"One family got washed away and didn’t make it, and one family got destroyed but made it out"
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(jpeg)/ukrainian-family-north-carolina-helene-tout-102124-d32a6b8a6168470ea20808fa757387d5.jpg "Four Ukraine refugees escaped their war torn home country and settled with family in North Carolina. They perished in the deadly floodwaters.")
Wiebe Family
From left: Dmytro Segen, Yevhenii Segen and Anastasia Novitnia-Segen- Anna Wiebe's sister and her family were living near them when Hurricane Helene hit their North Carolina community
- While Anna and her husband made it to safety, Anna's family was apparently swept away in the flooding
- Tragically, they had relocated to the U.S. from Ukraine, fleeing Russia's invasion, only two years ago
Around 9 a.m. on Sept. 30, as Ryan Wiebe and his family stood in knee-deep floodwater from Hurricane Helene in their kitchen in Burnsville, N.C., they made the decision to get to safety.
Ryan, his wife, Anna, and their two teenage children grabbed their backpacks and the family cat, Charlie, and ran barefoot out of the house to climb to higher ground at Ryan’s mother’s home a few hundred yards away on a shared property.
About 30 minutes later, once their kids were settled, Ryan and Anna Wiebe went to rescue their other relatives in a three-bedroom single-wide trailer on the same plot of land.
But when Ryan, 45, and Anna, 46, arrived to where the residence should have been — and where Anna’s mother and sister and their family should have been, too — there was nothing but water.
“It was like staring at an ocean,” Ryan tells PEOPLE.
In an interview, he described leaving and coming back to that spot in complete disbelief.
“One second, there’s a house with people in it, and then you go look at it and it’s not there,” he says. “It’s like an illusion.”
Related: Hurricane Helene's Death Toll Climbs to at Least 200. Here's How to Help Relief Efforts
Wiebe Family
The aftermath of Hurricane Helene on the Wiebe family's property in North CarolinaThe bodies of Anna’s sister and brother-in-law, Anastasia Novitnia-Segen and Dmytro Segen, were located and identified on Oct. 14, according to the family.
Anna’s mother, Tetiana Novitnia, and Anna’s nephew, 13-year-old Yevhenii Segen, remain missing and are presumed dead: “The search team believes they’re just buried,” says Ricky Wiebe, Ryan’s brother. “Buried under mud and debris so deep the dogs can’t find them. We don’t know if they’re ever going to be found.”
The four are among the hundreds of people killed by Helene as it barreled through the Southeast after making landfall in Florida on Sept. 26. North Carolina was particularly hard hit by Helene’s flooding.
The Wiebes say there is an added layer to their tragedy: Anna’s mother, sister and her family had fled from the war in their native Ukraine in June 2022 — escaping the threat of violence there, only to die in the apparent safety of the North Carolina mountains.
While “Anna’s mom didn’t want to leave,” Ryan says, “They were so happy to be here,” remembers his brother, Ricky Wiebe, a 42-year-old producer in Los Angeles.
Wiebe Family
The home where Anna Wiebe's family lived after moving to North Carolina from Ukraine following Russia's invasionWhen the family first arrived, they stayed at Ryan and Anna’s home or at his mother’s house in Burnsville, about an hour northeast of Asheville, N.C.
A little over a year ago, Ryan and Ricky’s mother purchased the trailer so Anna’s relatives could stay there. “It was right next to the river,” Ryan says. There was already electricity, water and a septic tank.
“It made sense,” Ryan says.
The worst seemed to be behind them.
On the night of Sept. 26, as Helene approached Florida, Dmytro Segen — Anna’s brother-in-law — came over to Anna and Ryan’s home to fill five-gallon jugs of spring water (the well water at his home didn’t taste as good). Ryan warned him that the forecast called for flooding; he asked Anna to translate the word “flood.”
But they had “already survived worse,” Ryan says.
“They lived in an apartment in Ukraine, and every day they would hear missiles and bombs go off,” he says. “They were in an active war zone in terror, day and night, for months. I was thinking, ‘What's a little bit of rain and wind? They’re so tough making it through war.' I mean, who gets worried about a little bit of rain and wind?"
The Day of the Storm
Ryan, who does maintenance for a golf course, set his alarm for 3:30 a.m. on Sept. 27 — he wanted to be up early to track the incoming hurricane.
“I didn’t want to sleep through it,” he says.
He watched it rain and rain and rain, texting with friends who were also awake and swapping reports of the weather in their area. He went outside with his flashlight every 10 minutes.
“It was super windy, blowing trees around and shattering them. The river just kept coming up and up,” Ryan says. His 13-year-old son woke up, too. Together they watched the river near their home before it began pouring into the basement and then rising further still.
But Anna’s sister’s family said things weren’t so bad elsewhere on the property: She texted Anna around 6:30 a.m. to say that the water wasn’t at their own home yet.
Then everyone lost power and cell reception.
“From that moment on, everybody in the area was just on their own with their own thoughts, because there was no more communication,” Ryan says.
Wiebe Family
From left: Anastasia Novitnia-Segen, Dmytro Segen and Yevhenii SegenBy 9 a.m., Ryan and Anna and their kids left their home and soon discovered that Anna’s family had seemingly been swept away and drowned in the flooding.
“What’s sad is there was never any hope,” says Ricky, Ryan’s brother. “There was never a chance. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that they were gone.”
The family is mourning who they lost.
Tetiana Novitnia, 73, was known for her needlepoint, for knitting soft, cozy socks and for her cooking and gardening.
“She was always outside," Ryan says.
Novitnia had been sick before the hurricane hit: Melanoma spread to her brain and throughout her body, the family says. “It was everywhere,” Ryan says.
She received chemotherapy and radiation for her cancer but then recently stopped treatment.
“It made her too sick,” Ryan says. Novitnia switched to hospice care and had hoped to return to Ukraine to be buried next to her twin sister, who also died of cancer.
Wiebe Family
Tetiana Novitnia“She didn’t want to leave Ukraine in the first place,” Ryan says of Novitnia. “At the end, she still wanted to go back.”
Segen, 41, Anna’s brother-in-law, and Anna’s nephew, Yevhenii, learned English almost immediately after arriving in North Carolina two years ago. Segen quickly got a job working construction.
“He’s real handy,” Ryan says.
Yevhenii, a sixth grader, always took things apart to fix them and learn how they worked, and he loved creating with his 3D printer. One day, he wanted to move to New York.
“He was really smart. He had a plan,” Ryan says.
Wiebe Family
Yevhenii SegenAnna’s sister, Anastasia Novitnia-Segen, 42, worked with her cleaning houses. She was always cooking and spent weekends thrifting and loved saving money for the future.
“Every meal she made was mind-blowing,” her brother-in-law remembers.
“She was funny. Always happy,” he says.
Wiebe Family
The aftermath of Hurricane Helene on the Wiebe family's property in North CarolinaRicky, Ryan’s brother, has started a GoFundme to help the family rebuild and move forward. Ryan and Anna lost their own home as well: The water reached the ceiling in the first floor and knocked down walls, even lifting his upright piano and pushing it onto a staircase in another room.
“This was like an avalanche coming right through the house,” Ryan says.
Now, piece by piece, they will put their lives back together. They have made arrangements to honor Novitnia's wish and to cremate her body when she’s found and return her ashes to Ukraine.
“One family got washed away and didn’t make it, and one family got destroyed but made it out,” Ryan says. “It’s terrible. It’s terrifying.”
Find out how you can help the victims of Hurricane Helene here.
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