North Carolina Neighbors Put Mutual Aid to Work in Hurricane Helene Recovery

Interview with Padma Dyvine, a survivor of Hurricane Helene from Bat Cave, North Carolina, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

July 2, 2025

Last September, Hurricane Helene struck North Carolina, resulting in severe damage and 106 deaths. Western North Carolina around the city of Asheville was hardest hit. While the downtown was spared, the arts district along the French Broad River was devastated and outlying rural areas also suffered catastrophic damage.

Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus visited friends in the area in June and saw firsthand some of the damage and ongoing recovery efforts. Padma Dyvine and her husband, who live in the hamlet of Bat Cave, were airlifted from their home by helicopter when fallen trees blocked their ability to leave their home and get supplies. The couple spent 55 days as refugees, moving back home just before Thanksgiving. Increases in hurricane strength and rainfall due to the worsening climate crisis are predicted to make future hurricane seasons more dangerous over time.

Here Dyvine talks about the physical and emotional toll the hurricane has taken on her community and what they’re doing to heal, collectively across the political spectrum — from MAGA to progressive. She debunks Trump’s false charge that FEMA wasn’t helpful in recovery and worries about the future now that the Trump administration has cut hundreds of millions of dollars from FEMA’s budget, threatening to eliminate the agency entirely.

PADMA DYVINE: So there’s a convergence of three major waterways, which raised all the water to take away a lot of the roads so that the traffic barriers landed down in the rivers. You couldn’t drive a car on some of the parts of the roads. And then there were other parts that were okay. So, they’re like reshaping the rivers and then they’re creating banks of wall, cement with rebar in it to build the road back. This is going to take years and who knows if we’re going to continue to get FEMA money.

MELINDA TUHUS: Trump, when he was running last year, was saying that FEMA was nowhere to be found to help the poor white people …

PADMA DYVINE: ... (sing song voice) liar, liar pants on fire, liar, liar pants on fire. No, FEMA can’t get in when you don’t have infrastructure. So we had emergency responders, local fire and emergency. They came to every house in Bat Cave, every residence and checked on people. By foot. And then they made assessments as to who to get out with helicopters as soon as possible.

MELINDA TUHUS: What did FEMA do in your experience? Did you see people from FEMA coming to help?

PADMA DYVINE: FEMA came after there was a way for them to come in with their vehicles. FEMA dropped off MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), tons of that and tons of water. And yes, there were church groups and local groups. FEMA came to my house and she did a full assessment of damage and we got whatever we were entitled to, I think $750.

MELINDA TUHUS: Did you have more damage than that? But that’s all you could get?

PADMA DYVINE: Our house was fine. What we couldn’t do is deal with all the trees that were down that didn’t land on the house. We got some locals and people in our community had chainsaws.

MELINDA TUHUS: How would you assess the spirit of, or the mental health of the people that you came in contact with after this disaster?

PADMA DYVINE: So I live on a road with about maybe eight houses on our road. And so we all had each other and we didn’t have Internet. But one person got a Starlink, so everybody went there and people have muddled through. And then we had a gathering. At the front door was a sign that said, “Whatever the problem, Community is the solution.” And then we had a little exercise where people, they had to share because we were sitting in a circle in my living room, 25 people came and they were from the two communities, Gerton and Bat Cave. We’re like the stepsisters, we’re way out in the outside part of Henderson County. People picked either an orange or a yellow piece of paper and the questions on that paper were, “What’s your takeaway from the hurricane? And what does resilience feel like for you?”

And then everybody got a blue one that said, “One good thing that’s happened to you since the storm.” And then people were invited to go to find somebody they didn’t know because people in Girton don’t necessarily know people in Bat Cave and vice versa. And they did it.

One person said at the end when she was leaving, she said, “Wow, that was therapy for less than a thousand dollars!” And another person said, “Oh, that was so wonderful to be able to talk about what happened.” So people are still processing and there are groups that gather that are working together, healing. I mean, there’s still people when it’s raining really hard, they get scared. They get triggered.

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