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“I'm ready to go back home:” After long stay in hotel rooms paid for by FEMA

Theresa Sanchez and her bulldog Daisy in a hotel room paid for by FEMA.
Gerard Albert III
/
BPR News
Theresa Sanchez and her bulldog Daisy in a hotel room paid for by FEMA.

This story is part of Living in Limbo, a special package of stories exploring housing after Helene through four unique angles. Read the rest of the stories.

Theresa Sanchez is used to opening the front door at her home in Swannanoa and letting her two cats and bulldog Daisy run in the surrounding fields.

Now, at the Country Inn and Suites in Asheville, she has to rush visitors to shut the door behind them so the animals don’t run into the hallway.

The hotel in the Westgate shopping plaza is one of several in the area participating in the Federal Emergency Management Agency Transitional Sheltering Assistance program. The program pays for rooms at motels and hotels for people whose homes were damaged or destroyed during Hurricane Helene.

The hotel is full of people carrying their belongings in black trash bags while tourists fill the other rooms. The scene encapsulates the friction of a region trying to keep its tourism-based economy afloat while residents like Sanchez are still struggling to recover from the deadliest natural disaster North Carolina has ever witnessed.

Hurricane Helene damaged an estimated 126,000 homes throughout Western North Carolina. Months after the storm, there are thousands of people displaced. Many are living day-by-day with no permanent housing solution in sight.

An estimated 2,500 are still staying in hotel rooms paid for by FEMA indefinitely, while those who didn’t apply or are ineligible for federal relief have turned to donations and nonprofits for help.

Sanchez has a Red Cross blanket covering the armchair in her two-bedroom suite. It keeps her two cats, Miss Kitty and Helene, from tearing up the fabric. Before she got into the hotel room, she lived for one month at the shelter set up at the WNC Agricultural Center. That’s where she spoke with FEMA agents and other storm survivors.

“A lady bought these shoes for me,” Sanchez said, pointing to her white worn out tennis shoes. “I went barefoot for three days at the shelter. I felt something one night, and it was her putting these under my pillow. Like a tooth fairy.”

Sanchez’s mobile home near the Bee Tree reservoir was flooded during Helene. Sanchez recalls she was sleeping as the creek by her home pushed over its banks and entered her trailer. Her son woke her up and she started to walk down the mountain until she came across a bridge that had been washed out. Not wanting to leave her home or her family, she turned around and went back to her trailer.

Theresa Sanchez displays a family heirloom — a letter from a friend of her father's — that she saved from her trailer.
Gerard Albert III
/
BPR News
Theresa Sanchez displays a family heirloom — a letter from a friend of her father's — that she saved from her trailer.

She often walked long distances to find water for herself and her pets. Then, after two days, “when I finally had no water to make coffee… we got the car dug out by hand and drove it to the shelter.”

Now, she’s been living in the hotel for about more than two months.

FEMA initially planned to stop the voucher program in December but extended it until January 14. Sanchez plans to stay until FEMA stops extending the program.

“I'm ready to go back home. If it wasn't so cold, I'd be there in a tent. But I can't handle the cold,” she told BPR News during an interview in her hotel room in early December. “I don't like being cooped up. But it's better than being out in the cold.”

Sanchez inherited her trailer from her parents, who had lived there since the 1970s. But she has no insurance on it and is still waiting to hear how much, if any, funds FEMA will provide her. In the meantime, she said, Samaritan's Purse is working on repairing the home while her son is living there to protect from looters. He occasionally comes to stay in the hotel when the temperatures drop below freezing.

“Samaritan's Purse came and tore all the insulation out from under it and so far up on the walls. Right now, you can look down through the floor. I mean, see the ground under it,” she said.

She hopes to get back to living in the trailer at some point. Her neighbors, she said, may want to buy her land but she wants to pass the property down to her son.

A church group – Sanchez couldn’t remember which one – is working on getting an RV for her to stay in when FEMA’s hotel program expires. Until then, she plans to stay at the hotel with her dog, cat and her kitten – which she named after the storm that took so much from her family.

“It reminded me, you know, hell of a storm, she's gonna be a hell of a cat,” Sanchez joked.

Gerard Albert is the Western North Carolina rural communities reporter for BPR News.
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