Mike Stewart, Associated Press

OGDEN — As residents of the Wasatch Front welcome autumn weather and their annual reprieve from the summer heat wave, people in multiple southeastern states are simultaneously reeling from Hurricane Helene while bracing for Hurricane Milton’s arrival.

One Ogden woman experienced the devastation wrought by Helene firsthand. Now, she’s calling on people in the Beehive State to take greater care in preparing themselves for the possibility of a catastrophic event.

Karen Burton, who works on special projects at the Weber County Library System, was wrapping up a three-week trip with her daughter and son-in-law when she found her way to North Carolina on Sept. 24 to begin the return trip.

“We’d gone through the Smoky Mountains and the Blue Ridge Mountains, and they dropped me off in Asheville,” Burton told the Standard-Examiner. “I was going to catch a flight home a couple days later; do two days of sightseeing and then come home.”

After those two days had passed, though, much of what Burton had seen in town was gone.

Phelan M. Ebenhack, Associated Press

“By Thursday, the rain and wind just started taking out trees and becoming so bad that there was nowhere to go to get out of it,” Burton said. “Friday morning, it was devastation.”

That day, she found her way to one of the few places she knew she could at least let her family know she was OK — the library.

“Libraries have infrastructure so people can use their Wi-Fi and contact people at home. So I went there, but it was inundated. There were just too many people there, and so I couldn’t get on,” she said. “It took me quite a long time just to get a text message out.”

The Airbnb Burton had been staying at was badly damaged, so she was asked to leave by a property manager. Meanwhile, homes and hotels all over Asheville were similarly evacuated. She would inevitably find herself, along with many others, seeking shelter in the wake of the storm — without food, without water.

They were homeless.

“They didn’t have gas and electricity, and (the Airbnb) was visually compromised. But I couldn’t get food or water, and people kept saying, you know, ‘Go here, go here,’ but it wasn’t happening,” Burton said.

“I went to the grocery store and the line was like six hours long at the grocery store. … It was too much.”

Although she had been wandering the streets amid the devastation with nowhere to go and no way back to Utah, it took seeing a life lost for her to truly realize the gravity of the situation and actually lock into dealing with it.

Specifically, that of a dog, dead in the roadside mire.

“That’s when I went into complete survival mode. I’m like, ‘Karen, people are dying here.’ That’s when I kind of just — you just turn things off. You just go, ‘That’s it. No more crying, no more feeling until we get out of here.’ … ‘Just get out of here, and then we’ll process it.'”

Burton went to multiple fire departments, a police department and, on Saturday, found her way to the Asheville airport. After having braced herself for a five-plus-hour walk, she lucked out and caught a ride there.

However, no commercial flights were able to depart despite the airport being “functional” otherwise.

In the end, Burton linked up with two older women who had also been sightseeing in Asheville and a young member of the military who was on his first leave and chanced driving a rental car with very little gas left in the tank to Charlotte.

The fuel situation, road conditions (including signs and markers having been destroyed) and lack of services notwithstanding, Burton made it to Charlotte where she was able to secure a flight home on Sept. 29.

Now, a little over a week later, Burton understands — more than ever before — how important it is to plan, and perhaps overplan, for emergencies that could occur where we are.

“I had some really good experiences, particularly with the recognition that we’re complacent,” she said. “We have the heavy snows. We have flooding. We take care of it, you know? Maybe we don’t have water for a day, or we have water in our basements for a few. But we live on the Wasatch Front. We ought to all be prepared for an earthquake.”

Burton, who will be training library staff on preparedness, is imploring locals to be proactive in having the proper supplies and formulating their own plans for navigating emergency situations.

“We need to start a dialogue and get prepared. We need to think about what we would do, where you would go,” she said.

Burton noted that there are a number of emergency preparedness resources available online, including from the American Red Cross, Be Ready Utah and the Weber County Sheriff’s Office.

She also stressed the importance of being ready to leave nonessential items behind, having things like paper maps on hand and ensuring that we can receive Wireless Emergency Alerts on our smartphones.

While Burton has emerged from her experience with a new resolve for emergency preparedness, she also has a deeper appreciation for the way in which people can come together in extreme circumstances. She saw homeless individuals comforting evacuees, helping them navigate the library’s Wi-Fi and know how to survive in the world with nothing. A baggage-handler who suddenly found himself to be “the senior person in charge of the airport” assured people that the bathrooms would be kept clean and in working order.

“I want to share that with people,” Burton said. “You can still be compassionate and caring even if you don’t have food, water and clothing.”