Lost during Helene: Asheville police spearheading effort to reunite families with lost pictures

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (WTVD) -- Asheville Police Department Detective Sam DeGrave and others saved hundreds of photos along the Swannanoa River in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

Now, the police department is working to get these lost photos back to their rightful owners, ABC affiliate WLOS reported.

APD spent hours in flood zones during the nearly three weeks after the storm hit.

WLOS reported on the day the flood hit, DeGrave was working on the evacuation efforts and assisting with swift water rescues. He returned the next day.

"We had watched several houses float down the river there and were trying to start going back and seeing if there were people in need of rescue," DeGrave said.

That's when he found the first picture. He snagged it, not knowing who the little girl was or where it came from.

DeGrave told WLOS that collecting photos, at first, was to help figure out who had been accounted for. But as weeks passed, he continued to collect more as he went.

"Each of these photos contains an immense amount of humanity," he said, knowing that they meant something to somebody.

This quickly became a group effort with other detectives, FEMA workers and volunteers pitching in.

Being from Asheville himself, DeGrave said it was hard to see the scale of the damage.

"There's nothing I could do to get a U-Haul truck out of the middle of the river or to deconstruct a debris field that has four or five houses smashed in it, but what I can do is pick up one of these pictures when I see it," DeGrave said.

These photos, he says whoever they belong to probably lost a lot.

"If returning them helps give people some normalcy or some connection to a time and a place before their lives were turned upside down by this disaster," DeGrave said, then their purpose here will have been served.

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