Over eight months since Hurricane Helene tore through her mountain community, All Hands & Hearts (AH&H) reconnected with Marya, one of the first people we supported in the immediate aftermath of the storm. She shared her story with us, where she is today, and explained the ongoing emotional and physical toll the storm has on her and her community.
The Moment Everything Changed
When Hurricane Helene struck, Marya never imagined how completely life would change in a matter of moments, or how long that change would last.
“I was sitting in bed, the power was off, and I was filming a short video for my middle daughter,” Marya recalls. She was recording a quiet, almost mundane moment of life without electricity when she heard the sound that would signify the beginning of her ordeal: a deep, resonant crunch.
At first, she thought a tree had hit the back of her house. As she moved through the dark, still talking to her daughter on camera, she reached the back door. There, her phone captured something far more terrifying. Floodwaters rising, ten inches, then fourteen, in a matter of seconds.
Escaping the Flood
In that instant, survival instinct took over. “I can’t walk through it. I can’t drive through it. I’m an insurance adjuster, I know how this ends,” she thought, narrating her own escape plan as she decided to flee uphill, away from the flood.
In those moments, the storm’s ferocity shifted her entire sense of reality.
“Disasters are weird,” she says. “Your sense of normal just shifts.”
Life in the Aftermath
The life she knew, where turning on a light, cooking dinner, or flushing a toilet happened without a second thought, was gone. For 40 days, Marya lived without power. She used five-gallon buckets to flush toilets, cooked on a camp stove on her front porch, and carefully managed every drop of water and scrap of food.
Even today, the aftershocks of that time linger. “It’s raining today, and I’m anxious every time it rains,” she shares. “I don’t trust the mountains to stay where they are. I don’t trust the trees to stay where they are. Rain isn’t just a pretty noise. It’s a threat.”
The visible scars of Hurricane Helene still cut through the landscape of Marya’s community. Some roads are still reduced to one lane where the rest crumbled away. Neighbors live in temporary campers, unable to rebuild their homes. Trees continue to fall, landslides still block roads, and the environment itself remains unstable eight months after the storm.
“The damage isn’t just the night it happens,” Marya says. “The damage is slow-motion ongoing for months.”
A Community Still Recovering
In the aftermath, the struggle for Marya continued in another act of resilience: reaching out for assistance. “It’s one of the hardest things to do as an independent adult, to ask for help,” Marya reflects. “I’ve raised children to be hard-working adults. I’ve put my kids through college. And here I am, having to ask for food, water, basic recovery.”
It’s a lesson in humility, in survival, and in the quiet strength of those who live through the unimaginable and then face the long, slow work of recovery.
We were deeply moved when Marya shared that AH&H helped make her recovery a little easier after clearing debris and repairing damage, but even more importantly, by showing up when help felt out of reach.
“In that moment of feeling small and needing help, AH&H never made it harder to ask,” she shared with us. “It was generous, it was open, it was genuine. It made me feel like my neighbors did. These were just human beings helping human beings, neighbors helping neighbors. It never added to the burden of the disaster.”
