When County residents Yvonne and Cary Kreuzwiesner made their way through Black Mountain, North Carolina recently, they saw a lot of similarities between the stateside community devastated by Hurricane Helene and their home base in the Highlands.
The pair spent a day helping residents literally pick up the pieces of their lives Nov. 2, offering support to those who “lost everything” during the brutal Category 4 storm that made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida Sept. 26, before making its way inland.
The storm caused catastrophic rainfalltriggered flooding in several states, including Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina – with some rural communities hit particularly hard.
As of Nov. 6, Helene has been credited with causing $88 billion in damage and killing 233 people.
Yvonne was visiting her sister in Naples, Florida in mid-October when she learned the extent of the devastation. While Naples, on the southern tip of Florida, was largely unscathed, other parts of the country weren’t so lucky. Yvonne, having flown down, called husband, Cary, a few days after landing to say she wanted to help.
Cary got to work packing supplies – food and water, space blankets, sleeping bags, clothes – and made the long haul drive south – 14 hours to North Carolina rather than the 26-hour trip to Florida.
Yvonne had earlier heard from one of the volunteers she connected with in 2022, when assisting with Hurricane Ian clean-up in Fort Myers, Florida. He asked if they were planning to help again – though noted as bad as things were in the sunshine state, there were other areas, further north, that really needed help. It was then that Yvonne learned about Black Mountain.
The town of approximately 8,500 people is nestled in Pisgah National Forest – about 185 kilometres northwest of Charlotte, the state’s most populated city.
“As we got closer, it struck me just how much the Black Mountain area looked and felt like Haliburton County. It just made me think, ‘wow, what if this were us?’” Yvonne said. “When we pulled up to the town, everything was gone. Homes, if they were still standing, were stripped right down to the studs. There was massive flooding. People were living out of their cars.”
A community volunteer-led distribution hub was established at a nearby concert venue, where locals could go for supplies. Yvonne and Cary assisted there for a full day, unloading and sorting donated items, gathering supplies for those in need, and helping people to pack.
While Floridians are used to annual hurricane clean-ups, locals in Black Mountain told the Kreuzwiesners this was the first major storm to hit their area in 100 years. “People didn’t know what to do, where to turn. It was heartbreaking,” Yvonne said.
When they told people they were from a small community in rural Ontario – Cary donning a red Canada T-shirt and Yvonne a green Haliburton County tee – people couldn’t believe they’d made the trip.
Asked why they had, Yvonne said she feels a call to help in desperate situations.
“We had a tornado on Halls Lake in 2006 – it was total devastation; we didn’t have power for 10 days. But people came together and helped. There was the flooding in Minden in 2008, that was a tragedy that impacted so many people. You don’t hear stories like this, about places like this on the news,” Yvonne said.
“I can’t just sit back and watch and not want to help. I just can’t,” she said.
The couple are already planning another trip south of the border, back to Black Mountain, to help the community rebuild. Yvonne also wants to go to Jasper, Alberta where wildfires raged from mid-July to early September, scorching 96,000 acres and destroying 358 buildings, according to Parks Canada. The Kreuzwiesners are accepting donated items to help people in both areas. To give, contact Yvonne at ykreuz@hotmail.com.
All in this together
The Kreuzwiesners weren’t the only Highlanders helping south of the border following Hurricane Helene – a handful of Hydro One and Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF) staffers spent weeks in Florida and Georgia getting power lines reinstalled.
Rick Putman was the foreman managing about 130 workers, including some from Haliburton County, who arrived in Georgia Oct. 8 and spent three days helping there before moving onto Clearwater, Florida.
“This is the worst we’ve ever seen,” Putman said, noting he was a part of a crew that assisted in 2017 following Hurricane Irma and has been involved in about half a dozen other efforts. “When you see the number of outages and what people are living through, the conditions they’ve been thrust into, it’s hard not to want to try and help.
“Despite the devastation, people are so excited to see somebody is there trying to help them. When they find out we came all the way from Canada, they’re always floored. I just tell them we’re all in this together,” he added.
As of Oct. 22 all Hydro One workers had returned home, confirmed company spokesperson Tiziana Baccega Rosa.
