When Brian and Susie Hill purchased a historic home on Cattail Creek in Yancey County, North Carolina, in 2023, they deliberate to remain endlessly. Their daughter, Lucy, would chase fireflies within the evenings throughout their broad expanse of grass.
“It’s that feeling that you simply all the time wished of going house,” Susie mentioned. “Your little household and your little canine and your large yard and the chickens.”
In September 2024, Hurricane Helene upended their lives. After days of rain that saturated the mountains, Helene arrived, turning little streams into raging rivers a whole bunch of miles inland. The swollen Cattail Creek churned by way of the Hills’ house, leaving logs rather than furnishings and taking porches, doorways, home windows, home equipment and elements of the ground with it.
The Hills watched all of it, huddled of their truck parked up a delicate slope. When the water receded, they discovered the home was uninhabitable.
Instantly displaced, the Hills started the arduous strategy of looking for catastrophe aid from the Federal Emergency Administration Company. The just about $40,000 in federal help they obtained allowed them to take essential first steps towards rebuilding. It wasn’t practically sufficient cash to finish the large undertaking. The remainder must come from their very own efforts and an outpouring of neighborhood assist. But it was greater than most others of their neighborhood managed to muster from the federal catastrophe help system.
ProPublica and The Meeting examined federal knowledge, trying on the 10 counties in North Carolina hardest hit by Helene. We discovered revenue disparities in the way in which the company had distributed housing help, although that help is meant to be impartial of revenue. Among the many extra rural counties hardest hit by Helene, households that acquired probably the most FEMA help tended to be the highest-income ones. In some counties, together with Yancey, the highest-income owners obtained two to a few occasions as a lot cash to restore and rebuild their properties as these with decrease incomes.
In rural areas, residents can face obstacles to looking for help starting from poor entry to cellphone and web service to rugged topography to a scarcity of cash to pay for companies.
The reverse was true in city Buncombe County, house of Asheville, the place lower-income owners sometimes obtained greater FEMA awards for housing help. Buncombe can also be house to most of the area’s nonprofits that helped low-income residents navigate the FEMA utility and appeals course of.
For the Hills, it’s been an exhausting yr. They’ve been camped in a trailer since January with a view of their former house, engaged on the home till darkish after days of educating public faculty. They lengthy for easy comforts of their former life — simply sitting of their front room as a household and watching a film. Because the Hills put together to maneuver again in, we be taught of their journey why so many different households could by no means have the opportunity to take action.
Watch the brief documentary “Rebuilding After Helene” right here.
Sept. 27, 2025: A video with this story initially misidentified the topic Brian Hill teaches. Hill teaches highschool math, not historical past.
