Helene-flooded family’s home restored with help of Clinch-Powell home repair program

NEWPORT – Tropical Storm Helene left a visible path of destruction in its wake that has been estimated at more than $400 million dollars in Northeast Tennessee.

Damage from the storm left many people suddenly homeless and unsure where to turn for assistance. Clinch-Powell RC&D’s home repair programs have helped homeowners recover from the storm with needed home repairs. The organization’s programs can help homeowners with repairs whether due to damage from a natural disaster or other causes.

Newport resident Sarah Moore’s family was among those whose lives were dramatically changed by the historic flooding Helene brought to the area. Moore had just finished her workweek Friday morning, September 27, 2024. She said she went home and went to bed to get some sleep before picking her children up from her mother’s house. For some reason she woke up earlier than usual and decided to go get her kids early. She said when her husband went outside to the car ahead of her, he began yelling for her to come outside. He wanted her to come see the water that had risen into their neighborhood from the Pigeon River.

Tennessee State Route 73 runs parallel to the Pigeon River for several miles, almost hugging the river as it passes the neighborhood Moore lives in. It is the only route in or out from her neighborhood. Moore’s house faces the river, and sits on the first street in the neighborhood, which runs parallel to SR 73.

When Moore went outside, she was shocked to see the torrential rains had caused the Pigeon River to swell beyond the highway, flooding Grace Baptist Church and adjacent homes along the highway and all the way through Moore’s across-the-street neighbors’ yards to the edge of their street.

“Twenty minutes later, it was at the door,” she said, “That’s how fast it rose.”

She grabbed framed pictures off the walls of her home, threw them in the car, and she and her husband drove up the hill behind their house, away from the rising water.

“It happened so fast,” Moore said. “I know you see it on documentaries and stuff, and you’re like, ‘how did you not have time to grab some stuff,’ but it literally just happened so quickly. Like I remember I was kind of freaking out because (a neighbor) wasn’t home and they have a Lab in the back yard, so I went and let everybody’s pets out; like that was my job so they wouldn’t die.”

When they left their home, the river was lapping at its front steps. They traveled up the hill behind their house and stopped at the home of a friend’s parents. After parking their vehicle, Moore said they heard a woman screaming in the distance.

She said, “We all kind of checked on each other and made sure everybody was at work or wherever, because it was Friday at like 11-11:30 a.m., and then we heard this faint screaming. There was a woman stuck on top of her roof with her three kids, and they were little. Two of them were little-little.”

She said there was a man with the woman and children, “but he jumped off the roof and left them and swam out, and never got anybody. So then everybody had to try to get her. They eventually got somebody’s boat and got her off the roof.”

She said another neighbor was stuck on the top of his roof as well, but had to be airlifted because the current was so strong they weren’t able to get to him. She said the rushing water was so strong it broke the floor joists beneath her house.

Clinch-Powell Senior Community Resource Navigator Michelle Lane was a schoolteacher at the time. Because schools were closed due to the flooding, she went to volunteer and help her neighbors. She never returned to the classroom. Lane quit her job and became involved in the recovery effort in the immediate aftermath of the flood, coordinating donations and assistance, and continued on into the long-term recovery effort.

Lane said, “It’s hard for anybody to understand how bad it was and how far (the river) came.”

“Yeah, cause you would never think it would get up this far,” Moore added. “I mean, I never did. ‘Cause even now that they’ve redone the flood stuff, I’m still not in the flood zone.”

Moore said she and her husband planned to just stay with a friend on the hill behind their home until the water receded, but they received a warning that instead made them flee for their lives through the countryside.

“They had like two or three helicopters going around us, and one of them had a megaphone saying that another dam had broke, or something like that, and we were going to get 20 to 50 ft. wave surges and that they were not going to come to help us,” she said. “So then people started panicking and then they got their jeeps and their side-by-sides or whatever and they went up the hill and went through people’s fences. We went through a cow field, we went through a barn… and ended up way back there somewhere. We ended up going through so much we ended up on the interstate.”

Moore said when they announced from the helicopter that a dam had breached she thought the whole town would be underwater.

“And I remember that phone call. I told my Mom, I said, ‘Just get in the car and take my kids to Knoxville.’ I said, ‘Just drive as fast as you can,’ because I thought we were dying,” she said.

Aftermath

By the time the storm passed, the Pigeon River crested at about 29.73 feet, far surpassing its 8-foot flood stage and the previous 1902 record of about 23.4 feet. Grace Baptist Church was inundated to its lowest gutters, and nearby homes were inundated with four to six feet of water, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Moore said they didn’t have flood insurance on their home, but they did have a house payment. She said when she and her husband escaped from their home she thought the water might come on up to about the floor level of their home, but she never thought it would get as high as it did. She said water filled their home as deep as the countertops in the kitchen.

Moore said after they were able to return to their home, volunteers and church groups helped them with initial cleanup and repairs. Volunteers mucked out the home quickly, and a group of Amish volunteers provided the labor to rebuild the deck on the back of the house.

