In this video, you’ll hear how real Americans talk about a natural disaster as I interview Asheville, NC residents about the recent flooding. This English lesson focuses on listening, vocabulary, and American pronunciation in a real-world context.
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Video Transcript:
I recently visited Asheville, North Carolina about one year after the devastating Hurricane Helene.
North Carolina is cleaning up from the worst flooding ever on record for the state.
Today, we’re going to talk with some residents of Asheville and study English vocabulary in this English lesson.
I’m Rachel. I have a background in opera singing and I’ve been teaching the American accent to non-native speakers for over 20 years. Scan this QR code or go to rachelenglish.com/free to get my free course, The Top Three Ways to Master the American Accent. It will change the way you think about speaking American English.
On September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helen went over Asheville, North Carolina, a region already drenched with rain, causing devastating flooding and killing over a hundred people in North Carolina. I sat down with an Asheville resident, Rodney, the father of one of my dear friends from growing up in Florida, to hear about that day.
Okay, we live on Swannanoa River Road and uh, we’re about two and a half blocks from the river itself. And when the storm hit, the next morning, I went down to the river as close as I could get to it. And it took couple of days for the river to get to where I could get across the bridge. And there were literally at least 100 cars and at least uh, 25 to 50 semi-trailers.
This is a semi-trailer. This part is called a tractor truck. The whole thing together is called a semi-trail truck, but it’s usually shortened to just semi. There are a lot of semis on the road today.
There were literally at least a hundred cars.
Literally is a word that gets misused in English a lot. The meaning is really, actually, it’s a fact. It’s not an exaggeration. It gets misused when people use it even though they’re exaggerating.
There were literally millions of cars in the river. No, there were not. In this case, you shouldn’t use literally, but here the numbers that Rodney is giving me are real. So, he uses the word literally so that I know he’s not exaggerating.
There were literally at least 100 cars in at least uh, 25 to 50 semi-trailers that were scattered along the riverbank.
Scatter as a verb means to cause to go in different directions. Here, as an adjective with the ed ending, it’s scattered. Another great vocabulary word that means the same thing is strewn. The cars and trucks were strewn along the road by the flood.
And at least uh 25 to 50 semi-trailers that were scattered along the riverbank and smashed. And I was looking under one of the uh, huge semi-trailers and there was a dead cow, a big one who had floated down the river which had to have been a couple of miles that he floated to get to where he landed uh, there near us. When the police and the rescuers came along, they had to check each one of the cars and the trailers and they would put a big X with a circle to show that there were no bodies inside the cars.
Did they find some bodies?
Oh yeah, they found bodies. When I was standing there when the water was still rising, I was a good block away from the river and it was coming towards me and I had to keep backing up as the flood was coming through. I was taking a picture down towards the other side of the river and there was this house that came floating down the road that was put on a river road and he the house hit the light but it kept going and it ended up in uh, Lowe’s garden center.
Wow.
Which was three or four blocks away.
Here, he’s describing a house that floated down the river and ran into a light. By this he means a traffic light. This was a surprising occurrence. The flood lifting whole houses with people inside off of their foundations.
This is the foundation of the house. That is the part of the house that’s underground that supports the structure of the house itself. We can use this word for situations other than buildings as well. You could use it to mean the starting point or the basis of something. For example, the foundation of a good relationship is communication. It’s also used in makeup. It’s the base layer applied before other makeup.
What happened was I was trying to find a way to get to Sarah and Chris’s house here and I went out to 40 to the next exit on the way to Black Mountain and I got off the exit to try to come back into Asheville, but uh, the bridge was out. It had been washed away. So, I stopped by the bridge and got out to take some pictures. And uh there were some people that were by the river and they had these large sticks and they were poking down the river on the bank uh looking for things. And I asked the man that was there, I said, “Uh, what are you looking for?” And he says, “We’re looking for bodies.” And he told me that they lived on the hill up from the river and they had walked down as the flood was beginning to where these two houses were in a row. And there was a couple in one of the houses and they were trying to help them get out, but the river had surrounded the house. And so, while they were trying to do all this, the two houses lifted up off their foundation and one of them floated down the river and hit the bridge, which was what knocked out the bridge. And the other one went down a street and turned on its side. And that was the house that the couple was in. And the rescue people came and they cut a hole in the roof to try to get the people out. But what they discovered was the people had already washed down the river, so they weren’t able to save them. And that’s what they were looking for, the couple.
