ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — Asheville Police Department Detective Sam DeGrave loves photo albums. He has spent hours of his life pouring over old family pictures.
“My grandparents’ pictures, my parents’ pictures, my own childhood, my family laughs at me I spend so much time with our photo albums,” DeGrave said. “When I started finding these, it meant something to me, and I know it will mean something to the people in them.”
The “these” DeGrave mentioned were hundreds of photos he and his team rescued from the Hurricane Helene flood.
During the early days of the storm, the detective was assisting in relief efforts near Tunnel Road when he came across a warped photo of a little girl in a green shirt.
The picture appeared in a collage of identical photographs, the sort of posed portrait sheet parents receive after school picture day. One wallet sized picture was missing. The rest were in DeGrave’s hands.
“Seeing that photo concerned me, because it was quite clear that that came from somewhere,” DeGrave said. “A house that had been washed out, an apartment, we don’t even know how far upstream it came from.”
For DeGrave, seeing the photo made the missing persons list real. He realized that little girl and others like her might be needing as much of a rescue as their photographs.
“That was the immediate goal as I picked up that picture. As we continued our recovery efforts over the last two weeks, it was bizarre. Amid the debris, you’d find a picture of a baby or a Christmas card,” DeGrave said. “In this case, this is a baby picture that looks to be from the turn of the century.”
DeGrave brandished another photograph, this one a black-and-white portrait of a baby.
Depending on how old the photo is and if the child was local, the person in the picture may have been around for the Asheville Flood of 1916, DeGrave pointed out.
“There wasn’t a lot of good news that we had to share from the flood zone,” DeGrave reflected. “But what each of these photos was was an opportunity to reunite families with some of the memories that they had that otherwise would have been lost.”
After finding his first picture, DeGrave began saving all the photos he could find, asking others on his recovery missions to do the same.
There was an enthusiastic response to DeGrave’s request. Everyone from FEMA personnel to civilian volunteers were collecting pictures for him to identify.
“About 100 of them, I’ve already identified the family that they came from, and they’re waiting to be reunited,” DeGrave said.
Still, about 100 photos are left without owners, and DeGrave is still finding more.
Many of the pictures have been damaged by the storm. Fascinatingly, that doesn’t mean they were ruined. Though many of the photos are covered with sediment and warped by water, their captured moments remain.
“This one I thought was neat, because though it’s fairly heavily damaged, the key moment survived,” DeGrave observed. “It’s peculiar how the damage can draw your attention.”
The picture DeGrave held was distorted and discolored, but at its heart, its subjects remained.
DeGrave has created a digital archive of every picture he has collected. In a few days, he will publish those pictures online for people to peruse, hoping to reunite more of them with their families.
“I don’t know whether the people in these pictures still look like this, I don’t know, to be honest, if the people in these pictures are even still with us. But what do know is these photographs were, are, memories that get to live on,” DeGrave said.
Thanks to DeGrave, these memories will.
828newsNOW will be publishing the archive of recovered photographs in conjunction with the Asheville Police Department on Thursday, Oct. 17. If you recognize a photo that belongs to you or a loved one, contact APD Public Information Officer Rick Rice at rrice@ashevillenc.gov.