When Brita Nordgren was in college in Western North Carolina, the region experienced what at the time was called a hundred-year flood. The remains of Hurricane Frances soaked the area in September 2004, causing heavy damage to mountain towns like Asheville, Canton, and Clyde.
Just 20—not 100—years later, Hurricane Helene crashed into the North Carolina mountains in what was the deadliest hurricane to hit the U.S. since Katrina. Nearly five months after the storm, Brita and her family (her husband, 10- and 12-year-old daughters, and a family dog) are still processing what happened to their community. Emotions about the storm come in waves. They’re still surrounded by visual reminders of the disaster: beloved landmarks are gone; the power lines near their Weaverville home are still held up by rope and caution tape.
I’m struck by the undercurrent of surprise in Brita’s voice throughout our conversation: “Everything about the experience of Helene has been unexpected,” she tells me.
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The first few days
The day of the storm, Brita and her daughters hunkered down at home: “Our power went out, and the girls and I sat in the living room watching the lightning and the wind. It was really exciting, like when there’s snow.”
And in the days that immediately followed—power still out, and cell service and water down too—neighbors came together to share resources and community. There were cookouts, a neighbor who delivered bowls of melting ice cream, and a sense of connection and care. Because there was no cell service or power, Brita and her neighbors didn’t understand the scope of the damage to the region beyond what could be discovered on foot. But when community members did begin to venture out, the devastation they discovered was unthinkable. The storm had fundamentally altered the terrain of Western North Carolina, taking over 300 lives across multiple states. Buncombe County, where Brita’s family lives, sustained the highest death toll of all.
“This doesn’t make any sense”
In 2023, nearly 2.5 million people in the U.S. were displaced by extreme weather, with socially vulnerable groups—like the elderly and Black and Latino families—hardest hit. This number was almost certainly higher in 2024, a year that saw 27 separate billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. alone. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced by Hurricane Helene. Brita and her family were among them. Once the scope of the storm’s damage became clearer, they did what many families with children did if they could: they left Western North Carolina for safer ground and running water.
Interstate 40, North Carolina’s main highway, had sustained significant storm damage and was closed. The trip to Brita’s parents’ home in Durham, North Carolina, took seven hours, instead of the usual three. When they arrived in Durham, they plugged back into a frantic news cycle—checking in on loved ones back in the mountains and wondering whether their lack of response meant that their power hadn’t been restored or something more sinister. Though Brita was grateful for her family’s access to safe shelter in the aftermath of the storm, her emotional experience of displacement was infused with a complex mix of cognitive dissonance, disorientation, grief, and guilt. She describes a moment running an errand with her daughters:
“I took my girls to Target to get a few things that we had left at home. My 12-year-old turned to me and said, ‘This is not OK. This doesn’t make any sense that we’re here, and able to pick out shampoo.’ She was articulating the disconnect she was understanding in her 12-year-old brain: here we are with 900 options for shampoo when people back home are in a completely different reality. And then she said, ‘I just want to tell everyone we see in here what we’ve been through.’ Feeling everything really deeply and then all of sudden being in ‘normal’ life again was a lot for her. It was a lot for me, but somehow seeing it through my daughter’s eyes was particularly poignant.”
There is no manual for navigating life when you’ve been displaced by a disaster, but nothing about the experience went the way Brita expected it to. She managed to find a temporary school placement for her daughters and a temporary field placement for her own graduate school program in occupational therapy. Yet navigating the necessary bureaucracy of paperwork while grieving intense trauma was difficult. Brita also felt the weight of being away from her Western North Carolina home as neighbors and community members coped with the direct impacts of the disaster. “I felt tremendous guilt,” she says, “for not being fully present in the immediate weeks and months afterward.”
“What are you going through?”
Thankfully, the Nordgrens’ home wasn’t structurally damaged during the storm. Eventually, they were able to return, unlike many Western North Carolinians—but what they returned to wasn’t the same landscape they left.
“Things are not the same, and they won’t be the same. Parks are built on floodplains. Soccer fields are built on floodplains. Hiking trails are built on floodplains. A lot of these places where people gathered to enjoy nature and be in community are the places that are not being rebuilt. Both of my girls play soccer, and there are no soccer fields—it’s just part of the reality of what happened. It’s continual waves of change that I didn’t foresee continuing to echo out.”
Brita tells me she finds a strange comfort in the altered topography of Western North Carolina. The fact that the earth actually moved feels validating, helping her to make sense of her own altered inner terrain. When I ask her what kind of support helped—and what would have helped—in the aftermath of the storm, Brita says she wishes there had been more time after the disaster to move at a humanizing, gentle, patient pace—and less pressure to hurry back to a “normal” that no longer existed. Instead of rushing in to share their own stories or trying to make everything OK, she wishes more people would have simply asked, “What are you going through?” and just listened.
It’s a question nearly all of us will need to hold close in the coming years as we navigate a world whose terrain is changing in so many ways. In the moments when we’re struggling to know how to support loved ones through hurricanes, wildfires, and the storm of sociopolitical turmoil, maybe we can trust that a listening ear and simple question are enough: What are you going through?
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