San Tan Valley man grateful family in North Carolina is alive amid Helene

SAN TAN VALLEY (AZFamily) —Helene is now the deadliest hurricane since Katrina hit the U.S. mainland. The overall death toll is more than 200, and hundreds more are still missing.

Those who survived struggle to clear the damage and get the essentials.

All weekend long, Joseph Miele was fearing the worst.

“Every hour on the hour I’m calling my mom, my dad, my sister, my nieces, my nephews calling everybody and couldn’t hear anything on Saturday. All day Sunday, nothing,” said Miele.

The San Tan Valley man couldn’t contact his family in North Carolina.

“It was torturous,” he said.

They live in a small town outside of Ashville that has experienced historic destruction in the wake of Hurricane Helene.

He finally heard from his mom on Monday.

“Relief and it was all I could do. All I could do was just cry and I cried for a few minutes and then I called and hearing her voice I cried again and she said everybody is OK,” he said.

All of his loved ones are accounted for, but the roads are washed away and their cars are gone or stuck in debris.

“My sister’s house got flooded. The river came into her house. Took her stove. Took her couches. Took all of her memories,” he said. “So now they’re just building fires outside and using a cast iron on top of the fire to cook all their food.”

Miele says he can only talk to his mom for seconds because of poor cell service.

She’s a nurse in North Carolina and with many of the main roads wiped away, he says it takes her hours to get to a nearby hospital to treat patients in the parking lot because the facility was flooded.

“I can only talk to my mom when she is at work. That’s the only place that has signal, but as soon as she leaves the hospital area I can’t talk to them anymore,” he said.

The devastation in Western North Carolina comes as a shock.

Miele says his parents have lived there for three decades and hurricanes hit just about every year, but never like this.

“We’re talking 7,000 feet above sea level. Who ever thought a hurricane would bother anybody that high up that far away from the ocean? It’s almost unheard of,” said Miele. “You expect hurricanes to destroy the coast, not the inland mountains.”

A GoFundMe page has been set up to help this family.

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