Helene at Our Doorstep: Aftermath, College Life, Crisis, and Community in Asheville
Dublin Core
Title
Helene at Our Doorstep: Aftermath, College Life, Crisis, and Community in Asheville
Description
In this image collage, you see the first digital documentation I captured and shared with others as we sought out news and updates. These images reflect not just the physical aftermath, but also the moment of realization when the full weight of everything we had experienced began to sink in
Autobiography
When Hurricane Helene hit Asheville, I don’t think any of us expected how serious things would get. I remember hearing about a hurricane coming on the news and thinking, “Okay, sure… rain in the mountains. We’ll probably get flooded, maybe lose power for a couple hours.” But then the storm came, and everything changed.
For at least four days, a lot of us were basically cut off. No electricity, no water, no way to charge our phones or check on friends and family. The school tried to reach out, but without the internet , a lot of their messages didn’t even make it through. As a University we can't function, people couldn’t get food, and some dorms didn’t even have running water. It felt like time just… froze. As a community this exposes how much we truly rely on our phones and it turns our world quiet.
But what stuck with me the most wasn’t just the chaos, it was the way people showed up for each other. Neighbors checking in, hotel staff sharing supplies, students organizing little group meals with what we had. In the middle of all that uncertainty, there was this quiet sense of, we’ve got each other.
On campus, it was wild yet so calm, No one really knew what to do. people wandering around looking for any signal on their phones. I walked around after the worst of it and saw streets totally flooded. Places we loved, little coffee shops, bookstores, restaurants just gone. Livelihoods ruined overnight. And leading up to the storm in the middle of all that, we were still trying to get through our week moving like things were normal.
I work in a hotel, so I also got to hear stories from all over town when I received service. Some folks were hit way harder than others, depending on where they lived. That range of experience made it clear to me that this wasn’t just about property damage it was emotional, deeply personal. The storm affected every part of life.
Speaking through interviews are that
To understand this better, I looked into how other communities have dealt with similar situations. In the Philippines, for example, people affected by Super Typhoon Megi had a completely different approach. One study talked about how some indigenous groups, like the Agta, live right by rivers and the coast, so they’ve built whole ways of life that are used to flooding. Water is something they work with, not against but overnight it became our communities enemy.
But even they said that modern relief efforts didn’t always help because they didn’t take local knowledge into account (Buenafe-Ze & Telan, 2018). That made me think about how important it is to actually listen to the people who are affected, and not just show up with outside solutions.
It’s important to consider how long emotional and physical recovery takes. It’s in our American nature to grieve in private and fight hard in public. This gives a facade that we as humans are stronger than the battles we face. Although this is a solution to big issues like this it allows for constant neglect and suppression of real feeling and emotional ties to land that we don’t show until it's gone and trying to rush the healing process is detrimental to one's mental help. Mental health researcher Linda K. George (2014) talks about how we don’t really factor time into how we think about trauma. But for a lot of people, what happens after the storm is just as big as the storm itself. That quiet waiting, the feeling of not knowing what comes next builds anxiety and chemistry.
When looking at other culture
A piece from HuffPost about Katrina survivors that stuck with me. It said disasters can actually be “engines of growth” that sometimes, people come out of them with more strength or clarity than before (Gregoire, 2015). That doesn’t mean it wasn’t awful. A lot of people developed PTSD. But it also showed how resilient people can be when everything falls apart. I definitely felt that after Helene. People pulled together in ways I hadn’t seen before.
On the medical side, hurricanes can really mess with your body over time. People experience high levels of stress, sleep problems, panic, and even long-term PTSD. And the scary part? A lot of folks don’t realize it until so much later (Barbash, 2017). That’s why it’s so important to talk about mental health as part of disaster recovery, not just the cleanup or the rebuilding.
If I’m able to include stories from people I work with in the hotel, even better. They’ve seen different sides of the storm how it hit their homes, their jobs, their neighborhoods. And if that’s not possible, I’ll bring in voices from campus. I already have friends who want to share what they went through.