Moore said her house was stripped down to the studs, top to bottom. She said they were about halfway through with the work when someone said to her, “You know you have a hole in your wall over here under your window?”

“That’s where that water was so strong, it cut a hole through it,” she said. “That’s how bad (the damage) was, I didn’t even notice it.”

Rebuilding

Moore was eventually able to take advantage of funding through the Federal Home Loan Bank of Cincinnati Disaster Reconstruction Program administered through Clinch-Powell. However, she said due to delays and confusion created by insufficient, incorrect, and conflicting information about what homeowners could or should do in the immediate aftermath of the storm, much of the work completed to her home initially had to be paid out of pocket.

Lane said, “I think Clinch-Powell made a huge impact just by paying me a salary until I got the (Newport) office. I was getting paid by Clinch-Powell and I was still working in the disaster. It was because we didn’t have any of the other initiatives started, and I wasn’t just going to sit around, and so I just kept working and Clinch-Powell just paid me.”

“And if it wasn’t for her, I don’t think we’d have even got this house done,” Moore said. “I know that sounds bad, but nobody knew what to do. Nobody came out here. I got a BS story every time I called an office or wherever it was supposed to be. And it was, ‘Oh you gotta do this, and call here,’ and I’d call there and they’d tell me the opposite of whatever that person told me to do and I had to call somebody else.”

Moore said Clinch-Powell funded the purchase of materials for their home’s deck construction and paid for the construction of the deck roof. She said the organization also provided the repairs to fix the hole in the outside wall caused by the rushing water, and replaced the window above it, as well as repairing a door frame that had been damaged.

Moore said she had hurricane insurance and thought damage to her house would be covered, but because the damage was caused by flooding, it wasn’t. She said she had also paid for a rider to cover the contents of her home but was told it wouldn’t cover the damage because it was caused by flooding.

Long-term Recovery

While the physical damage caused by Helene has been obvious to the naked eye and totaled into dollars and cents, the mental and emotional toll taken by the storm isn’t easily measured, and can’t be taken in at a glance. A hurricane forecast isn’t something that has often caused many people in East Tennessee to feel wary, but Helene changed that.

“I guess where I’m not at home at night, I feel like it’s going to flood at night. I don’t know why, but I do get real nervous,” she said.

A neighbor texts Moore when she’s at work on a rainy night to let her know everything is OK. She doesn’t believe her son was affected as much due to his young age, but said her daughter gets very nervous when it rains, and attends therapy to help her overcome the trauma.

“She gets really nervous with rain, or with water,” Sarah said. “She was so terrified when we first got water turned back on she wouldn’t get in the bathtub. She would scream bloody murder. Even though she didn’t see the flood here, at my mom’s house, I guess where all that water had gotten into the pipes or whatever, my mom said that water just shot out and was like black muck, and shot out of every faucet at her house. And when we did finally come home, we didn’t really know what we were (going to be) looking at or anything. She was in the car with us because we didn’t really have anyone to watch her.

“I think it kind of broke her in a mental kind of way. Like, all her stuff was gone. Everything she had was gone. So, this year she just now started getting back in the pool. We have a little tiny pool. That’s the only thing she will really get in… and she’s just now got to where she will flush the toilet by herself,” Moore said.

Despite the overwhelming trauma and devastation, Moore said there was a bright spot in that seemingly endless difficult time.

“I never realized how lucky I was to live in such a great area and community,” she said. “We would have people from schools, the Parrotsville basketball team, or the Cocke County football team, they would come by. They would do work on the house, and the coach would say, ‘This is from our team,’ and it might be $500 or it might be $100 or it might be $20 or whatever. And we just had so many people do that. Or they would give us Lowe’s gift cards, or Food City gift cards or whatever, and they would come by every day. And my neighbors that lived up the hill, bless their hearts, they’d come in their golf cart and they’d bring lunch and snacks for everybody down here – every day.”

Lane said it wasn’t only the local community who offered their support and assistance, but people from all over traveled to the area to chip in.

“We had people come from all over the country,” Lane said. “We had people from California, from Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, Ohio; we had people come from New York, people from Maine, Indiana, Colorado, and just this past spring we had the Mennonites, who were from all over.”

Moore said the only things they were able to save as they escaped the flood were some pictures, their kids’ baby books and a blanket.

“I literally had nothing,” she said. “I didn’t even have a pair of shoes. That’s how fast I had to leave the house. I mean, I had a pair of flip flops on but I lost one getting out. I’ll never forget, I never even knew this woman, and she lived on this street, but her house was a two-story house and it didn’t get all the way up to her second story. She had like four pairs of shoes up there and we just happened to wear the same size shoes, and I was barefoot here at the house, and she gave me a pair of shoes. And those shoes, I still have them just because. I mean, that’s all I had.”

Clinch-Powell can help homeowners with needed non-cosmetic repairs to weatherize and reduce utility costs, repair structural issues, or updates to improve accessibility for those with disabilities with financing through one of its repair grant or loan programs.

To learn more, call 865-828-5927.