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Episode: One Thing: What The Holidays Look Like After Hurricane Helene

Author: CNN
Duration: 00:19:54

Episode Shownotes

Nearly three months after the remnants of Hurricane Helene washed out large parts of western North Carolina, the community surrounding Asheville is still cleaning up and taking stock of what comes next. We check back in with one displaced resident who is still coming to terms with the damage to

her neighborhood. Guest: Olivia Cooner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
My boyfriend and I's house sits 30 feet above the top of the of the river, typically. So we're like, all right, we're safe. Like we're we're we're way above this flood. And then within one hour, it had risen another 10 feet.

00:00:18 Speaker_00
You might remember I spoke with Olivia Cooner back in October. The Burnsville, North Carolina resident told me what it was like as America's deadliest natural disaster of 2024, Hurricane Helene, arrived on her doorstep.

00:00:36 Speaker_01
And we started to see things go by like hay bales and pumpkins and some trash. And then it started to get kind of dark and we started to see propane tanks. We started to see shipping containers. We started to see houses start floating by.

00:00:56 Speaker_00
Whole houses just floating down the river.

00:00:58 Speaker_01
We saw four whole houses floating down the river and then just said, yeah.

00:01:05 Speaker_00
Remember, Helene was a monster that rapidly intensified into a category four hurricane in just two days, dumping an historic amount of rain along the way. In all, it killed at least 232 people across six states.

00:01:20 Speaker_00
The landscape was literally reshaped in some places. This storm was supercharged by incredibly warm water in the Gulf of Mexico. That's a phenomenon some experts attribute to human-caused climate change.

00:01:37 Speaker_00
But remember, Olivia was in Burnsville, North Carolina, just outside of hard-hit Asheville. The Gulf of Mexico is more than 500 miles away from there. And yet, she felt the most extreme impacts.

00:01:50 Speaker_00
And so, for Olivia and her boyfriend Eli, this holiday season looks very different. Because nearly three months later, they are still not back in their home.

00:02:04 Speaker_00
Today, I check back in with Olivia to get an update and ask her whether she considers herself a climate refugee. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Ryan.

00:02:23 Speaker_00
Last time we spoke was about a week and a half after the storm hit, and you were staying with family in eastern North Carolina. Where are you right now?

00:02:32 Speaker_01
Right now, we are actually relocating to Portland. Since we last spoke, my boyfriend lost his job, and seeing as we couldn't access our house until about two weeks ago, and for perspective, that's almost three months after the flood.

00:02:49 Speaker_01
and by then we had already decided to relocate because there aren't very many service industry jobs in Asheville right now. Our neighborhood is still pretty uninhabitable.

00:02:58 Speaker_01
Our driveway was rebuilt, which is great, but currently there's a huge mold problem in our house, and our house still today does not have power. There's still a ton of repairs that need to be made, and we made the decision to relocate to Portland.

00:03:17 Speaker_01
I lived there for nine years. And we had jobs lined up and people that would take us in. So it just seemed like the easiest and the right move. So we've been on the road, kind of doing a little cross-country road trip for the last two weeks.

00:03:34 Speaker_00
Right. And you're actually on the road right now heading up to Portland, Oregon. But you said you hadn't been able to get back to your house in North Carolina until about two weeks ago.

00:03:43 Speaker_00
So can you describe just how it felt to see it for the first time after all this happened?

00:03:52 Speaker_01
I mean, it was my boyfriend went the first day that we were back and he said it was hard to, you know, he was fighting back tears. It's really hard to take in because it looks...

00:04:07 Speaker_01
so different and you know you drive through Asheville and it's it's still devastating there's really has not been much work done with cleanup.

00:04:16 Speaker_01
You'd think three months down the road there would be a lot more progress than there is and you know I've taken a lot of content like I was just recording videos when I was down there and it just it looks like it just happened yesterday.

00:04:30 Speaker_01
The damage is hard to put into words. Out where we live, my boyfriend literally missed the turn to go to our street because it's that unrecognizable. It is just, it's a totally different, it's a different place.

00:04:48 Speaker_01
The highway is still not officially rebuilt. It is just a dirt road all the way to our house. And the bridges are temporary bridges. road that we live off of in the neighborhood is completely unrecognizable. It looks like a nuclear bomb went off.

00:05:08 Speaker_01
The landscape has completely changed. All of our neighbors have been washed away. Every house along the Cane River is completely gone. It is devastating.

00:05:26 Speaker_00
Last time we spoke, we talked about FEMA and there was a lot of misinformation going on around the agency and just how much they were helping folks. Did you ever get any assistance from them?

00:05:37 Speaker_01
Yeah, so a lot of my friends who lost jobs or had severe life changes from the storm did not get FEMA payouts.

