a flood plain like she was before. She’s hopeful that if her community does experience another storm like Helene, she will have a better chance of staying safe.
Music in this episode was provided by Trevor McKenzie, Justin Faircloth, and Buddy Holler Studios in Lansing, NC. Other music was by Mark Handy, Ethan Grillo, Monplaisir, and Lobo Loco.