You couldn’t imagine. I’ve been through probably 12 to 15 hurricanes in Florida, and I had never ever seen anything as bad as this.
This is Rodney’s daughter, Sarah, my friend from high school. I get together with Sarah and six other awesome ladies from growing up every year. And this year, we were in Asheville.
Nothing. We had no access or no way to communicate with anyone from the outside world.
The outside world is a term used to describe the rest of the world outside of a restricted remote space. It’s used to show a lack of communication with the rest of the world. Sarah was able to contact her neighbors only. She couldn’t get out of her neighborhood because of all the trees that fell on the roads and she couldn’t reach any family, including her parents who also lived in Asheville because the cell service was down. They couldn’t get news either. There was no internet.
They were cut off from the outside world.
We had no access or no way to communicate with anyone from the outside world. And so we lost our cell service like a few hours after the storm ended and we so we, so couldn’t communicate.
Even to know if your parents were okay?
No. So I wasn’t able to communicate with my parents for over 24 hours and we couldn’t get out. So, we had to cut our way out of our neighborhood. So, people were just walking around with chainsaws, like sawing, chainsawing the trees so they could get out of the neighborhoods. Um, so we could get to them, but we couldn’t contact anyone in my family to let them know we were okay. Um, and we had, so everyone else in the world knew what was going on and we had no idea, because we didn’t have any way to find out.
The city of Asheville has done an amazing job trying to clean up the debris over the past year, but there was still evidence as we drove around the town. I asked Sarah about their lives right after the storm came through.
So Sarah, when the hurricane hit, you were thinking probably not a big deal?
Yeah. I mean, having been born and raised in Florida, I’ve lived through lots of hurricanes, and we don’t have hurricanes in western North Carolina. So, I thought it was basically going to just be a lot of rain.
And it was a lot of rain.
And it was a lot of rain, which was part of the problem because it had been raining for 2 days before the hurricane even hit.
Mhm. One thing that blew me away was—
If you’re blown away by something, that means you can hardly believe it. You were in no way expecting it. One thing that blew me away was you said you were without power and water for how long?
Yes. So, we were without power for a little over a month and we were without water for over two months.
Wow.
Yes.
So, how did you deal with not having power? Let’s do that. Conquer that first.
So, it uh, was really good at getting our kids to go to bed when it was dark because it was pitch black.
Pitch black is a phrase that we use to mean the darkest darkest black, not a speck of any other color. Pitch is a thick sticky substance that comes from the distillation residue of coal. And this has been used for waterproofing. I think of it especially as something that’s used in roofing. It can also be used in paving. So, it wasn’t just dark or very dark, it was pitch black.
So, it uh was really good at getting our kids to go to bed when it was dark because it was pitch black. Once the sun went down, that was it. You couldn’t do anything else.
Were they in school?
No. So, the kids were out of school for a little over a month.
Mhmm.
Um, and so yeah, we used flashlights and candles, but luckily the weather was good. So during the day, we just opened up the house and kids spent a lot of time playing outside.
Okay, that’s nice.
It’s not like Covid where you couldn’t leave and interact with other people.
So it was literally the opposite of Covid. So, in Covid, everybody was out of school, but no one could be near each other. Here, everyone was out of school and everyone came together. So, all of the neighborhood kids, all of the neighbors, we all got together, we had dinner together, we spent time playing together, hanging out.
That’s nice.
Yeah. So that part was good.
Okay. So let me show you how we had to do water when we were at without water for 2 months.
Sometimes you don’t realize all the things you need water for until you don’t have it anymore. Like:
Flush a toilet.
To flush the toilet, to clean dishes, to take showers. Um, anything you need water for, we had to come down here to the creek and get.
Well, luckily you have a creek in your yard and it’s just gorgeous here.
Creek, stream, brook, river. Generally, a brook and a creek are considered to be smaller than a stream and a stream is smaller than a river. We can also use the term stream or river to refer to a constant flow of something. Stream is probably more common. A stream of people came through for the grand opening of the new store. We got a river of complaints after we changed our store hours. The revenue stream of the business was not interrupted by Covid.
Multiple times a day, my husband and I would bring buckets down and we would fill five gallon buckets of water. And then we would walk them up back to the house and then we would use that water, like I said, for cooking, for washing our hands, for flushing toilets, for taking baths. So, we would have to boil the water before we used it for anything. Um, and so we were constantly boiling water. Then my husband made a sink system for us.
