13 minute read
NOT JUST FAIR-WEATHER BROTHERS
NOT JUST FAIR-WEATHER BROTHERS
by Rachel Greene
On September 26, 2024, Hurricane Helene made landfall at peak intensity in Florida, as a Category 4 storm with 140 mph winds. Helene, the deadliest hurricane to strike the mainland United States since the infamous Hurricane Katrina in 2005, broke storm surge records throughout Florida, inundating Tampa Bay and causing 221 deaths, along with more than $78 billion in damages. Along with Florida, the effects of Helene’s wrath were felt in Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina.
In the days after Hurricane Helene tore through the Southeast, the images that emerged were haunting: entire neighborhoods under water, homes split open by storm surge and families left with nothing but the clothes on their backs. It was hard to look away, and for a group of Pi Kappa Phi brothers from the Kappa Chapter at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it was impossible.
So, those seven brothers piled into a car for something most wouldn’t expect from college students on a Saturday morning. A road trip? Sure. But this one came with shovels and work gloves. Among them was Andrew Davis, a junior and chapter archon at the time. A Florida native, Davis knew what hurricanes could do, but nothing prepared him for the devastation awaiting them in Western Carolina.
The drive down started lighthearted. Music was playing, and brothers were catching up, unaware of how much the day would impact them. But when they arrived, the tone shifted immediately.
They were sent to a home built along a riverbed that had been completely overtaken by the storm. Water had surged above the roofline, and the couple who lived there showed the brothers footage of the river overtaking everything they owned.
“You see the waterlines on the roofs, and it just hits you,” Davis said. “You’re not just helping clear out debris; you’re digging someone’s life out of the mud.”
Their task was simple but enormous: remove every ruined possession, every piece of drywall, everything caked in mud. Hours were spent separating burnable debris from what had to be trashed. They found everything from children’s toys to cherished family keepsakes buried in sludge.
“You’re digging through mud, pulling out pieces of someone’s life, Legos, photos, family mementos, and it hits you, this isn’t just stuff. It’s someone’s world. There were moments that just froze you,” Davis said. “We saw a man standing silently by a burn pile, watching his memories go up in smoke. It was humbling in a way that changes you.”
Despite the heavy emotional toll, the experience also revealed something beautiful. Strangers from all walks of life, people in their 60s and 70s, local families and college students worked side by side without a second thought. No one asked for credit, and no one expected thanks.
“You join a fraternity for a lot of reasons,” Davis said. “Most people on the outside looking in think it’s about parties or formals. But this, that willingness to give up your Saturday, to do backbreaking work together just because someone needs you, to never hesitate despite how hard the work is, that’s the real meaning of brotherhood.”
Just a few states away, Florida residents were in a state of emergency in the days prior to Helene making landfall, and there was no way to prepare them for the catastrophic impact that would soon be felt. For many in Florida, hurricanes and states of emergency are a normal occurrence. For Debbie Ely, this had been the case since she began calling the Sunshine State home in 1988. While she took heed of the warnings and prepared, she did not panic. Debbie was away on business but trusted that the damage could be handled upon her return. Debbie’s son, Zachary Ely, Iota Upsilon (Florida Gulf Coast), was at home, but reassured her that the water was ebbing. The receding tide, along with their hurricane kit consisting of flashlights, extra batteries, food and water, kept her mind at ease. That is, at first. About 30 minutes after seeing the tide recede, Zachary Facetimed his mom and turned his camera to the water, which was rising rapidly, and had reached the back door of their coastal home. Immediately, Debbie told Zachary to evacuate. By the time he’d grabbed some essential items and secured a place to go about 15 minutes later, water was already coming underneath both the front and back doors of their home.
” It was hard to look away, and for a group of Pi Kappa Phi brothers from the Kappa Chapter at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it was impossible.
With no time to spare, Zachary safely escaped the rising waters in their neighborhood and made it to the highway, evacuating to a Pi Kappa Phi brother’s house further inland, where he waited out the storm.
