Samaritan's Purse opens Asheville center for Helene home rebuilding

Samaritan’s Purse dedicated a new Asheville ministry center on Friday to support Helene home rebuilding for underinsured families still trying to piece their lives back together 18 months after the storm. The center will house volunteers and supplies for continued recovery work in Buncombe County, where the organization says many homes still need repair or replacement.

The Meadows family’s recovery shows both what the new center can do and what it cannot fix on its own. Ronnie and Ginny Meadows lost their Buncombe County home to Helene and, as Ginny Meadows said, escaped with only “the clothes on our back.” Samaritan’s Purse later dedicated a new home for the family in the Asheville area, one of several replacements already delivered locally for families including Norberto Pizarro and Lidia Gomez.

Franklin Graham’s organization says its Helene response has stretched across western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, with volunteer teams and staff repairing and replacing hundreds of homes, replacing hundreds of mobile homes, and helping churches repair storm damage. The group also says it has repaired or replaced more than 870 bridges, driveways and culverts as part of the broader recovery effort.

The storm’s scale still shapes that work. Samaritan’s Purse says Helene dropped more than 2 feet of rain in some parts of western North Carolina, leaving damage that has proven harder to close than many families expected. In Asheville and across Buncombe County, the response has included road clearing, emergency water filtration and oxygen refill support, along with the longer-term rebuilding that now has a dedicated base of operations.

Before the new center opened, Samaritan’s Purse used the Billy Graham Training Center at The Cove in Buncombe County as a volunteer base for Asheville-area Helene response. The new facility gives the group a permanent local hub as it continues replacing mobile homes, rebuilding houses and helping residents who still have not caught up with the cost of the disaster.