Tiffany Zorica camping on her lawn to raise funds for North Carolina flood victims. Jeremy Brown/The Portager

Atwater family is on a mission to help North Carolina hurricane victims

On Friday, Sept. 27, 2024, high winds and rain from Hurricane Helene swept through Western North Carolina with ferocity causing $60 billion in damage and taking over 100 lives in the state.

A few days after the storm hit North Carolina, Atwater resident Tiffany Zorica and her daughter, Simmie Zorica, began seeking volunteers on Facebook to outfit North Carolina flood victims with campers and supplies.

“I want people to understand what we’re doing,” Zorica said. “We’re having to raise funds for these people, because these people have nothing if we don’t give it to them. It might be a volunteer from Ohio, and one from Michigan, and one from Tennessee, and it might be a couple of people from western North Carolina, but we just all kinda come together and we find a way.”

Through Facebook, Zorica connected with Cajun Navy Relief, a volunteer group that provides immediate rescue and relief during natural disasters. Along with Cajun Navy Relief and several other groups that Tiffany connected with on Facebook, she raised funds and identified a husband and wife in need of assistance.

“We were going to collect supplies and take them down to western North Carolina,” Zorica said. “By the time the week came and we were ready to leave, we had 18 people and eight trucks and trailers, and we had to beg in the community to get extra drivers, because we had too many trailers because of all the donations. When we got back, we were just so compelled, like, we have to do more.”

It wasn’t long before they recruited more volunteers and donated their first camper trailer stocked with supplies to a family in need.

Donated items in Zorica’s garage will soon reach flood victims. Jeremy Brown/The Portager

“Our next goal was to get down there and get this couple into a camper,” Zorica said. “There’s a husband and wife and their newborn baby, and their temporary housing was coming up to where they had to vacate. It was 10 o’clock at night. They had nowhere to go. They had no money. They had been starving themselves to pay for the baby’s food, and they were depending on people like us to network.”

On that trip, Tiffany and Simmie used $5,000 of the donations to buy eight generators, nine kerosene heaters, seven propane heaters and propane.

The campers are stocked with everyday items that people need to survive, as well as some of the things that victims lost to the flood, such as clothes.

The moment Joseph Hudson was gifted a camper trailer through Tiffany Zorica’s fund raising efforts. Submitted video

“We have a checklist,” Tiffany said. “We put a crock pot, a can opener, dishes, Q-tips, toilet paper, and paper towels. We fully outfit this, and then each person that we know is going to live in the camper, we buy them a full wardrobe, so we get them five to seven T-shirts, five to seven long sleeve shirts, five to seven sweatshirts, five to seven pairs of pants, two pairs of sweatpants, two pairs of lounging pants, a pair of tennis shoes, boots, socks, underwear. We try to fully outfit them.”

After their third trip to North Carolina, Tiffany’s truck sustained damages while delivering campers to victims living in the mountainous regions surrounding Asheville. Funding was running low, as well, so they planned an awareness event that took place on Dec. 20.

The event included Tiffany camping on her lawn in a tent for 24 hours in solidarity with the victims of North Carolina. For 24 hours she confined herself to a tent with only straw bales for bedding, a tiny heater and snacks.

She posted video clips of the event to her Facebook page, which drew enough attention for Tiffany and Simmie to continue to send aid to North Carolina.

“I was trying desperately to raise the funds that we needed for a couple more campers to get moved,” Tiffany said.

Tiffany Zorica set up a second tent as a storage space for donated items. Jeremy Brown/The Portager
Tiffany Zorica at her home in Atwater in December 2024. Jeremy Brown/The Portager

At the moment, five campers have been delivered to flood victims and three are ready to be delivered in the near future, but Tiffany and Simmie aren’t taking the campers down anymore. Instead, they’re focusing their efforts on fundraising and recruiting volunteers that are willing to transport the campers.

One of the next campers to be delivered to North Carolina was donated by recipients found by Sally and Bill Chaffins of Olivet, Mich.; the Chaffins are volunteers that Tiffany met through Cajun Navy Relief’s Facebook page. The Chaffins will plan a time to drive the camper to Atwater, where Tiffany and Simmie will stock it with the essentials, then the Chaffins will continue the trip to North Carolina for delivery.

