Taylor Bonnell watched as her two toddlers, Aria, 5, and Silas, 1, played on the playground at Jack McLean Park in a carefree manner, despite their displacement and her concern for their Western North Carolina home. The mother grew up in Tallahassee, but now her hometown has become a refuge after Hurricane Helene destroyed her community on Sept. 26.
“It’s familiar so it’s really comfortable to be here. I couldn’t have asked for a better place to be to ride out the storm. We weren’t even up there, and it still affected us,” Bonnell told the Tallahassee Democrat Friday, over a week after Helene wreaked havoc on the southeastern states. “It affected us more than we originally thought.”
Bonnell and her husband, Ethan, had no idea Western North Carolina would be so badly hit.
“There was no warning. I just remember there were flash flood warnings as it was happening on my app and that was it, so there were no evacuation warnings,” Bonnell said. “They didn’t know, it just happened so suddenly and so quickly.”