Debbie was able to get to their home by the next afternoon, after a storm surge that lasted about 12 hours from start to finish. There was a clear water line visible throughout the house, evidence that water had risen to 24 inches, destroying everything below that height.
Debbie’s neighbors, who had lived on the coastline longer than she had, and had more experience with hurricane damage, came over and advised her that she had to get rid of everything that was wet immediately, or run the risk of her home being overtaken by mold. They helped her cut drywall, while she remained in a sort of daze, having never been through anything quite like this before. Amid her panic, she recalls repeating to herself over and over, “It’s just stuff – it’s all replaceable. I’m safe, Zachary’s safe, everything is okay.”
Through her dazed state, Debbie called Zachary and said, “You’ve got to get home – and we need help.”
Immediately, Zachary began calling his brothers. Though he’d been racing to get out of there just days prior, now Zachary was headed back, anxious to see what was left of the home he shared with his mother. This time though, he wasn’t alone –arriving on what was left of their doorstep along with multiple Pi Kappa Phi chapter brothers, who were more than willing to help one of their own.
Fraternity, in its truest form, isn’t about letters on a shirt or photos on a wall. It’s not just the latenight laughs or weekend plans. True fraternity shows up when the floodwaters rise.
When they arrived, the young men helped move all the appliances and furniture into the yard. That was crucial for Debbie, who couldn’t lift any of those items on her own. Without the men, she says, her home would be undoubtedly infested with mold. After one day, the house was empty of everything that had gotten wet in the storm, and the brothers headed back to campus, about an hour away.
“You know, we might have been able to hire some contractors financially, but the issue is – who are you going to hire?” said Debbie. “When there’s that level of devastation, they’re going to help their family first, then the people who can pay them the most next, so it’s just a matter of where you’re going to fall on the list. There’s no telling how long it might take. Without Zachary’s brothers, my house would have very easily been infested with mold and would have been 10 times worse. I consider myself incredibly lucky that they came to help me.”
The next day, the brothers were back, undeterred by the hard work from the day before, and ready to continue doing whatever Debbie and Zachary needed them to do. “I was so happy that they were willing to step up when they really had no obligation to,” said Debbie. “I repeatedly offered them money, but they refused every time. Finally, I learned that the way they’d accept my gratitude was through pizza.”
The second day was spent largely cutting the drywall out around the house as every single piece in the entire home needed to be removed, making it a massive undertaking that went much faster with many Pi Kappa Phi hands. “The most important thing to do after a hurricane is to get all the wet stuff out,” said Debbie. “We rented large commercial fans, because there’s no power to run the air conditioning, so everything that was wet had to go outside, from the baseboards to the doors.”
Even faced with such loss, Debbie was grateful that some of her items, such as photos, dishes, televisions and anything that was waist level and above, were not destroyed, and she purchased a pod to place those items in for safekeeping during the demolition process. By the third day, all salvageable items had been secured in the pod, and the bulk of the drywall was removed. Thirty to 40 percent of the possessions that Debbie and Zachary owned prior to Helene were safe in the pod – the rest were lost.
Soon, their work was done, and Debbie sent Zachary and his chapter brothers back to school. Feeling grateful and ready to rebuild, Debbie’s plans came to a screeching halt when yet another hurricane was projected to barrel through her home just 12 days after Helene. This time, the initial warnings about Hurricane Milton were all Debbie needed to hear to get herself and Zachary out of the area immediately, not willing to chance anything after seeing the unpredictable and unprecedented effects of Helene on not only their own home but the surrounding community. Debbie and Zachary fled to the East Coast of Florida, where they remained for three days, until they were notified that power in their community had been restored, and that water had receded.
