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My boyfriend. A nice house sits 30ft above the top of the of the river, typically. So we're like, all right, we're safe like we are. We're we're way above this flood. And then within one hour, it had risen another ten feet.

You might remember I spoke with Olivia Kushner back in October. The Burnsville, North Carolina resident told me what it was like as America's deadliest natural disaster of 2024. Hurricane Helene arrived on her doorstep.

And we started to see things go by like hay bales and pumpkins and some trash. And then it started to get kind of dark and we started to see propane tanks. We started to see shipping containers. We started to see houses start floating by.

Whole houses just floating down the river.

We saw four whole houses floating down the river and then just said, yeah.

Remember, Helene was a monster that rapidly intensified into a Category four hurricane in just two days, dumping an historic amount of rain along the way. In all, it killed at least 232 people across six states. The landscape was literally reshaped in some places. This storm was supercharged by incredibly warm water in the Gulf of Mexico. That's a phenomenon some experts attribute to human caused climate change. But remember, Olivia wasn't Burnsville, North Carolina. Just outside of hard hit Asheville, the Gulf of Mexico is more than 500 miles away from there. And yet she felt the most extreme impacts. And so for Olivia and her boyfriend, Eli, this holiday season looks very different because nearly three months later, they are still not back in their home. Today I check back in with Olivia to get an update and ask her whether she considers herself a climate refugee from CNN. This is one thing. And David, right? Last time we spoke was about a week and a half after the storm hit. And you were staying with family in eastern North Carolina. Where are you right now?

'Right now we are actually relocating to Portland since we last spoke. My boyfriend lost his job. And seeing as we we couldn't access our house until about two weeks ago. And for perspective, that's almost three months after the flood. And by then, we had already decided to relocate because there aren't very many service industry jobs in Asheville right now. Our neighborhood is still pretty uninhabitable. And our our driveway was rebuilt, which is great. But currently there's a huge mold problem in our house. In our house still today does not have power. There's still a ton of repairs that need to be made. And we made the decision to relocate to Portland. I lived there for nine years and we had jobs lined up and people that would take us. And so it just seemed like the easiest and the right move. So we've been on the road kind of doing a little cross-country road trip for the last two weeks.

Right. And you're actually on the road right now heading up to Portland, Oregon. But you said you hadn't been able to get back to your house in North Carolina until about two weeks ago. So can you describe just how it felt to see it for the first time after all this happened?

I mean, it's. It was my boyfriend when the first day that we were back. And he said it was hard to you know, he was fighting back tears. It's really hard to take on because it looks so different. And, you know, you drive through Asheville and it's it's still devastating. There's really has not been much work done with clean up. You'd think three months down the road there would be a lot more progress than there is. And, you know, I've taken a lot of content like I was just recording videos when I was down there and it just it looks like it just happened yesterday. The damage is hard to put into words out where we live. My boyfriend literally missed the turn to go to our street because it's that unorganized little. Wow. It is just it's a totally different it's a different place. The highway is still not officially rebuilt. It is just a dirt road all the way, all the way to our house. And the the bridges are temporary bridges. The road that we live off of in the neighborhood is completely unrecognizable. It it looks like a nuclear bomb went off. The landscape has completely changed. All of our neighbors are have been washed away. Every house along the Kane River is completely gone. It is devastating.

Last time we spoke, we talked about FEMA and there was a lot of misinformation going on around the agency and just how much they were helping folks. Did you ever get any assistance from them?

Yeah. So a lot of my friends who lost jobs or had, you know, severe life changes from the storm did not get FEMA payouts. Like, for instance, one of my closest friends. A tree fell on her house and her car and she lost her job for three months and did not get any assistance from FEMA and tried over and over again. But we were able to get some FEMA assistance. And it wasn't. Given that we have not had jobs or couldn't access our house for almost three months. It was about $4,000 in total. And we still have a bunch of damages to to assess on our house, too. So, you know, the money that FEMA gave us was basically like two months of mortgage. Not really, you know, including all the things that we had to buy and all of our other bills. And, you know, it's not nothing which we're grateful for, but we have a lot of work to do on the house. There's about three inches of mold covering the basement. Everything in the basement is just is completely toast. And it's starting to get on the main floor. And we were able to do a little bit of as much control as we could ourselves. But we're going to have to hire professional service to clean out the mold. And also there's a R, we still don't have power and we have to hire an electrician to come out and figure out what's going on with that because we have to repair the line that fell on the house. It's completely broken and it's it's on us to fix it, not on the power company. And we did get the driveway repaired, so it's not a 15 foot cliff anymore, which is great.

Yeah, that's. That's positive.

That was a problem we had. We had to buy a car because we could not. I mean, we couldn't. We couldn't access our cars. It was impossible. And until about two weeks ago. So we, we bought a car and we left our two vehicles there. And we're just kind of we're trying to figure out how to navigate this remotely. But right now, living in Nashville really isn't an option for us. And there are a lot of people that don't have the luxury, you know, the privilege to leave and the opportunity to leave and live somewhere else. And they are the ones that need jobs there right now because there aren't very many. And it just doesn't really feel right to stay there and take those jobs when we have another opportunity to live in a different city.

So still work to do. But you had said you had planned to go back to Burnsville eventually, that you were committed to staying long term. So is that still the plan once you get done with all that work?

