First-year Hema Mangat planned on returning to her hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida, for winter break to spend Christmas with her family.
But after flooding from Hurricane Helene damaged the flooring in her home late last month, Mangat said her family will not be able to spend the holiday in their house, instead relocating as they wait for their home to resume ongoing renovations initiated prior to the hurricane, which are expected to now cost additional thousands of dollars.
“Everything was just completely destroyed,” Mangat said.
The Category 4 storm made landfall Sept. 26 in northwestern Florida and continued inland through Georgia, through the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina until early Sept. 27, causing mass floods in impacted areas and killing more than 230 people as of Wednesday.
Mangat said she flew back to her hometown earlier this month to visit and surround herself with her friends and family.
Mangat said Shore Acres, the neighborhood in St. Petersburg where she is from, wasn’t in the direct path of the hurricane but still received about 4 feet of flooding. She said her family wasn’t in the house when the storm blew through, but she knew many others who were in their homes during the flood and was saddened because she was not able to be there to help.
“Basically everyone that I know back at home was in the flood zone, and they stayed in the house when it was flooding, so it must have been really scary,” Mangat said. “I feel sad and a little bit of guilt.”
Mangat said she has felt supported by GW community members, adding that her professors have given her extensions on assignments in light of the devastation in her hometown. She said she received an email from Dean of Students and Vice Provost for Student Affairs Colette Coleman late last month checking in on students whose loved ones may live in the hurricane’s impacted areas.
“I think the University took the time to look through where all their students lived, to see who was in a direct path, so it did make me feel a little bit better,” Mangat said.
In the email, officials provided students with a list of available University resources including consulting the Counseling and Psychological Services and the CARE team, asking professors for academic assistance and speaking with a financial aid representative if their financial circumstances have changed.
“Our hearts go out to the communities and families affected by this natural disaster,” Coleman said in the email. “The GW team is ready to assist if you are in need of additional support during this time.”
After leaving her internship for a congressperson in the House of Representatives at the Capitol on Sept. 27, senior Maryn Larsen opened her phone to a series of emergency notifications from her home state of North Carolina, where Hurricane Helene raged through her hometown of Hickory. Larsen, an opinions writer for The Hatchet, said she received multiple calls from family members and emails from organizations like the Federal Emergency Management Agency with updates on the storm.
That same day, a tornado hit Rocky Mount, North Carolina, the town where her grandparents and father live.
“Never in my entire life have I seen a hurricane ever really hit us before,” Larsen said.
Larsen said it was scary to receive messages from her friends in Boone, North Carolina — near the state’s border with Tennessee — who didn’t have power or access to clean water and that a fallen tree and landslide blocked access to the stairs in her friends’ apartment complex due to the flooding, trapping some residents in their homes. While the damages to her home were minor, she said it was difficult watching other places special to her like Boone, which she described as a “second home” for people from Hickory, get destroyed by the flooding.
Larsen said small rural communities in North Carolina like Chimney Rock, which is located in the state’s western region, were especially devastated by the floods and debris from the hurricane, with debris strewn through the area and floods drowning roads and sidewalks. Larsen’s county, Catawba, was one of the 25 counties whose residents are eligible for emergency FEMA disaster assistance, and the public schools were closed until the power could be restored. Last week, schools resumed a regular schedule.
The damage from Helene nationwide is estimated to cost more than $30 billion.
Larsen said she hopes people will donate to grassroots organizations, like the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina and BeLoved Asheville, to help people in the state receive urgent aid.
“The main thing that’s so hard to grapple with is how people’s entire homes and businesses — the very things they need to stay alive — are gone,” Larsen said.
Jordan Fields, a senior from West Palm Beach, Florida, said it was “shocking” to see images of areas in her home state completely underwater, and she checked in with friends and family during the storm and after the hurricane passed through. Fields said most of the day-to-day operations back home are mostly back to normal, but she does have older family members in Tallahassee, Florida, who temporarily lost power when the hurricane first made landfall.
Fields said her hometown was not in Helene’s direct path, but West Palm Beach has previously been hit by numerous hurricanes like Hurricane Irma in 2017, which knocked down trees and sparked power outages for about a week for some residents. She added that FEMA has identified her hometown as an area at high risk of future storms. She said Helene brought back memories from her childhood of evacuating her home and staying with friends in neighboring states when hurricanes hit her area.
“We went to Atlanta because they weren’t being impacted by the hurricane, and we had friends there, but now those same friends were impacted by this storm that went all the way up through Georgia,” Fields said.
Cecilia Case, a first-year from Raleigh, North Carolina, said her closest friend from back home, a student at the University of North Carolina Asheville, sheltered on campus for three days in the midst of the storm before she was able to return to Raleigh.
“She was without electricity, food or water for a long time,” Case said.
Case said Hurricane Helene has impacted her mental health, and she felt “down” for a few weeks seeing how it devastated local communities, urging people to donate to local charities.
“I’ve been doomscrolling a lot, which has been really bad for my mental health because there’s a lot of media coverage, and it’s really hard seeing media coverage of the place you live and how it’s been destroyed,” Case said.
Case said the flooding from the storm in Asheville — which residents previously considered a place that wasn’t severely impacted by extreme weather because of its cooler weather and inland location — should be a reminder of the reality of climate change and its destruction to the environment.
“Climate havens are places people want to move to avoid the climate crisis,” Case said. “No one ever really expected them to get hit by hurricanes, which is why they didn’t have the infrastructure.”
Parker Malphrus, a sophomore from Greenville, South Carolina, said that he expected some wind and rain from the hurricane to hit his hometown, but he did not expect the storm to unleash such widespread damage, knocking down cell towers and causing power outages in its path.
He said the power outages disrupted the routine of his grandfather who lives with dementia because comfortable things, like watching television, that were a part of his daily life were taken away, which adds confusion to an already “incredibly difficult” situation of navigating a natural disaster.
“When you’re in that state, you want to make dementia patients and Alzheimer’s patients the most comfortable that they can be and the most kind of normal,” Malphrus said.
Malphrus said his parents’ power was restored Sept. 28, and they offered his grandfather, who was without power for several days, and nearby friends to use their power while others were being restored. Power has been restored for most people in Greenville County, according to a project that tracks nationwide power outages.
Malphrus said the aftermath of the storm showed him “the true spirit” of his community in South Carolina, with people from across the political spectrum joining together to help one another by offering up their homes to those who needed shelter and assisting with cleaning up the debris from the storm.
“In that moment when the devastation hit — Republicans, Democrats, Independents — everybody comes together as just friends and neighbors in the South Carolinian way to help one another and to check on one another to make sure they’re okay,” Malphrus said.
