Being 'the hands and feet'

By: 
Kate Wehlann, Staff Writer
You could smell the mold, the open sewers, the damp.
Stepping off the bus at the first neighborhood they were sent to, the six members of the Hoosiers Help team who traveled from Salem to Hamsted, North Carolina, near Wilmington, were met with a street lined with heaps of people’s lives. The neighborhood looked fairly affluent and normal. If it weren’t for the smell, the piles of ruined furniture and belongings and the odd blue tarp over a damaged roof, you might not have noticed it had just been flooded. The region hit by Hurricane Florence is full of neighborhoods and communities just like that one, with people, numb from shock and grief, venturing out as flood waters recede to salvage what, if anything, is left of their homes. Nearly 50 people were killed either in the storm or during the clean-up after. Billions of dollars worth of damage stretch across the affected region — communities flooded, trees down, roofs ripped off from the wind, mold climbing up the walls, utility poles, and sewers, waterworks and dams destroyed.
In a word, the areas affected by Florence were a mess.
See the full story on the group of volunteers who traveled to the Carolinas in The Salem Leader, on newsstands this evening.

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