Ashley Kreitz ’15 couldn’t bear the sight of the storm-ravaged North Carolina mountains in her rearview mirror as she drove north toward her home state of Pennsylvania and away from the path of Hurricane Helene – a Category 4 storm that devastated parts of the South in late September.
“As I was driving away from North Carolina, I really just knew that I was going the wrong way and I had to go back and help,” Kreitz recalled.
Helene made landfall in North Carolina on September 27, generating record rainfall and causing severe flooding and landslides that damaged thousands of homes. To date, Helene is the third-deadliest U.S. storm in the 21st century, with nearly 100 confirmed deaths in North Carolina alone and dozens more still missing as of October 23, according to a report from the North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management.
It’s disasters like Helene that are at the core of the work being done by researchers in The Center of Catastrophe Modeling and Resilience, Lehigh University’s first University Research Center, as they attempt to assess the risk of these kinds of events and plan for them. Such disasters raise questions about what can be done to ensure communities can withstand catastrophes and quickly rebuild. It is the latter that has also become the focus of Kreitz’s volunteer efforts in North Carolina.
After spending a few years working as an environmental science instructor in Charlotte, North Carolina and canoeing and biking through the mountains in her free time, Kreitz felt a deep connection to the state – one that inspired her to take action and help those suffering from devastation caused by the storm.
Since early October, Kreitz has taken to Facebook to raise nearly $10,000 in donations, gathered via Venmo and PayPal, to help those impacted by Hurricane Helene damage. She has also recruited dozens of volunteers, including two fellow Lehigh alumni and a Pennsylvania-based construction crew, to aid her in her efforts of cleaning out and restoring damaged homes in Barnardsville, North Carolina.
Barnardsville is a small mountain town located about 20 minutes north of Asheville, North Carolina that was particularly impacted by the hurricane. According to Kreitz, the small creek that runs through the town overflowed during the storm and flooded many homes in the area, sweeping some entirely off their foundations.