While Hurricane Milton is threatening Florida, people are still cleaning up from Hurricane Helene in the south.
Locally, relief and donation drives are underway to help those who lost everything.
Lori Helffrich, a Level Four teacher at St. Gregory School in North East said, "We saw what was going on and we have been praying for them every day. We know prayer is powerful, but we thought, 'let's do more', so we decided to collect as much as we can to send down to them ."
School administrators heard about different collections happening and thought this would be a great learning experience for their students.
Maricarol Schoenfeldt, the St. Gregory School principal explained, "It's cross curriculum. Yesterday, I talked to the students about the hurricanes and what they look like and the impact and our theme this year is actually 'Rooted in Faith', so this is a great example of how we are rooted in faith and how our brothers and sisters who might not be here locally but are globally and in the state of Florida and North Carolina and who else might need this aid."
Students at St. Gregory School have already started to fill the truck with donations that they started collected on Monday. Once the truck is filled, it will combined with donations that have been collected for several days, thank to local relator, Katie Cameron, who reached out to Barnhart Transportation to help with the move.
According to Sueann Weist, the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications for Barnhart Transportation, "This is actually the second truck we have going down, our Charleston South Carolina facility loaded a truck of bottled water which was loaded Monday, so this truck is coming out of our North East terminal to be delivered next Monday."
Items and monetary donations will be collected all week, then the organizing and packing will come this weekend.
According to Weist, "Barnhart is providing the transportation with the warehousing so the group of volunteers are going to be here Saturday morning to fill the truck and get it off to North Carolina.
People can drop off donations at St. Gregory School in North East from 7:45 a.m.-4:00 p.m. or at Barnhart Transportation all this week.
The money donated will be used to send down chainsaws to help cut down trees.