The total damage from Hurricane Helene to North Carolina – be it physical, psychological or economic – is difficult to quantify. But the numbers reported by the Office of State Budget and Management are harrowing: over 100 deaths, US$59.6 billion in damages and thousands of homes destroyed, as of Dec. 13, 2024.

More than two months after the storm struck land on Sep. 27, small businesses are still struggling to recover from the flooding and lost inventory. Families remain displaced, their homes laid to waste.

But natural disasters like hurricanes don’t just endanger homes and infrastructure. There are items at risk that might not have price tags attached to them, but nonetheless matter a great deal to survivors: family photographs, heirlooms, journals, letters and documents.

That’s where Leah Bright and Brian Michael Lione come in.

Bright is an objects conservator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where she’s responsible for the long-term preservation of the collection, including preventive care and repairs. Lione manages the International Cultural Heritage Protection Program at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute, supporting disaster response globally, including in Iraq and the U.S.

A few weeks after the hurricane struck, they flew down to North Carolina to support the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Save Your Family Treasures program, providing demonstrations and resources to survivors explaining how to salvage their damaged belongings.

In an interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, they describe their experiences on the ground, while relaying some simple steps that can be taken to better protect family heirlooms from natural disasters.

When did cultural preservation become a part of disaster preparedness?

Leah Bright: I think within the profession of conservation, the 1966 floods in Florence, Italy, represented a big moment that sparked the formulation of a lot of disaster response procedures. The floods caused severe damage to a lot of cultural institutions there, and conservators from all around the world went to help salvage affected heritage items like books and paintings.

In the wake of that event, there were a lot of papers and articles written about the best ways to respond to disasters with conservation and cultural heritage in mind.

Brian Michael Lione: In terms of the Smithsonian getting involved, I believe that goes back to the Haitian earthquake in 2010. Richard Kurin, who’s still at the Smithsonian, formed a team of people to respond directly to the disaster in Haiti. He deployed dozens of conservators to support recovery efforts in Haiti, at the request of the Haitian government.

Before then, I’d say it was much more ad hoc. A lot of federal agencies did this work, but they weren’t coordinated to the extent that they are today. Today the Smithsonian and FEMA currently co-sponsor the Heritage Emergency National Task Force – HENTF – which connects over 60 organizations, including several federal agencies.

This network is what allows us to get down to North Carolina, or to other disaster areas, and coordinate with government agencies.

How did your trip to North Carolina come together?

Bright: Representatives from the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative are in contact with FEMA and HENTF, which organize the Save Your Family Treasures program. They expressed a need for additional volunteers from the Smithsonian, so Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative representatives reached out to Smithsonian staff who had completed the required training to see who was interested. We expressed interest. There was a little flurry of activity and logistical details. Soon enough, we landed in Charlotte.

Lione: We arrived on a Tuesday and went to a Joint Field Office. That’s the larger kind of disaster-level, disaster-wide command center. It’s where FEMA coordinates its larger scale efforts with state governments, local governments and other bodies. And then all of these disaster response centers, or DRCs, are set up in local communities to provide support to survivors. I think there were as many as 13 or 14 of them, and some would open and then close depending on need.

For example, one DRC was in a school in Asheville, but they wanted to reopen the school, so they asked FEMA to move out of the school and move into a temporary location. The second week we were there, that DRC was, I believe, in a tent. The DRCs were as close to the centers of need as possible. They’re typically easy for the public to access, so that means there’s a facility, parking and accessible roads. FEMA personnel primarily staff the DRCs.

So survivors will come in if they’ve started a request for FEMA assistance online or on the phone. They can continue it there in person with staffers. Or if they haven’t started, they can sit down and start that process. There were also state workers there and local government employees who could answer questions about aid.

Our program, Save Your Family Treasures, is set up in a way so that as the survivors come in and have questions about assistance, we can also hop in and offer advice and tips for how to salvage objects of importance. The initiative provides information on salvaging books, photographs, records, tapes, paintings, framed artwork, clothing and even furniture and leather to a lesser extent.

In the case of the hurricane, it was really about offering tips for how to save objects that are going to get wet. If they’re not addressed quickly, within a week or two, mold is going to set in, and some of these things could very easily become too far gone.

So you arrived a little over three weeks after the disaster had struck. What did it look like on the ground?

