The water that flooded the Doe River when Hurricane Helene swept through East Tennessee has long since receded. The National Guard’s helicopters have come and gone. Cars full of eager volunteers no longer clog the roads.
But six months after the disaster, First Baptist Church of Roan Mountain is still swimming in donations.
“We’ve still got probably 10,000 toothbrushes,” pastor Geren Street told Christianity Today. “We’ve still got 20-something pallets of water bottles. I can’t tell you how much water we’ve given away, and to look out there and still see 20-something pallets? It’s crazy.”
Then there’s the flood of clothes. First Baptist had installed storage racks along the walls of a Sunday school classroom, and early on the church set up a semitruck trailer to take in all the donations. It’s not as full as it used to be, but it still holds bags and bags of clothes.
“We’ve put a dent in it,” he said, “but we’ve still got work to do.”
Donations follow every natural disaster. People give, and give a lot. They are especially generous with old clothes. So generous, in fact, that the volume of donations can be overwhelming and create what experts call the “second disaster.”
Free clothes create complicated logistical problems. Where a toothbrush or a bottle of water can be given to anybody, a shirt or pair of pants has to fit. Sorting clothes and getting each item to someone who can wear it is much more more difficult.
Just storing the clothes until they are sorted can be challenging. At Unicoi County Care and Share, in Tennessee, donations quickly overran the small operation, so Care and Share asked nearby churches to take some bags. Soon the Unicoi Christian Church fellowship hall was full. The nursery was next. Volunteers piled bags into the space until it was stuffed floor to ceiling, wall to wall.
“You physically could not enter the room,” said Ben Booher, executive director of Unicoi County Care and Share.
The Christian benevolence ministry received donations from 25 different states—literally half the country. Booher posted lists of urgent needs online and got loads of cleaning supplies, hygiene products, and portable heaters that helped the ministry assist more than 1,000 households in 2024.
The overflowing generosity meant volunteers worked nonstop. The organization saw a 371 percent increase in volunteer hours from 2023 to 2024.
“We kind of threw our normal hours out the window with Helene,” Booher said. “We were open 12 hours a day, many days in a row, just to respond to the need.”
But even with an experienced crew working extended hours, the onslaught of clothes was impossible to keep up with. It was more clothes than they could handle and more than people needed.
Booher recalled a box truck from Alabama, for example, arriving unannounced. It was full of winter coats.
“We don’t have that many people in the county,” Booher said. “Everyone would have four or five coats.”
Another time, a woman drove all the way from Illinois in a Chevy Tahoe packed with used clothes. He couldn’t put them anywhere and had to turn the woman away.
“There have been some people very mad at me,” Booher said. “I don’t want to say no, but at the same time … there have been points where we had so many clothes we couldn’t function as a ministry.”
An academic study of emergency management in America found a consistent “misalignment” between would-be donors and people in need. Donors told researchers they had seen the devastation on the news and wanted to help, wanted to feel they were doing something, but also saw giving as “purging with a purpose,” according to the study.
Americans seem to give a lot of clothes because they have a lot of clothes. People buy an average of 53 new items of clothing every year, according to industry experts, and get rid of about 65 percent of them within one year.
“Clothing has become so cheap in comparison to previous decades that we can afford to buy it unthinkingly,” said Dion Terrelonge, a psychologist who researches fast fashion and clothing consumption. “We have online shopping, next-day deliveries, free returns, pay later providers—everything is perfectly set up for us to meet and encourage our want for instant gratification.”
Between 1960 and 2018, US textile generation increased from 1.76 million tons to 17 million tons. A percentage of the excess clothing gets recycled. A lot—more than 10 million tons per year—gets thrown away.
Trashing clothes can feel wasteful. Donating, in contrast, feels pretty good. People like to purge with a purpose—and they have a lot of clothes to purge.
Anthony Mullins, senior pastor at County Line Community Church in Chavies, Kentucky, said people have good intentions when they donate clothes but just haven’t thought through the whole process of dealing with them and considered whether their donations really meet people’s needs.
County Line Community Church became a main distribution site for donations after the flooding in Eastern Kentucky in 2022. Volunteers went through bags and bags of clothes. Mullins said some of the bags smelled bad from years of sitting in storage.
“We would just have to throw those away,” he said. “I felt like if [the people hit by floods] had already lost everything, we didn’t need to give them something that wasn’t up to par. And we wanted to make sure they got good items and clean items.”
According to Samantha Penta, professor of emergency management at the University at Albany in New York, most people who want to help after disasters would do more good if they gave money. Financial gifts can be redirected to the greatest needs or saved up to help people months and years after national attention has moved on.
Donors often hesitate to give money, Penta said, for fear it will be wasted, misused, or even misappropriated. But money is used more effectively and efficiently than clothes or other goods.
“Find an organization with values that align to your own. Find an organization you can trust,” she said. “Do a little bit of that research now … and that way you can really have the biggest impact with your donation.”
In Western North Carolina, Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry was able to use financial gifts that came in after Helene to buy heaters to distribute.
The ministry, which began as a collaboration between churches and today has the support of more than 300 congregations, was storing so many clothes at its four crisis centers that people had to turn sideways to walk through the buildings, said director of church engagement Chandler Carriker. Clothes pretty much filled up the ministry’s warehouse, too. But the money that people gave helped the most. It allowed the ministry to “act quickly and act directly,” Carriker said, and meet needs as they arose.
“Never think that a financial gift doesn’t come with the same sense of generosity, abundance, and faithfulness,” Carriker said. “It really does.”
In Unicoi County, Booher said Care and Share is transparent about its finances to reassure donors that every dollar is being used efficiently.
“We’ll gladly share our budget,” he said. “I’m happy to give everybody as much detail as they want—here’s what we bring in, here’s how it’s used, here are our plans, here’s our strategic plan.”
Care and Share redistributed donated funds to people who needed help with home repairs. Less than 1 percent of the 250,000 homes affected by the storm in East Tennessee carried flood insurance, according to state estimates, and an inch of water inside costs about $25,000 to fix. People who came to Unicoi Christian Church or Care and Share often didn’t need blouses, belts, or more T-shirts but money for drywall, plywood, or shingles.
Months later, Care and Share is still not accepting clothing donations. Booher hopes the remaining piles will be sorted and dealt with, one way or another, in the next month.
Up on Roan Mountain, First Baptist is still tidying up its grounds from the “second disaster.” The congregation recently spent dedicated a midweek Bible study to a church cleanup party. Volunteers took a bunch of the donations and donated them to Goodwill. One Sunday school room will continue to store clothes for the foreseeable future.
Besides that, the Baptist pastor said, they hope to have the flood of donations cleaned up by Easter.
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