Much to their shock and dismay, Hurricane Milton was even more disastrous than Helene had been, picking up where she’d left off and wiping out everything she’d left untouched. “When I talked with my friends in the neighborhood before returning after Milton, and they said the hurricane was worse, I just thought to myself, ‘What could be worse than two feet of water?’ but I just couldn’t fathom it,” said Debbie. “You have to imagine that your home is literally a swimming pool, everything is so saturated and flooded, everything from your toilets and your sinks just comes back up into the home.”
When Debbie and Zachary walked into their home, she cried and felt absolute disbelief. “River water, it’s not like the water you see at the beach; it’s brackish, muddy water,” said Debbie. While the water had mostly receded out of the home by the time they returned, the water line was clear, and the water had risen to 36 inches. Everything that had been salvaged in the pod just days prior was now destroyed. Once again, Zachary put an ask out to his brothers for help, and once again they came out in full force. Unwavering in their support, despite much of their hard
work from last time being washed away, Zachary and his Pi Kapp brothers returned to Debbie’s home, this time, with even more hands to help move a devastating process along.
“When you see these natural disasters play out on the news, it’s something distant that you can remove yourself from, but when you see it in person, it’s a completely different experience,” said Debbie. “When these guys walked in, you could see their facial expressions change. You could tell it was unbelievable to them what they were seeing. When you see damage like that firsthand, it’s shocking.”
This time, Debbie had to order a dumpster, because nothing was able to be thrown into the yard – it was too saturated with water. For days, crews of various men cycled in and out of the home, bagging up drywall and insultation, ripping out the entire kitchen and cleaning up the residual dirty water. By the end of the process, the men had filled two 20-foot dumpsters.
Aside from the physical labor the brothers were doing, which was greatly appreciated, Debbie was perhaps equally as grateful for their presence and the emotional support she felt from Pi Kappa Phi during a really difficult time.
“You’re just so overwhelmed when everything is destroyed. You don’t know where to begin,” said Debbie. “But you have these young, strong men, and them being there helps you get out of that sort of decision paralysis because you want to make use of their time, so you ask them to help you lift or help you move something, and as each task is done, you feel some of the monstrous weight lifting off your shoulders.”
The brothers and the hours of help they provided have restored Debbie’s faith in not only humanity but also in fraternity. “It’s true what people say about the people you surround yourself with and the relationships you have in your life,” said Debbie. “You can have all the possessions in the world, but if you don’t have anybody in your life who cares about you, you don’t have anything. In a time of devastation for our family, the Fraternity didn’t hesitate to be here and to help, and it didn’t cost us a dime. That kind of support system, that’s what community’s all about.”
Today, Debbie has finally returned to her home after spending three months displaced from a house that had no kitchen, no bathrooms and that had been entirely gutted due to water saturation. All major repairs in her home are finally complete. Her kitchen and bathrooms have been entirely redone, her drywall, electrical outlets, interior doors and floors have been replaced, and all that’s left to do is the interior painting.
Fraternity, in its truest form, isn’t about letters on a shirt or photos on a wall. It’s not just the late-night laughs or weekend plans. It’s not measured by chapter trophies or the number of events on a calendar. True fraternity shows up when the floodwaters rise, and when there’s nothing to offer in return but gratitude and maybe a slice of pizza.
For Davis and the brothers of Kappa Chapter, it meant trading sleeping in on a Saturday for a shovel, stepping into the wreckage of strangers’ lives and driving back to campus with a new outlook on life. For the brothers of Iota Upsilon, it meant showing up not once, but twice, without hesitation, to help a brother and his mother rebuild when everything felt lost.
From the mountains of North Carolina to the Florida coast, one common bond showed through in every gesture of service: brotherhood. The truth is, fraternity isn’t just about being there when the sun is shining. It’s about being there when the storms hit, literally and figuratively. It’s about holding the line for one another when the waters rise.
That’s what it means to be a member of Pi Kappa Phi.
Not just fair-weather brothers. But brothers, always.
To find out where to donate to communities impacted by these devastating storms, either financially or by volunteering your time, visit www.redcross.org