00:05:48 Speaker_01
Like, for instance, one of my closest friends, a tree fell on her house and her car, and she lost her job for three months and did not get any assistance from FEMA and tried over and over again. But we were able to get some FEMA assistance.

00:06:04 Speaker_01
It wasn't, given that we have not had jobs or couldn't access our house for almost three months, it was about $4,000 in total. And we still have a bunch of damages to assess on our house, too.

00:06:18 Speaker_01
So, you know, the money that FEMA gave us was basically like two months of mortgage, not really, you know, including all the things that we had to buy and all of our other bills. And, you know, it's not nothing, which we're grateful for. But we have.

00:06:36 Speaker_01
a lot of work to do in the house. There's about three inches of mold covering the basement.

00:06:44 Speaker_01
Everything in the basement is just is completely toast and it's starting to get on the main floor and we were able to do a little bit of as much mold control as we could ourselves but we're gonna have to hire a professional service to you know clean out the mold and also there's a we still don't have power and we have to hire an electrician to come out and figure out

00:07:06 Speaker_01
what's going on with that because we have to repair the line that fell on the house. It's completely broken and it's on us to fix. It's not on the power company. And we did get the driveway repaired, so it's not a 15-foot cliff anymore, which is great.

00:07:20 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's positive.

00:07:21 Speaker_01
That was a problem. We had to buy a car. Because we could not I mean we couldn't we couldn't access our cars it was impossible. And until about two weeks ago, so we, we bought a car and we left our two vehicles there.

00:07:34 Speaker_01
And we're just kind of, we're trying to figure out how to navigate this remotely, but right now living in Nashville really isn't an option for us.

00:07:43 Speaker_01
And there are a lot of people that don't have the luxury, you know, like the privilege to leave and the opportunity to leave and live somewhere else. And they are the ones that need jobs there right now, because there aren't very many.

00:07:55 Speaker_01
And it just doesn't really feel right to stay there and take those jobs when we have another opportunity to live in a different city.

00:08:04 Speaker_00
So still work to do but you had said you had planned to go back to Burnsville eventually that you were committed to staying long-term So is that still the plan once you get done with all that work?

00:08:15 Speaker_01
That is the plan. We reckon we'll probably stay in Portland for about a year. And I think by then, there might be a little bit more progress in the city. There might be more jobs. We're not entirely sure.

00:08:28 Speaker_01
We're just going to take it month by month, honestly. My boyfriend does own that house. So we are committed to either going back or figuring out how to make that work in some way or another. It is a commitment that we have to, pay attention to.

00:08:45 Speaker_01
And it is still, you know, even after the flood, it is still a really beautiful property. It's completely different. And, you know, our perspective on the beauty is going to have to shift a little bit.

00:08:57 Speaker_01
Like there's a lot of mourning of what that property used to look like and what the landscape used to be. It used to be so beautiful. We had tons of trees. And now it's just kind of like bedrock.

00:09:07 Speaker_00
It's just physically been reshaped.

00:09:09 Speaker_01
Yeah, the river path has changed a little bit and there's no green anymore. Like I said, it's just bedrock.

00:09:27 Speaker_02
Hey, it's Afoma DK. It's Madeline Thompson. Hi there, it's Charlie Drever. It's Emily Williams. As the year winds down, we want to thank you for listening to 5 Things. Now, get this.

00:09:38 Speaker_02
In 2024, CNN produced over 248,000 minutes and 4,000 hours of podcast content. And you listened to about 175 hours of 5 Things alone.

00:09:51 Speaker_01
We're so grateful that you made us part of your required listening each week.

00:09:55 Speaker_02
We wish you a happy holidays, and here's to a great 2025.

00:10:03 Speaker_00
What are you hearing from, you know, friends of yours that are still in the area? Like, are they thinking about leaving or are they committed to, like, making this work and putting in the effort to build back?

00:10:16 Speaker_01
It's about half and half, and I think People who are choosing to stay have been there a really long time and don't really know how to leave.

00:10:27 Speaker_01
And a lot of people don't want to because they I mean Asheville is still such a special place and Appalachia is it's a beautiful special place and I will always love it and I'll always want to want to live there and make it work but um.

00:10:41 Speaker_01
Most of my friends that are transplants or have moved there like within the last five years are leaving and some of them have already left and I didn't get to say goodbye to a lot of my friends and that's pretty devastating.

00:10:53 Speaker_00
Yeah. Do you consider yourself a climate refugee?

00:10:57 Speaker_00
Like we hear about this phenomenon when it comes to other countries, not so much in the U.S., but this storm, you know, really took a lot of people in the area by surprise, you know, and you're having to spend all this time away from where you lived.

00:11:09 Speaker_00
So what do you think about that?

00:11:11 Speaker_01
Um, I mean, that's what that's what our friends and family are calling us. It's, it's a really surreal term. You know, we are okay. We're fine.

