Deon Strommer needs but one word to describe the damage wrought by Hurricane Helen on the mountains around Asheville, North Carolina.

“Unbelievable.”

Strommer, who has been a mortician for more than 40 years, was a member of a federal team that spent two weeks in the Asheville area earlier this month helping locals deal with the death toll from the storm.

He was back in his Baker Valley home on Tuesday, Oct. 15.

But not for long.

Strommer, 66, said he planned to return to North Carolina, either late this week or next week, as a volunteer with Third Wave Volunteers, a nonprofit that helps residents following natural and other disasters.

“My heart is still in North Carolina, but my body is in Baker,” Strommer said on Tuesday afternoon. “It was hard to come home.”

Strommer’s role during his first trip was more narrowly defined.

He is a member of a 40-member Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a program he joined in 2002. Team members are temporary federal employees who assist local morticians who lack the capacity to deal with the number of bodies following a disaster.

Strommer said he talked with residents in the Asheville area who told him that an estimated 30 inches of rain fell in places when the remnants of Hurricane Helene passed through in late September.

And eight to 10 inches of rain had fallen on consecutive days before the storm, he said.

“The ground became so saturated that homes just slid off the mountains,” Strommer said.

Almost every creek or river washed out due to the heavy rain, he said.

So much debris poured into one lake that the flotsam created a temporary bridge that made it possible to walk across the lake.

“Trucks, buildings, whatever was in its path,” Strommer said.

He said he spoke with one resident who had 11 relatives killed during the storm.

“A lot of sad stories,” Strommer said.

He said residents were effusive in thanking him and other relief workers.

They urged him to try to help others whose plight was more dire.

“So humble,” Strommer said. “They would say, ‘we’re blessed, we’re alive.’ ”

Strommer said he has read claims that FEMA’s response was sluggish and ineffectual, but that wasn’t his experience.

He said he saw trucks of supplies that were sent elsewhere because a pair of horse arenas were already crammed with food and other items.

Strommer said the people he spoke with were “very satisfied with the response.”

Strommer said he slept in a tent set up in a hospital parking lot between 12-hour shifts.

He said he worked much of the time in a morgue about 16 miles from Asheville.

Strommer said he also went out with body recovery teams, working with several National Guard teams as well as one from the Army’s 101st Airborne Division.

Recovering bodies was difficult both due to the amount of debris, but also because the clay soil, when it dried, was nearly as hard as cement.

Strommer said it’s likely that some victims will not be found for years, if ever.

He was he was glad he was able to help his fellow morticians, and he is eager to continue as a volunteer with Third Wave Volunteers.

“It was an honor to serve in a unique way,” Strommer said.