Dozens of ninth graders from Girard College just returned home to Philadelphia after being stranded in North Carolina while on a class trip.
Action News was there for an embrace between a mother and her daughter after a long and stressful week.
“I’ve been on top of a mountain in North Carolina.. stranded basically,” said 14-year-old Tiara Dargan.
Dargan was one of 31 Girard College freshmen who embarked on an Outward Bound Expedition to North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, well before the threat of Hurricane Helene moved in.
“It was a lot of rain during the time we were camping. We had to do a lot of lightning drills. It was constant rain and thunder,” Tiara recalled. “It was a bunch of landslides and trees falling.”
The students were supposed to come home last Friday but with powerful force of Helene destroying parts of Asheville, there was no way.
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Tiara was able to speak to her parents, only briefly, to let them know they were sheltering in place in a cabin on the mountain.