Bright: I had anticipated being placed in areas that had experienced widespread destruction, and figured we’d be working in these wastelands. But most of the locations where I was stationed appeared relatively normal. Occasionally, I noticed patches of trees that had been blown down or places where you could see the water level had risen – it was really muddy, or there would be water lines on buildings. But generally, in my experience, the Disaster Recovery Centers were in safe and easily accessible locations.

Lione: My first week, I was in a place called Old Fort. It was just east of Asheville, and it’s built along a stream bed. On I-40, you could see stains of mud on the road from the mud slides that the state had recently cleared away. That road had only been opened recently. Getting off of I-40 and into town, we crossed over two small bridges. That route was completely clear. There were piles of debris here and there, but they had prioritized getting the main roads open, the bridges open, the railroads open.

But a block or two off that main road, I saw several houses that had been knocked off their foundations, several that had been completely destroyed, and water lines high up on brick buildings. There were massive piles of debris everywhere, and people were parking on their lawns because their driveways were just piled high with stuff. Those big, electric highway construction signs were flashing messages about curfews.

Were there any interactions with survivors that stood out?

Bright: There was a wide range of reasons why people showed up to chat with us. Some people didn’t experience much damage at all, while others had entire homes that had been flooded or destroyed. Overall, I was really struck by both the range of damage, but also how everyone had an incredible amount of gratitude, even if they didn’t have much left to salvage.

One woman that I spoke with was so grateful to have come across our table because just that morning, she had put a lot of belongings out on the curb that she had assumed were irreparably damaged and had to be thrown away. But after we demonstrated how she might be able to salvage them, she rushed back home to try to save them.

We often recommend freezing photographs or books, since that can buy people time if they don’t have the bandwidth to deal with damaged belongings in the moment. People were usually surprised to learn that photographs that are stuck together can often be safely separated and preserved for the future.

There was a family who came in that had come across a big batch of photographs from a neighbor who lived a mile away, whose home had been swept away by the flood waters. They recognized who she was and were thrilled to be able to assist that person with salvaging her photographs.

Most people would come to our table with a little bit of skepticism. Some of them didn’t understand why we were there. It seemed like a fluffy kind of service in comparison to some of the more serious FEMA funding conversations taking place. But I could also sense the relief when survivors learned about the steps they could take to preserve their heirlooms. Survivors might feel powerless filling out seemingly endless paperwork and waiting to hear about available resources, so we worked to provide tangible steps survivors could take in the interim to bring them some much-needed hope.

Lione: We had instructions to send people away with. It was a lot of information to digest at once. So these handouts were helpful because they included very basic steps to save heirlooms – for example, for photographs: Get out three turkey trays and put distilled water in each of them. Let your photos soak for a while. They may pull apart. Simple instructions like that.

These were tasks that these people could carry out on their own. So many of them had lost everything – their lives were out of control and completely upended. So I could sense some relief when they realized they could watch a demonstration, take some information and then head home – or what’s left of home – to do something right now, as opposed to wait for an inspector, wait for an adjuster or wait for a road crew.

A couple of moments stood out to me. We had one person come in and say, “I have an urn that got wet. What do I do with that?” That was a bit of a unique thing, and that’s not really a conservation question. However, I happen to know a funeral director back home, so I texted him and found out that urns with cremations that are of certain age or era are likely sealed in a bag. They might be sealed in two bags. And so we were able to provide some basic information for what they might do with the urn to see if it had been inundated before they opened it.

The other thing that really struck me was how many people said, “Oh, well, this has happened to me at least five times, probably more.” Or: “We moved here to be safe from hurricanes.” Or: “We’ve already lost everything, once or twice.”

So our role can also assume more of a preparedness element: If we assume it’s going to happen again, what can you do ahead of time? We offered advice about where to store your most treasured possessions and how to buy waterproof totes. We emphasized the importance of making copies of key documents and scanning and uploading them to the cloud. As heritage professionals, we do all of this with our collections.

The phrase “climate change” came up several times. No one turned their nose up at it. People were aware – particularly those who had moved to North Carolina to avoid hurricanes – that floods, high winds and strange weather patterns are probably the new normal. So they were able to take some of that preparedness information away with them and think, “OK, well, this is something important to know – not just to recover from this most recent disaster, but to prepare for the next one.”