28-03-2025
Helene 6 months later: Rebuilding neighborhoods in Buncombe County, NC
ASHEVILLE, N.C. (WNCN) — From non-profits to hired contractors—the stories of survival in western North Carolina are a large part of what motivates them to continue to help people rebuild their lives six months after Hurricane Helene.
That includes Jacob Churchman with Fuller Center Disaster Rebuilders. Churchman and his team are working to restore flood damaged homes in Beacon Village. The Buncombe County neighborhood is a community of mill houses built decades ago.
CBS 17's Russ Bowen spoke to Churchman about the project.
Bowen: 'So when you first got here, and it was time to get to work—or you were assessing what the work was going to be like—what did you think immediately?'
Churchman: 'This neighborhood, it's safe to say, water was basically up to the gutters on most of the houses. So, the first thing was like, okay, we need to address how old these houses are and then figure out how much mold and how much damage was done and then do the clean out. And that was a big thing. And just until recently, there's not piles of garbage, you can still see some, but there was some on almost every single house, just big piles. And so, we've gotten all those moved. The initial stuff was just basically trying to plan for gutting it and everything. And now we're getting to a point where most houses are gutted and it's now trying to figure out either who's going to rebuild them or how they want to be rebuilt, or if the homeowners are going to stay or what their situation is.'
Bowen: 'As you're busy assessing all of this, over time, you start to meet some of those homeowners, and you start to hear stories. Tell me about one that may particularly stand out to you.'
Churchman: 'We have a gentleman who lives on one of the houses down here. Most of the homeowners here that got water up to their gutters, had to obviously figure out a way to get out, and most didn't know or see the water getting up as high as they did until it was too late. So, they climb up to their attics. And so him, for example, I'm pretty sure that he climbed up into his attic and was hoping the water was going to go down and then ended up actually climbing back through his attic and swam up under through his house and popped out of a kitchen window. He lost his phone, which he actually ironically found about two weeks ago in the dirt, because they literally swam out of their kitchen and then got up on of their rooftop and to my knowledge, literally chopped their way through the roof to pull their pets out after the fact. So, and it's a pretty similar situation for a lot of the houses here. You can see patches up on a number of different places and roofs that have been redone because people either cut their way out or they cut back in to save whatever they could. Um, so that's just one example of a lot of people's stories. So it really speaks to the resiliency of the people that live in Appalachia, to the people that live in these neighborhoods where they are built below flood plain, that whenever you have times like this that you would have never thought would happen, that the best option that you do is the one that you think you can do the easiest to literally survive.'
Bowen: 'When you hear these emotional stories, does it give you more drive? Does it give your team more drive, your volunteer driven in many ways of what you're doing out here? Yeah. Does that make you feel more determined to bring them back to what they knew before or better?'
Churchman: 'One-thousand percent. I mean, that's what motivates a lot of us with Fuller Center. We are an organization, a national nonprofit that goes and sets up hubs to rebuild in places that get hit hard. So, we have one over in east Carolina after one of the hurricanes. We've done them all over the southeast. And that's one of our big things, is we like to get to know the homeowner. We like to rebuild their houses and ask them, do you want to closet your bedroom now? Do you want your kitchen to be this way? What kind of countertops do you like? We really like to bring that human aspect to it and not just be okay, let's rebuild it to the same way and make it look okay and make it livable to move on to the next.'
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