Scenes of Helene's destruction in Eastern Tennessee. Photo credits: Dustin Goff (house); Kayla Lambert (truck)

As residents in the Southeast continue to confront the aftermath of catastrophic damage from Hurricane Helene, the library community is stepping in to assist where it can. Operational public libraries are offering free WiFi and other services in the hard-hit areas, and individuals are doing what they can for their communities and colleagues.

Dustin Hensley is the library media specialist at Elizabethton (TN) High School and Tennessee Association of School Librarians (TASL) president. While Hensley’s family is safe and his home and school made it through the storm without damage, that is not the case for many in his area.

“Our town and the surrounding county have been hit pretty hard,” he said. “Lots of lost homes, businesses, and even schools and hospitals. People were staying at our high school, but have been shifted to a local church while our school acts as the local hub of operations for Red Cross and local/state/federal emergency personnel.”

Hensley says he has been keeping in touch with students and families. A donation page has been set up to get funds directly to the district’s families in need. The district was on fall break the week of October 7 and not scheduled to return to classes until Tuesday, October 15. What will happen in the coming weeks remains unknown.

As TASL president, Hensley is looking beyond his district.

“Right now we are still doing a lot of assessing of needs,” he said of libraries across the region and state. “Many of us have not been able to visit our libraries to really know what might have happened to our collections or spaces. I think the most important thing right now, though, is the strong sense of community that we have as librarians, authors, and readers. It has been so uplifting to get messages from across the country over the past several days, checking and seeing what can be done to help.”

Hensley is already taking steps to help librarians statewide and beyond.

“We are looking into different ways we can fundraise to support librarians who were in areas that were devastated by this natural disaster,” he said. “I talked yesterday with Barnes & Noble about possibly having a statewide book fair day where a portion of all proceeds would go to TASL to help these librarians. I am also going to be offering grant writing assistance to anyone who would like to apply for the Dollar General Beyond Words grant for disaster relief in libraries. We will be looking for more ways we can support as we gain a better understanding of the needs of our librarians across the region.

“I would also like to reach out to the presidents of the school library associations in the other states who were impacted by Hurricane Helene and see if there is work we can do to help each other.”

While the Elizabethton High School survived Helene, the nearby one that Hensley attended, Hampton High School, suffered significant damage. The Carter County Board of Education held a special meeting to allocate funds for cleanup and repairs to the school, according to local news reports. The district is assessing options for getting students back to classes as quickly as possible, including temporary schooling in trailers or remote learning—although poor infrastructure makes the latter a less likely choice, the director of the county schools told NewsChannel11.

Tennessee, of course, is only one of many states that suffered severe damage from the storm that killed more than 200 people, with many still unaccounted for. North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and West Virginia residents continue to try to comprehend this disaster and figure out next steps as they clean up amid ongoing power outages and a lack of resources. 

Through the crisis, public libraries have stepped up to offer their services. Hensley says his local public library is open and offering services, including WiFi, and in Buncombe County, NC, photos have shown people gathered outside a branch in Asheville on their phones using the free WiFi. Hensley, meanwhile, is collecting donations to bring comfort to those in nearby shelters.

“I am currently working on getting donations to purchase new books to deliver to the shelters so that every evacuee can have one,” he said. I can't imagine what it must be like to lose everything you have, so I want to provide them with some book-shaped comfort that can be a possession they take with them. Books can bring escape, can bring hope. That's what I'm hoping to deliver.”