Editor’s note: Every Friday, “Weekend Plug-in” meets readers at the intersection of faith and news. Click to join nearly 10,000 subscribers who get this column delivered straight to their inbox. Got feedback or ideas? Email Bobby Ross Jr.
By Bobby Ross Jr. | Religion Unplugged
Idon’t even know where to start.
The stories and pictures of Hurricane Helene’s aftermath — particularly in western North Carolina — are unreal.
As I write this, the official number of lives lost stands at 215, making Helene the deadliest hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland since Katrina in 2005, The Associated Press reports. And the search for victims — hundreds of them, according to NPR — has dragged into a second week.
Roughly half the fatalities were in North Carolina, while dozens more died in South Carolina and Georgia, AP notes.
“The last time a storm like this hit was in the Book of Genesis when Noah had to build an ark,” Zeb Smathers, the mayor of Canton, North Carolina, told AP.
As a journalist, I’ve covered death and destruction for decades.
I heard the boom, saw the smoke and rushed to the scene of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which claimed 168 lives.
Later, I ignored storm warnings and drove through the dark to talk to survivors after deadly tornadoes ravaged central Oklahoma in 1999. (Older and hopefully wiser, I wouldn’t do that again. I’d wait for the all-clear from meteorologists.)
But no disaster scene overwhelmed me like Katrina nearly two decades ago.
This column appears in the online magazine Religion Unplugged.
Photo by Bill McMannis, via Wikimedia Commons
Faith. Family. Fastballs. 