Why It Matters
We don’t talk enough about what storms like Helene leave behind the emotional wreckage, the quiet stress, the changes in how we live and interact. By putting all these pieces together, I hope this project will show how trauma and resilience can exist at the same time, and how storytelling itself can be part of healing. It’s so important to address our emotions and feelings and understand the disaster for what it is
Autobiography
When Hurricane Helene hit Asheville, I don’t think any of us expected how serious things would get. I remember hearing about a hurricane coming on the news and thinking, “Okay, sure… rain in the mountains. We’ll probably get flooded, maybe lose power for a couple hours.” But then the storm came, and everything changed.
For at least four days, a lot of us were basically cut off. No electricity, no water, no way to charge our phones or check on friends and family. The school tried to reach out, but without the internet , a lot of their messages didn’t even make it through. As a University we can't function, people couldn’t get food, and some dorms didn’t even have running water. It felt like time just… froze. As a community this exposes how much we truly rely on our phones and it turns our world quiet.
But what stuck with me the most wasn’t just the chaos, it was the way people showed up for each other. Neighbors checking in, hotel staff sharing supplies, students organizing little group meals with what we had. In the middle of all that uncertainty, there was this quiet sense of, we’ve got each other.
On campus, it was wild yet so calm, No one really knew what to do. people wandering around looking for any signal on their phones. I walked around after the worst of it and saw streets totally flooded. Places we loved, little coffee shops, bookstores, restaurants just gone. Livelihoods ruined overnight. And leading up to the storm in the middle of all that, we were still trying to get through our week moving like things were normal.
I work in a hotel, so I also got to hear stories from all over town when I received service. Some folks were hit way harder than others, depending on where they lived. That range of experience made it clear to me that this wasn’t just about property damage it was emotional, deeply personal. The storm affected every part of life.
Speaking through interviews are that
To understand this better, I looked into how other communities have dealt with similar situations. In the Philippines, for example, people affected by Super Typhoon Megi had a completely different approach. One study talked about how some indigenous groups, like the Agta, live right by rivers and the coast, so they’ve built whole ways of life that are used to flooding. Water is something they work with, not against but overnight it became our communities enemy.
But even they said that modern relief efforts didn’t always help because they didn’t take local knowledge into account (Buenafe-Ze & Telan, 2018). That made me think about how important it is to actually listen to the people who are affected, and not just show up with outside solutions.
It’s important to consider how long emotional and physical recovery takes. It’s in our American nature to grieve in private and fight hard in public. This gives a facade that we as humans are stronger than the battles we face. Although this is a solution to big issues like this it allows for constant neglect and suppression of real feeling and emotional ties to land that we don’t show until it's gone and trying to rush the healing process is detrimental to one's mental help. Mental health researcher Linda K. George (2014) talks about how we don’t really factor time into how we think about trauma. But for a lot of people, what happens after the storm is just as big as the storm itself. That quiet waiting, the feeling of not knowing what comes next builds anxiety and chemistry.
When looking at other culture
A piece from HuffPost about Katrina survivors that stuck with me. It said disasters can actually be “engines of growth” that sometimes, people come out of them with more strength or clarity than before (Gregoire, 2015). That doesn’t mean it wasn’t awful. A lot of people developed PTSD. But it also showed how resilient people can be when everything falls apart. I definitely felt that after Helene. People pulled together in ways I hadn’t seen before.
On the medical side, hurricanes can really mess with your body over time. People experience high levels of stress, sleep problems, panic, and even long-term PTSD. And the scary part? A lot of folks don’t realize it until so much later (Barbash, 2017). That’s why it’s so important to talk about mental health as part of disaster recovery, not just the cleanup or the rebuilding.
If I’m able to include stories from people I work with in the hotel, even better. They’ve seen different sides of the storm how it hit their homes, their jobs, their neighborhoods. And if that’s not possible, I’ll bring in voices from campus. I already have friends who want to share what they went through.
Why It Matters
We don’t talk enough about what storms like Helene leave behind the emotional wreckage, the quiet stress, the changes in how we live and interact. By putting all these pieces together, I hope this project will show how trauma and resilience can exist at the same time, and how storytelling itself can be part of healing. It’s so important to address our emotions and feelings and understand the disaster for what it is
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Citation
Julie N, “Helene at Our Doorstep: Aftermath, College Life, Crisis, and Community in Asheville,” Come Hell or High Water Community Memory Project, accessed January 13, 2026, https://helenehistory.omeka.net/items/show/955.