[Nat sound: winds from the Hurricane blow]
When Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina back in September, it didn’t just tear apart buildings. It exposed what was already broken. Rachel Backus, who was homeless and on the streets of Asheville during the hurricane, lost more than just her belongings, she lost her identity. She said you could not get an ID if you didn’t have a birth certificate or social security and vice versa.
Backus: Who said, “Well, hold on, floods. Let’s get our lockbox, let’s get our wallet off the dresser. You didn’t have time for that.
Backus also spoke about the lack of help she witnessed in western North Carolina once the California wildfires occurred.
Backus: It was like we were dropped, like a red hat. Like we were good, they were doing everything to help us, blah, blah, blah. And then, whoops.
Andy Ashely and O’Brien Quaid, two homeless people residing in Asheville, spoke about the lack of help they saw from organizations like FEMA during the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
Ashley: I didn’t see anybody in uniform, you know? No FEMA.
Quaid: I kind of saw FEMA helping some, but not in the level that some people needed.
Nathaniel Downs, an up and coming artist in Asheville, who is also homeless, claims he was flat out denied help.
Downs: FEMA declined helping me. My camp was completely washed out. There was no saving anything that I had. So all the things that I had was eventually taken from me. But I couldn’t claim that in FEMA.
In a statement, FEMA told me it does not provide housing or home repair assistance to applicants who were experiencing homelessness prior to the disaster.
And with a lack of assistance from government organizations, Ashley said things got even worse.
Ashley: So total chaos, blackout like wild west out here. Like I said, people armed and dangerous walking around, you know, lawless pretty much. A lot of looting going on, a lot of violence.
[Nat sound: news report]
However, according to the homeless people I spoke to, it was the citizens of Asheville who stepped up. Downs spoke specifically about Street Side, a group of Asheville citizens who help deliver supplies to homeless people every Saturday morning.
Downs: Whether that be hot hands, whether that be clothing, whether it be just a couple of smokes, you know, they hand out cigarettes and they help us charge our phones and our devices whenever we need them.
Mo Swirsky is a volunteer for Street Side.
Swirsky: It’s really quite tragic that it takes something like a disaster to bring people together. But extreme circumstances do that.
Swirsky also spoke about what she saw from the people of Asheville during these tough times.
Swirsky: There was a real huge absence of unified government or systemic response to it. And so it was community taking care of community.
The four homeless people I talked to said: It wasn’t FEMA. It wasn’t the state. It was each other. They added….. when the system said no, the community said yes. I’m Matthew Broderick, reporting.
