By Dylan Henson | WNCW
September 23, 2026
Two years after Hurricane Helene, the roads are mostly open, and the power is mostly back. But for thousands of families across western North Carolina, recovery still comes down to one question: when do I get to go home?
Luther Harrison, vice president for U.S. Rebuild at Samaritan's Purse, says the Boone-based Christian relief organization was already deployed to two other disasters when Helene hit. It hasn't left since. As of this recording, Samaritan's Purse has moved 371 families back into repaired or newly built homes, out of more than 750 rebuild and repair projects approved across western North Carolina, upstate South Carolina and East Tennessee.
"We had a whole tractor-trailer arrive in Polk County — loose items, but it was packed to the brim with scarce resources and supplies," said Josh Kennedy, vice chair of Polk County's Long Term Recovery Group, describing the earliest days after the storm. "Getting that out into the community became the second challenge."
AN ARMY OF VOLUNTEERS, AND A DEBT FEW EXPECTED TO CARRY
More than 43,000 volunteers, many of them Appalachian State students, turned out to help in the storm's aftermath, Harrison said. Samaritan's Purse brought in helicopters — some donated by NASCAR owners, some rented Blackhawks, with the Air National Guard flying in Chinooks — to fly more than 358 missions and 800,000 pounds of generators, heaters and Starlink satellites into areas cut off by washed-out roads.
The organization takes no government grants, relying instead on donor support. Franklin Graham's guiding rule, Harrison said, is "a dollar in the front door, a dollar out the back door" — meaning the money keeps moving toward families rather than sitting in reserve. Samaritan's Purse has also given out more than 20,000 gift cards for gas and groceries, and every family that gets a new or repaired home also receives a furniture package — La-Z-Boy furniture, Bassett bedroom sets — at no cost.
Beyond the construction itself, Samaritan's Purse has stepped into debt many families never expected to carry: paying off 110 mortgages on houses that were washed away or destroyed, and helping 118 churches reopen their doors. Harrison also pointed to a less visible cost of recovery — driveways, bridges and culverts that families need just to reach their own property. The organization has fielded 157 requests for bridge repairs and completed 101 so far, now built to state Department of Transportation standards.
Two stories stick with Harrison from the past two years: a hardware store owner near Boone whose house slid off its foundation, pinning him inside for six hours before rescue; and a retired Marine in Yancey County whose mountainside gave way beneath his home. With no power and spotty cell service, his 911 call somehow connected to a dispatcher across the state line in Unicoi County, Tennessee, who put a radio call out that a Yancey County rescue squad happened to catch — and got him and his wife off the mountain.
"We're at the halfway mark right now," Harrison said of the organization's own progress, comparing Helene's recovery timeline to Hurricanes Katrina, Andrew, Harvey and Sandy — all of which took roughly a decade to fully resolve.
THE LAST THREE THINGS
In Polk County, a smaller, local recovery effort has taken on a different role: finishing what larger national organizations couldn't quite get to. Margaret Lebeck, with the Housing Assistance Corporation, sits alongside Kennedy on Polk County's Long Term Recovery Group. She said that in hard-hit Green River communities, "some of the big, nationally recognized names in disaster recovery" — groups like Baptist Men on Mission and Samaritan's Purse — had done extensive work on homes, but small things were still missing: a back door with nothing to hold onto when stepping outside, for instance.
"We went from having one house on that street to having five," Lebeck said, "because everybody had these last little things that hadn't quite been right."
Both Kennedy and Lebeck say some of the toughest cases don't fit neatly into any government program. Western North Carolina's housing stock leans heavily on mobile and manufactured homes, and federal housing rules are built around the assumption that a homeowner owns both the land and the structure — a pairing that often doesn't exist in mobile home parks. Renters face their own version of the problem: if a landlord decides not to rebuild, a tenant can lose their home, their job proximity and their kids' school district in one blow, with no program designed to catch them.
Kennedy said the shortage of affordable housing in Polk County didn't start with Helene — the storm just made it impossible to ignore. Nearly two years out, both he and Lebeck say a different kind of need has surfaced: mental health. "That storm traumatized a lot of people," Kennedy said. "I was so traumatized I don't want to watch documentaries about Helene — I lived it." Lebeck said FEMA's own recovery math hasn't held up, either: the agency estimated the region would need roughly ten years to recover, and "every timeline FEMA set for us, we blew through it."
WHAT $5 BILLION IN STATE MONEY IS BUYING — AND WHAT IT ISN'T YET
At the state level, Matt Calabria directs the Governor's Recovery Office for Western North Carolina, created by Governor Josh Stein on his first full day in office to coordinate the recovery. Calabria calls Helene the worst storm North Carolina has ever experienced — 108 fatalities and nearly $60 billion in damage to property and infrastructure.
North Carolina's total funding commitment for the recovery now tops $5 billion, Calabria said, and the state has set some national records along the way: it obligated federal EPA water and wastewater repair funds faster than any state ever has, and completed its first HUD-funded home faster than any state in more than a decade. A federal hazard mitigation buyout program that typically takes a state about a year just to begin submitting projects — before a second year of federal review — saw North Carolina start submitting within months of the storm.
Still, Calabria was candid that federal recovery programs move slowly by design, with layers of required planning, analysis and paperwork. The state's Renew NC program, which administers the main federal single-family rebuilding funds, has completed or repaired just over 120 homes so far — compared with more than 1,000 built or repaired through the volunteer and nonprofit sector Kennedy, Lebeck and Harrison represent. Calabria said another 1,000-plus homes funded through Renew NC are either under construction or close to it.
One of the most visible gaps: Interstate 40 through the Pigeon River Gorge, a lifeline for Haywood County businesses that depend on travelers passing through, isn't expected to reopen fully until late 2028. "We know that this is a very difficult period of time for folks who rely on these major arteries to get customers and tourists into their communities," Calabria said. "So what we are doing is working very closely with our federal partners to see what we can do to accelerate these repairs — and we're working to ensure that they're adequately funded."
Calabria said the state is also pushing hard on tourism recovery, working to counter the narrative that western North Carolina is still closed for business. He pointed to a recent Economic Development Administration grant win — funding North Carolina had never successfully pursued in a coordinated way before Helene — as one example of turning a hard lesson into new resources for workforce development and downtown revitalization. He also flagged a lingering concern that predates the next hurricane season: the risk of wildfire from vegetative debris Helene left scattered across the region.
For Calabria, success two years from now looks like tourism and labor force numbers fully rebounding, and a region where Helene "is very much in the rearview mirror — even though we know the work will still be going."
Kennedy, for his part, said the goal now is making sure the infrastructure his group built doesn't disappear once the money stops flowing. "This will happen again," he said. "We'll have some sort of disaster that will hit the community. What we don't want to do is leave the community hanging for need when we had the opportunity now to make sure that they had support."
Two years in, the story of Helene isn't a single storm anymore — it's a substation rebuilt on higher ground, a dam still standing by inches, a family still weighing whether to come home, and a small nonprofit making sure no one falls through the cracks twice. The recovery isn't finished. But the work hasn't stopped either.
Helene didn't just knock down trees — it left millions of them scattered across the region, and forest experts say that debris has created a different kind of danger: a rising risk of wildfire in places that rarely saw it before. WNCW's Jaclyn Anthony picks up that story next, closing out the Higher Ground series in part four.