00:11:22 Speaker_01
We're privileged people like we have friends and family all over the country that have taken us in and looked out for us.

00:11:29 Speaker_01
And you know, we had family on the east coast, North Carolina, we stayed with my parents in Florida for three weeks, and then his family in New Orleans, and then my family in Denver, and

00:11:40 Speaker_01
We've had all these people around the country taking us in, and we were able to buy a car. We have jobs lined up in a different city. We're OK. And I feel like when I hear the term climate refugee, I think of somebody a little bit I don't know.

00:12:01 Speaker_01
Not as privileged as us, because we do have somewhere to go.

00:12:03 Speaker_00
Right. But you're still displaced and having to find places to go.

00:12:07 Speaker_01
Yeah. And I think there's just like, there's a lot of survivor's guilt, too, that comes with that. I mean, you know, our situation is, it's shitty. It really is. But we're okay. And I think, you know, there's a lot of people in

00:12:25 Speaker_01
Asheville and the area still that aren't okay and they're still just living on their property in tents and it's winter and it's just the whole situation is very bleak still.

00:12:39 Speaker_01
A lot of the, you know, most of the countries moved on in our general experience with driving across the country over the last two weeks.

00:12:45 Speaker_01
And people ask, you know, like servers or bartenders or just like, you know, people will ask, where are you from? And we're like, a loaded question. We're from North Carolina.

00:12:57 Speaker_01
Or like, you know, if we don't really feel like talking about it, we just say North Carolina and they're like, oh, you're just visiting? Like, and then we're like, we're going to talk about it, aren't we? And we kind of bring it up.

00:13:08 Speaker_01
And people either have heard about it briefly, and they didn't understand, you know, the scale of how bad this disaster was, and that it's like miles and miles and miles of destruction, like complete and utter destruction.

00:13:22 Speaker_01
They don't know, or they've heard about it. and didn't really pay attention to the details or they had never heard about it at all. And that kind of blows my mind because in our area, it consumes all of our lives.

00:13:40 Speaker_01
That's still in the forefront of our minds every single day. But people across the country generally just have no clue about what happened or what the state of Asheville is. And it's very strange.

00:13:57 Speaker_00
Well, so you're an artist. That's what you do for a living. How have you been able to keep up that work without a home base?

00:14:04 Speaker_01
It's been really challenging, but I mean, I'm grateful to have work. I did get a lot of print orders and people interested in buying my work, which I'm super grateful for.

00:14:15 Speaker_01
It gave us a little bit of extra money to have a little bit more fun on our road trip. But working was pretty challenging. I've got like a little label printer in my laptop. And my boyfriend is just like packing prints and tubes.

00:14:28 Speaker_01
And we're doing it from a hotel room or when we were staying at my brother's house, we were doing it on his kitchen counter. And it's been silly and stressful and just interesting to navigate.

00:14:40 Speaker_01
And every time I was like, oh, gosh, I have to ship stuff out from Moab. Let's figure it out.

00:14:48 Speaker_00
Well, so finally, what are the holidays look like for you guys? Like, how does it make you feel having to spend this time away from North Carolina when people are, you know, still really suffering and struggling?

00:14:59 Speaker_00
Like you said, like, what does this season look like?

00:15:03 Speaker_01
For us, we're not really able to go back to the East Coast. The flights are too expensive, and we're also just kind of exhausted. We're kind of ready to experience some normalcy.

00:15:17 Speaker_01
We're just going to have a nice dinner on Christmas Eve and relax and just be grateful for where we're at. And it's just going to be Eli and I. really going to have any family to spend time with and I don't know.

00:15:34 Speaker_01
It's going to be a weird holiday season. It doesn't really, we've been driving everywhere and like seeing Christmas decorations and neither of us are really feeling like very Christmassy this year.

00:15:45 Speaker_00
Yeah, I mean it's understandable, but wishing you nothing but the best as you continue on here and we'll talk to you next time. Really appreciate it, Olivia.

00:15:54 Speaker_01
Thanks, David. I appreciate it.

00:16:00 Speaker_00
Just a heads up, we will not have a new episode this coming Wednesday. We're taking a little time off for the holidays. Hopefully you can do the same, spend some time with family. Happy holidays from all of us here at One Thing.

00:16:12 Speaker_00
We'll be back on Sunday with another episode. I'll talk to you then. One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paolo Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Fez Jamil.

00:16:33 Speaker_00
Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan DiZula is our technical director, and Steve Lichtai is the executive producer of CNN Audio.

00:16:42 Speaker_00
We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manassari, Robert Mathers, John D'Onora, Lainey Steinhardt, Jamie Sandrice, Nicole Passereau, and Lisa Namrao. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage and Katie Hinman. I'll talk to you next time.