September 26, 2024, this monster of a storm swallowed the Gulf of Mexico as it moved toward the Big Bend area of my state. It’s huge fingers swept past my home three miles inland and flooded homes close to the beaches. With wind gusts of over seventy miles per hour, most of us breathed a sigh of relief, having taken a direct hit exactly two years earlier from Ian. When it finally made landfall, Helene was a category four hurricane with sustained winds of 140 mph. The destruction in Florida was horrible, as the same communities who were hit a year earlier by a category three, suffer another direct hit a year later. Now as this storm moved inland, Helene caused flooding in Atlanta and is downgraded to a tropical storm as it moves through the Carolinas and Tennessee. Now the heavy rain fall causes unimaginable flooding that is best described as biblical. By Saturday the  28th, Asheville is under water, and isolated. Bridges, and roads are washed away or under water and mudslides, fallen trees, rock slides along with failing dams and rising waters are causing destruction like I have never seen before. A week later the death toll is over 200. The sadness, death, and destruction are unimaginable, while our federal government seems either unable or unwilling to do anything tangible for those poor isolated communities in western North Carolina. American citizens deserve better.

ws