That is the plan. We we reckon we'll probably stay in Portland for about a year. And I think by then there, you know, there might be a little bit more progress in the city. There might be more jobs. We're not we're not entirely sure. We're just going to take it month by month, honestly. My boyfriend does own that house. So we are committed to either going back or figuring out how to make that work in some way or another. It is a commitment that we have to pay attention to and it is still, you know, even after the flood, it is still a really beautiful property. It's completely different. And, you know, our perspective on the beauty is going to have to shift a little bit like there's a lot of mourning of what that property used to look like and what the landscape used to be. It used to be so beautiful. We had tons of trees and now it's just kind of like bedrock.

It's just physically been reshaped.

Yeah, the river path has changed a little bit and there's there's no green anymore. Like I said, it's. It's just that rock.

What are you hearing from, you know, friends of yours that are still in the area? Like, are they thinking about leaving or are they committed to making this work and putting in the effort to build back?

It's about a half and a half. And I think people who are choosing to stay have been there a really long time and don't really know how to leave. And a lot of people don't want to because, I mean, Asheville is still such a special place and Apple watches. It's a beautiful, special place. And I will always love it and always want to want to live there and make it work. But most of my friends that are transplants or have moved there like within the last five years are leaving and some of them have already left. And I didn't get to say goodbye to a lot of my friends, and that's pretty devastating.

Yeah. Do you consider yourself a climate refugee like we hear about this phenomenon when it comes to other countries? Not so much in the US, but this storm, you know, really took a lot of people in the area by surprise. You know, and you're having to spend all this time away from where you lived. What do you think about that?

I mean, that's what that's what our friends and family are calling us. It's it's a really surreal term. You know, we are okay. We're we're fine. We're we're privileged people. Like we have friends and family all over the country that have taken us in and looked out for us. And, you know, we had family on the East Coast, North Carolina. We stayed with my my parents in Florida for three weeks and then his family in New Orleans and then my family in Denver. And we've had all these people around the country taking a stand and we were able to buy a car. We have jobs lined up in a different city like we're okay. And, you know, I feel like when I hear the term climate refugee, I think of some somebody a little bit. I don't know. I not as privileged as us because we do have somewhere to go. Right.

But you're. You're still displaced and having to find places to go.

Yeah. And I think there's just like, there's a lot of survivor's guilt, too, that comes with with that. I mean, you know, our situation is it's shitty. It really is. But. But we're okay. And I think, you know, there's a lot of people in Asheville in the area still that aren't okay, and they're still just living on their property in tents and it's winter and it's just the whole situation is, is very it's very bleak still. And a lot of the you know, most of the country has moved on. And our general experience with driving across the country over the last two weeks and people ask, you know, like servers or bartenders or just like, you know, people, they'll ask, where are you from? And we're like a loaded question. We're from we're from north here. Or like, you know, if we don't really feel like talking about it, we just say North Carolina and they're like, you're just visiting like this. And then really already we're going to talk about it, aren't we? And we kind of bring it up. And people either have heard about it briefly and they didn't understand, you know, the scale of how bad this disaster was and that it's like miles and miles and miles of destruction, like complete and utter destruction. And they don't know or they they heard about it and didn't really pay attention to the details or they had never heard about it at all. And that kind of blows my mind because in, you know, in our area, that's it's it consumes all of our lives that's still in the forefront of our minds every single day. But people across the country generally just have no clue about what happened or what the state of Asheville is. And it's very strange.

Well, so you're an artist. That's that's what you do for a living. How have you been able to keep up that work without a home base?

It's been it's been really challenging. But, I mean, I'm grateful to have work. I did get a lot of orders and people interested in buying my work, which I'm super grateful for. It gave us a little bit of extra money to have a little bit more fun on our road trip. But working was pretty challenging. I've got like a little label printer in my laptop and my boyfriend is just like packing prints and tubes and we're doing it from a hotel room. Or when we were saying it at my brother's house, we're doing it on his kitchen counter and it's been silly and stressful and just interesting to navigate. And every time I was like, gosh, needs to ship stuff out from. From Moab. Let's figure it out.

Well, so finally, what are the holidays look like for you guys? Like, how does it make you feel having to spend this time away from North Carolina when people are, you know, still really suffering and struggling, like you said, like, what does this season look like.

For us where we're not really able to go back to the East Coast? The you know, the the flights are too expensive. And we're also just kind of exhausted. We're kind of ready to experience some normalcy and we're just going to have a nice dinner and on Christmas Eve and and relax and just be grateful for, you know, where we're at. And it's just going to be you and I. We're not really going to have any family to spend time with. And I don't know, it's it's going to be a weird holiday season. It doesn't really. We've been driving everywhere and like seeing Christmas decorations and neither of us are really feeling like very Christmas this year.

Yeah. I mean, it's understandable, but wishing you nothing but the best as you continue on here, and we'll talk to you next time. Really appreciate it, Olivia.

Thanks, David. I appreciate it.

Just a heads up. We will not have a new episode this coming Wednesday. We're taking a little time off for the holidays. Hopefully you can do the same. Spend some time with family. Happy holidays from all of us here at one Thing. We'll be back on Sunday with another episode. I'll talk to you then. One thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers. John Dianora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage and Katie Hinman. I'll talk to you next time.