Former North Carolina residents offer suggestions for best ways to help survivors of Helene

By Holly Dillemuth, Ashland.news 

After narrowly making it back to Southern Oregon on one of the last flights out of Asheville, North Carolina, before remnants of Hurricane Helene touched down last Thursday, Ashland resident Ashley Brown is hearing devastating news directly from friends in the area.

“They’re not saying, ‘We got flooded,’ they’re saying, ‘It’s completely gone,’” Brown told Ashland.news via phone on Monday. Her friends were talking about an Asheville arts district, which she described as being vibrant just days ago, in addition to whole neighborhoods.

“Like, it’s just gone,” she added, speaking of parts of Asheville.

Brown, 41, had just spent Monday through Thursday last week in Asheville, a city of approximately 95,200 residents, where she visited the now-wiped out River Arts District. 

She and husband Eric Janoski, 40, of Ashland, lived in Asheville and the surrounding area for the better part of two decades before “we sold our house in Brevard (North Carolina) and moved here right in the middle of the pandemic,” Brown said, noting they moved to Ashland by way of a short-term stay in Klamath Falls in 2021.

Death tolls continue to rise following the storm, with Blue Ridge Public Radio reporting on Tuesday that more than 60 people have died in Western North Carolina alone. A total of at least 166 are dead across the southeast due to Helene, the Associated Press reported late Tuesday.

“You can’t imagine it until it’s happening and then you’re like, oh, this entire town could be gone,” Janoski said.

A mental health therapist for an Asheville-based organization, Brown said her recent trip is something she likes to make every so often to see friends, but she had no idea what was in store for them when she flew home. 

“All of my colleagues, they live there in the surrounding area,” Brown said.

“I had been there visiting my coworkers,” she added. “I like to go back every once in a while to see the city.”

As she was preparing to leave Asheville, Brown learned that the worst storm her friends had experienced happened in 2004. Pictures were shared of about a foot of water in their home from the experience, according to Brown.

“It was, by all comparisons, just minor,” Brown said.

She noted it had rained Wednesday night in Asheville and was raining on Thursday.

As Brown’s flight took off on Thursday around 4:30, there was little sign of a hurricane.

“It was just rain,” Brown said.

“Not even 24 hours later, the houses were gone,” she said.

The house she stayed in with a friend while there, which was located near a creek, is also gone.

“From seeing the pictures … it’s just a river right now,” Brown said. “There’s nothing left.

“There was no concept for how to prepare for it. It’s like preparing for a few sprinkles and then having a hurricane hit you.”

Brown said her friends are OK and have gone to live with family.

“They’re safe for now,” she added.

Brown expressed gratitude for “good timing” in making it out of Asheville safely before the storm hit.

“I had no clue and no thought that it would be like that, that if I didn’t get out when I did, that I would be stuck somewhere without cell phone reception,” Brown said.

She added that one of her friends has been stranded by the storm on an “island” in Brevard, North Carolina, where she and Janoski lived for a time.

Janoski said the couple have friends experiencing a “mix” of scenarios right now in the aftermath of the behemoth storm.

“We had people that, like Ashley had mentioned, are in the kind of privileged and fortunate position to be able to leave town and go with family members south or further east, but we have a lot of friends that are isolated in communities that are just cut off, where … water is getting low, there’s no way out or they don’t have gas, or the roads are just completely impassible,” he said.

Brown expressed mixed feelings about wanting to be of more assistance now that she is back home on the West Coast with her husband.

Just days ago, she was visiting colleagues in Asheville, drinking coffee, exercising at a crossfit gym, and spending time in the city’s vibrant but now destroyed River Arts District.

“It … is really hard to feel helpless,” she said. “In a lot of ways, I’m so far removed that I can’t be of assistance to my friends.”

Brown and Janoski spent their 20s and 30s in Asheville, as well as Brevard in Buncombe County, North Carolina, another area hit hard by Helene over the weekend, before moving to Ashland. 

“Our community is there as well as here,” Janoski added.

Janoski, who now works as a Family Self-Sufficiency and Homeownership Coordinator at the Housing Authority of Jackson County, sees parallels between the wildfire-prone climate of the Pacific Northwest and areas like western North Carolina. Both communities have faced a natural disaster.

“We moved here in the shadow of the Almeda Fire,” Janoski said. “I worked with a lot of people who lost homes and lost everything in Phoenix or Talent and whenever we started to see the early stages of how just kind of devastating this impact was in North Carolina, we couldn’t help but draw the comparison.”

In light of the red flag warning that ran Monday evening through Tuesday morning, Janoski and Brown reviewed their fire safety plan for themselves, right here in Ashland.

“If it can encourage people to have their own disaster preparedness plan, the comparisons are important,” he said. “Recheck your go-bag and evacuation routes and those kinds of things,” Brown said.

Janoski also brought up the point that the hurricane, which morphed into a behemoth tropical storm, is charting new territory for mountainous areas in the southeast like Asheville.

“A hurricane 400 miles from the (East) coast devastated a mountain community … anything can happen,” Janoski said.

He noted that, while he and Brown lived in Asheville and the surrounding areas, it was a common thing for people facing hurricanes in Florida and the southeast to escape to the mountains of the western Carolinas.

There are thousands of rural communities throughout that area, Janoski said, often with only one way in and out of town. 

“The mountains were a retreat for hurricane-hit coastlines,” he said. “It’s just this kind of unbelievable set of circumstances … so much more intense than I think anyone could’ve predicted.”

Janoski said he took Monday off to focus his efforts on identifying the best verified organizations so that those able to do so can give towards the effort. He posted his findings in Ashland, Oregon Community, a Facebook group specific to Ashland, drawing interest and support.

He suggests those interested in keeping updated on the news out of that region to go online to Blue Ridge Public Radio’s website at bpr.org.

“They keep a really great list of resources, organizations that donate,” he said. 

The biggest priority that Janoski is seeing in the Asheville and surrounding area right now is water.

“Water is a major, major issue for the vast majority of people, especially in Buncombe County, where there is just no access to clean or running water,” Janoski said. “There (are), slowly, water trucks being delivered, but it’s on a very limited basis.”

“I think the primary thing that people can do from this distance is donate money and it’s pretty tricky sometimes because, unfortunately, there can be scams that develop,” Brown said. “Eric’s done a lot of work to find the reputable places, essentially the quickest, best way to donate money to reputable sources.”

Brown, who works with individuals who have or are experiencing trauma, said she is also providing free counseling sessions for those impacted by Helene.

“There’s so many people that are kind of frozen and unable to act, even to start to act, to get their family out of danger,” Brown said. 

“As immediate danger is taken care of, there’s really long-lasting mental health crisis and people (who) live in trauma will have trauma for a long, long time,” she added.

Janoski noted that, in addition to hearing stories of trauma and loss, either of lives or property, the couple is also hearing stories of hope from their former home.

“We’re hearing wonderful, amazing stories like you always hear in tragedies like this,” Janoski said. “Communities and neighbors coming together and taking care of each other. 

“In moments of this kind of profound darkness,” he added, “there is amazing community resilience that is happening at the ground level.”

For those in the Asheville, North Carolina, area in need of mental health services, Brown is offering free counseling online at ashleybrowncounseling.com. She is an LCSW and CADC III and offers coaching services and counseling services locally and out of state. 

Email Ashland.news reporter Holly Dillemuth at hollyd@ashland.news.