In the weeks before Tiffany and Simmie connected with the Chaffins on Facebook, the Chaffins had bought a camper and taken it to Ashville and donated it to Christy McMahon and her four children, but the Chaffins wanted to do more.

During her trip to North Carolina, Tiffany Zorica encountered a group of soldiers going door to door to check on families. Submitted photo

“One night I went to bed thinking, ‘What could I do?’ And I woke up and I felt like I was inspired to get a camper,” Sally Chaffins said. “So my husband and I bought a camper and got what supplies we could.”

They delivered the camper to a mother of four children. After meeting the Zoricas online, the group bought another camper and delivered that one too.

On her first trip to Asheville, Sally Chaffins said she was overwhelmed by the sight of widespread mountains of rubble intermixed with overturned cars, people’s belongings and unanchored houses that had drifted away and been demolished.

“The worst thing you would see would be a piece of clothing in a tree, or a dog’s dish, or a child’s toy; then you know you’re not just looking at garbage, you’re looking at people’s lives,” Chaffins said. “When you’d see this, people would just stop and bow their head down, because, you know, they were still finding people at that time. I guess they still are, but not alive, of course.”

She added, “Not everybody can just go buy a second home. That’s your wealth, and it got washed away. If my house got washed away today, I’d be homeless because I couldn’t afford to go out and buy another one.”

Many of the flood victims around Asheville have poor cell phone service because of their location in the mountains, but The Portager was able to connect with Christy McMahon to get an insider’s perspective on the hardships that Asheville flood victims are dealing with.

Flood waters destroyed countless homes. Submitted photo

It was Friday, Sept. 27, 2024, when Asheville, North Carolina resident Christy McMahon woke up in the middle of the night at her ex-sister-in-law’s mountain home, where she had decided to spend the night due to severe rain. But the rain got worse and brought with it high winds, conditions that soon became a nightmare for her and her four young children.

“I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning to… it sounded like gunshots. It was, like, zapping, and banging, and whipping, and when I looked out the window, all the trees were snapping and it was just pouring down rain,” McMahon said.

Hurricane Helene had reached North Carolina, leaving McMahon stranded in the mountains with minimal food, no water and no utilities. In the following hours, the deadly storm decimated thousands of houses, caused at least 103 deaths across North Carolina and left the area with catastrophic damage.

Over a week later, McMahon, her children, along with her ex-sister-in-law and her children, walked two miles out of the mountains and started hitchhiking. They stopped at a small store to get supplies, where the cashier was using a calculator to make transactions due to widespread power outages. On their way to Asheville, the stores were being looted around them as they traversed downed trees and debris left in the road by the flooding. Eventually, she and her children were picked up by the pastor of a church from Asheville who let them stay at the church. She eventually returned home, only to find the home flooded and her belongings covered in mold: she lost everything.

Many of the victims of the flood lost everything, including their driver’s licenses, social security cards and birth certificates, which makes it difficult for them to find jobs, as well as get help from FEMA.

“The people that have been displaced, FEMA isn’t helping,” McMahon said. “FEMA has not helped my situation. They gave me $750 and then they gave me $300 for cleanup. My personal belongings have been ruined and FEMA is not willing to pay unless I have receipts, but even if I did have receipts, all that’s destroyed. So there’s no way to really prove exactly what all I’ve lost other than pictures. What we’re going through down here is the funding. And it’s been raining on top of that, so the people that got campers, they got tents, they need propane. We need propane, we need help with gas, we need food.”

Recovery is underway for Asheville and the surrounding areas, but there’s still a long way to go until things are back to normal.

“There are places that are completely recovered, that’s true. There are people who are scamming, that’s true, but there are definitely people that are still suffering,” Zorica said. “Everything is a dramatic obstacle for these people. I just want to raise awareness so we can raise funds. I just want to send one more camper until we can say, OK, we’ve done all that we can do and we have to pass the ball to someone else.”

If you’d like to donate or volunteer to the Zoricas’ North Carolina relief project you can contact Tiffany Zorica at 330-814-7588.

Jeremy Brown
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