The day before Hurricane Helene blew into Western North Carolina, Jeneal Hensley, a licensed family child care provider, was taking care of five children in her Swannanoa home. She’d been in business as The Little People’s Place in her house by the river for more than a decade and had cared for dozens of the town’s preschool-age children, along with some of her own grandchildren. Hensley loved her child care routine, but that ordinary Thursday would turn out to be the last normal day she remembers.

Before dawn the next morning, her daughter who lived nearby called to urgently insist: “leave now.” The river was rising, and residents were evacuating. Jeneal and her husband drove out through nearly a foot of water, abandoning her home, belongings, a life-time of photographs, and her livelihood to a merciless flood that would take it all. “I was in a state of shock,” she says. “I made the comment, ‘oh, I guess it’s gonna take a couple of months to clean this up. My husband put his arm around me and he said, ‘Try a year.’  I thought, ‘No way I will be out of business for a year,’ but it was actually more than 500 days.”

During that time while Hensley floundered, trying to sustain her own family while living in space donated by her church, filing for unemployment, and dealing with insurance agents and contractors who first gutted and then rebuilt her house from the ground up, the families who counted on Jeneal also faltered. Many child care programs were closed for weeks.  Some parents also lost jobs to the storm or had damage to their own homes. Others were displaced and eventually moved their kids to other child care settings. Of the five she’d cared for before the storm, only one returned. “He was here the first day I reopened,” said Hensley. “Couldn’t wait to get back.”

Read the full article about child care and disaster resilience by Anne Vilen at The Daily Yonder.