Storm Teller

Photo by Danielle Desnoyers

Parachute journalism, just dropping in for a few days or weeks and then moving on to the next story, has never interested me,” says ALLISON JOYCE.

Joyce is not someone to bounce from city to city as the ever-changing news cycle develops. I recently walked with her across destroyed roads in Burnsville, North Carolina, on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene to photograph her and to ask about the past year of her life, which was mostly spent in Western North Carolina.

A photojournalist who has lived and covered news in Bangladesh, India, Thailand, and New York City, she has called Wilmington home since 2022. Over the past few years, she has heavily covered politics and election cycles. But a lot changed on September 27, 2024 – for her, and for thousands of others.

A sheriff’s deputy and cadaver dog search the site of a destroyed chemical plant in May of this year in Green Mountain while Peggy Williams waits nearby. The scent of possible remains had been detected during a river cleanup the day before. Williams hoped the search would help locate the body of her partner of twenty-seven years, Lenny Widawski, who remains missing.

Helene hit the United States in Florida as a Category 4 hurricane. As it made its way through Georgia and South Carolina before affecting North Carolina, it weakened. But it still had enough momentum to get inland to a part of the state that doesn’t usually deal with that amount of wind and moisture. The result was mountain ranges and waterways being inundated with rain. Rivers and creeks turned into raging waters strong enough to move houses off foundations and bend shipping containers around poles. Over 1,400 landslides wiped pathways through residential and wooded areas alike.

Joyce was working for the international news agency AFP at the time and relentlessly pitched her editor to send her to the mountains to document the storm’s impacts. With the power being out across the region, reports were sketchy about the scale of the damage, but it was clear this was a life-changing event. It took some time to get the approval to go, but when she did, that’s when her journey started. She was challenged finding gas and bottled water, but she made it across the state to Western North Carolina on October 2, 2024.

TOP: Volunteer Chuck Pritchett and Larry Globokar search through an island of debris near Widawski’s house in Relief, North Carolina, in November as part of the ongoing search for the Yancey County musician’s remains. BOTTOM: Vrindavan Gabbard meets with Pritchett and the other volunteers at their camp to discuss funding for the search efforts.

Six weeks later, she was still there working alongside locals and volunteers and sleeping in her car. “Oddly enough, that turned out to be one of the best things I could have done. I slept at distribution and relief coordination sites alongside volunteers and relief groups. People seemed to appreciate that I wasn’t just dropping in and out; I was literally living alongside them,” Joyce recalls. “Every morning, I’d open the car door, bleary-eyed like everyone else, and step straight into coordination meetings.

“That’s how I learned in real time where they were still searching for bodies, which communities were cut off, who was running out of insulin, and which roads were still impassable,” she says. “Car camping gave me a clear view of the recovery and allowed me to embed in a way that hotels never could. It’s also how I began to notice the outsized role military veterans were playing in the response, which became a Washington Post story about veterans finding new purpose in disaster relief and, later on, a New York Times story about grassroots disaster response stepping in as FEMA scaled back.”

FROM TOP: A photo of Widawski’s property is seen at the site of his former home in November in Relief. A piece of music from Widawski’s father and other possessions, including photos of Widawski and his longtime partner, Peggy Williams, recovered by Pritchett and his team are shown at the site. Williams in September of this year is photographed in Bakersville.

In addition to those media outlets, Joyce did work for Getty Images, The Assembly, the Associated Press, and Reuters. She says she realized how “crucial it is to have journalists not just in D.C., New York, or L.A., but embedded in the places where Americans actually live, telling the stories that might otherwise go untold.”

Hurricane Helene, the deadliest storm in the U.S. since Katrina in 2005, was a national story, and roughly 75% of the stories Joyce worked on in the mountains were ones she pitched to editors.

She was invested – so much so that she stopped camping in her car and got an apartment in the mountains. She’s been a dual-city renter since November of last year.

When I asked her about any stories that really stuck out in her mind, she gave two examples.

One was the role of military veterans in the recovery process. It was interesting to see the skills they learned be used so effectively in areas such as search and recovery as well as operational planning, Joyce says. But more than that, she adds, it was seeing these veterans fall back into a world they understood, finding themselves again, being surrounded by a brotherhood again, and having a mission again.

TOP: Photojournalist Allison Joyce is shown in the field following Hurricane Helene. BOTTOM: Williams sits at her former property and holds a candle up as she looks across the river at a vigil in September for victims of Hurricane Helene.

The second story was that of a musician named Lenny Widawski, who disappeared when his house was swept away in the floodwaters.

Joyce worked on that story for almost an entire year, photographing a group of volunteers who refused to stop looking through every debris pile for Widawski’s body or clues on what happened to him. To this day, he has never been found. She saw them build a relationship with Widawski’s partner of twenty-seven years, Peggy Williams.

“Through Peggy’s love and grief, the story of Lenny became a way to show what Hurricane Helene actually took away from people in Western North Carolina – not just infrastructure, but entire lives and the futures people thought they had,” Joyce says.

A year later, Joyce says she is still spending much of her time in Western North Carolina in part because “it became clear this was a story I needed to stay with.”

“The scope and the enormity of the rebuilding became clearer every day, and I knew people here would be grappling with the aftermath for years or even generations to come,” Joyce says. “While the national spotlight was fading, people here were just beginning the second phase of recovery: finding housing, holding funerals, rebuilding roads and homes, and figuring out what comes next. That was when the real work started for them, and it didn’t feel right to walk away.”

FROM TOP: Williams talks with her neighbor Michael Cooper and his daughter Kacey Cooper, who also lost their home in Hurricane Helene, as well as Cooper’s parents, Boyd and Janie, in Green Mountain. Valerie Ludwig, Williams’ daughter, pours flower petals into the Toe River during NC Outdoor Adventures’ memorial vigil and retreat for Hurricane Helene survivors. Elissa Truesdale plays the violin during the vigil.

To view more of photographer Allison Joyce’s work, go to allisonjoyce.com

 Want more WILMA? Click here to sign up for our WILMA newsletters and announcements.