The reason why this photo is so dark is because, well, they had no electricity, therefore no lights.
Then my husband made a sink system for us with two containers, one for hot water, one for cold water, and a pipe system that we could turn a valve on and off and have flowing water because he knew we were going to be without water for a pretty long time. And luckily, I’m married to an engineer, so.
Rodney didn’t have a creek, so they came up with a different way to get water.
We live on the fourth floor on the corner apartment. And there were two elderly couples that lived on our floor down the hall from us. And, so I had to go down four flights of stairs because there was no elevator without electricity. And we had buckets uh, and we were getting the buckets, dipping them in the swimming pool and taking the water back up so they could flush their toilets.
Wow.
And I did that for a week and then I, I couldn’t do it anymore. I was just so worn out.
Yeah.
So, uh, others took over to try to help them. In our apartment complex, they brought a big tanker with water in it and they brought a couple of showers where you could take a shower and that was the second or third week.
That is crazy. That was a lot to live through, Rodney.
It was a lot to live through. And the guy that was the head of the water department for the county lived in our complex in our building. And uh, at the end of the first week, they had to send his employees that were uh, checking the river and the water pipes. Um, had to send them to get therapy because they found so many bodies.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah. Uh, it’s pretty depressing.
Yeah.
So it took a while to get it cleaned. I have to give credit though to FEMA.
FEMA stands for Federal Emergency Management Agency and it helps citizens during disasters such as this one.
I have to give credit though to FEMA, the county, and uh the volunteers because without them, it would have been a total nightmare.
A total nightmare. Literally, a nightmare is an awful dream. But we also use it to mean a situation that’s overwhelming or terrifying.
It would have been a total nightmare. Now, the first week, what was hard for me was the amount of siren that were going constantly all day long for police cars and ambulances, stuff like that. It just drove me crazy.
Mhm.
But uh, one of the problems is they were bringing in semi-loads of food and the police had to uh, escort every truck because uh one of the trucks when they stopped, people uh vandalized it and took the food out of it. That’s how desperate they were getting.
Yeah.
Yeah. So they had an escort the whole time.
Wow.
And you heard helicopters flying overhead constantly because so many out in the rural areas couldn’t get out. I mean the roads were totally blocked everywhere.
So did you have any issues with having enough access to food?
No, actually uh we were lucky the first week especially because stores uh that had food that was being totally wasted. They uh, sent us a lot of the food uh to the apartment complex where we live because there’s so many people that live there. And by the pool we had we have grills and so everybody in the complex we came down and the good thing about it is we got to know each other because we partied and we had tons of chicken that we grilled and uh, that was the first week. Of course, after a few days when the food went bad, uh, we didn’t enjoy that so much.
Yeah.
Yeah. But uh the only place you could get food was at the New Publix because when they built the New Publix, they built it with a generator. So they never lost power.
Mhm.
But uh, all the Eagles did. So, all their food was destroyed, but they would have five or six semis coming in constantly during the day unloading food and you had to wait in a long line to be able to get in. And of course, they were limited to what you could get. And—
That was FEMA who did that.
Publix, the grocery store.
Oh, so they were selling it.
Oh, yeah. They made a fortune that I see.
I thought you were saying truckloads were coming in.
They were.
From FEMA distributing.
No, it was uh Publix and they made a fortune that week.
Yeah.
Now, the other problem for Engles is that their warehouse is along the Swannanoa River towards Black Mountain. And of course, everything in the warehouse got destroyed.
Mhm.
And so, there wasn’t an awful lot of food in that sense. Yeah.
Rodney, thank you for sharing all these stories.
Okay.
I’ll probably hit you up for some of that footage that you got.
To hit someone up means to contact them often to ask them for something. So I could say, “Hey, hit me up if you’re ever in Philadelphia.” Or in this case, I’m letting him know I’m probably going to hit him up. I’m probably going to contact him later to ask him for the footage that he got in the days after the hurricane.
Thank you. Thank you so much to Rodney and for Sarah for sharing their stories with me. What mother nature can do never ceases to amaze me.
Thanks so much for watching. Keep your learning going now with this video. And don’t forget to visit rachelenglish.com/free for my free course, The Top Three ways to Master the American Accent.
And please do subscribe with notifications on. I absolutely love being your English teacher. That’s it. And thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.
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