“The memories are still there. But all the physical things that go with it are just floating,” said Ryan Rector as he waded through the wreckage of Penland & Sons, his third-generation family department store. In the image above, a neighbor rescues a mud-caked family photo album and hands it to Dennis Rector (left), Ryan’s dad.
The store sits on Main Street in Marshall, North Carolina, one of many communities devastated by Hurricane Helene. Much of downtown Marshall was destroyed, and its roughly 800 residents were left to salvage what they could.
Helene struck the southeastern United States in September, killing over 200 people—the highest death toll from a hurricane in the U.S. since Katrina in 2005. Days later, Hurricane Milton hit the same region. Together, the two storms caused an estimated $80 billion of damage.
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