Hurricane Helene Recovery Effort a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Less than a month after Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina in late September,  students got the chance to ask questions of the leader of a nonprofit working directly with the affected residents.

N.C. Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler invited Richard Brunson, executive director of Baptists on Mission, to speak Nov. 18 as part of Troxler’s fall seminar series at the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences.

More than 200 storm-related deaths have been reported from Helene, 103 of them in North Carolina, and the hurricane caused an estimated $48. 8 billion worth of damage in the state.

“If you had taken a bomber and made bombing runs on Spruce Pine, Burnsville, Bakersfield, Pensacola, you couldn’t have done any more damage,” Troxler said, naming towns in Mitchell and Yancey counties.

Troxler said his son, a Methodist minister in Spruce Pine, called him on Sunday, Sept. 29, about the conditions there. “They were begging for help,” he said. “They were cut off. They had very limited cell service, running out of food, running out of water.

“By the time that I could get up there Monday morning, Baptists on Mission had made its way into Spruce Pine and they were providing food for the people up there,” Troxler said.

But Brunson said the nonprofit’s quick response was only the beginning of a long period of reconstruction for the region.

“This effort in western North Carolina is a marathon, it’s not a sprint,” he said. “So quickly people forget … especially when we’re in an area where we’re not affected by it.”

N.C. A&T alumna Tracey Ford ‘91, a disaster response assistant with Baptists on Mission, encouraged students to volunteer to help with recovery efforts.

“We work seven days a week during a disaster, so if all you have is the weekend, if you can only come up one day, I will encourage you to come,” Ford said.

The group provides meals, a place to sleep and laundry services to volunteers. And special skills are not necessary to help with the work.

“We use licensed electricians and plumbers,” he said. “But then you need a lot of volunteers who might not know, like me, anything about construction. You’re needed just to care about people who were affected.”

The talk got the attention of Amarion Singletary, a freshman studying agriculture education. “This presentation does open my eyes up to other avenues to help people, especially for an area that was hit so bad in a disaster.”

Brunson also praised Troxler and the state agriculture department for its work with volunteer groups. He said the department connected Baptists on Mission with the Farmers to Families Food Box program to distribute fresh food during the pandemic. It also enlisted state drivers to transport food for the nonprofit through flooded highways after Hurricane Florence struck eastern North Carolina in 2018.

Antoine Alston, Ph.D., associate CAES dean of academics, recalled how extensive flooding from Hurricane Floyd affected his hometown of Rocky Mount in 1999.

“You had hogs floating on the water, chickens, cows, caskets,” Alston said. “So, this stuff gets real.”