How This Asheville Nonprofit Aids Hurricane Helene Recovery

Amy Cantrell lives in the mountains near Asheville, one of the areas of North Carolina that was hardest hit by Hurricane Helene last week.

She and Ponkho Bermejo co-founded BeLoved Asheville in 2009 and typically work through the nonprofit to create innovative solutions to pressing issues like building affordable housing and feeding the hungry.

But since Helene barreled over the Southeast starting on Sept. 26, they’ve been focused on helping their community simply survive.

Cantrell says she has watched in horror as friends and neighbors in her town of Swannanoa were literally swept away by the floodwaters from the storm, which drowned much of western North Carolina.

“We saw a lot of deaths, so much loss of the life,” Cantrell tells PEOPLE. “We saw people in the river clinging to the trees and they couldn’t hang on. Whole houses were floating down the river. We saw trailers engulfed in water with people still in them.”

Bermejo, Cantrell’s neighbor and coworker adds: “We had two neighbors killed in a landslide — we saw so much death with our eyes, it’s just so widespread. We kept hearing people screaming ‘help,’ they were kids and you could see people in their windows screaming for help. We saw it. These are people we know who are gone.”

Recovery efforts continue and the death toll has climbed steadily, now at more than 220, according to officials and news reports — one of the deadliest storms to hit the U.S. in the last century.

Through BeLoved Asheville, Cantrell and Bermejo say they are doing their part to help.

“We’re really focused on the most vulnerable and in many cases were the first people, the first water and food they’ve seen in days,” Cantrell says.

Their volunteers have been spanning out across the area, delivering supplies, many of which have been donated from across the state.

“Today was an amazing day,” Bermejo said in a recent interview. “We had 1,000 volunteers and five tractor trailer loads of food, water and diapers. We were able to reach 10,000 people today. We had 5,000 cases of water and we shared all of them.”

Their teams have also been doing wellness checks because communication is still so spotty.

“We’re getting calls from all over the country, people saying, ‘I haven’t heard from my relatives’ — so many people that we’re checking on and had to send volunteers to literally go find these people,” Cantrell says.

She and Bermejo say they are grateful they’re in a position to help but they worry the community they love will never be the same.

“Everything along the river is gone,” Bermejo says. “There is four feet of mud everywhere. It’s surreal to be here right now.”

To learn more about how to help with relief, recovery and rebuilding efforts from Hurricane Helene, click here.