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In and around Asheville, N.C., there are still visible signs of devastation that remain from the floods of Hurricane Helene six months ago: rusted debris in the yards of water-damaged residences in ruins.

But Helene, a federal disaster worker who coincidentally goes by the same name as the storm, also worries about this community's invisibleproblems that tend to persist, months later — like mold and financial and mental health aftereffects.

Shots - Health News

After Helene's floods, North Carolina tries to tame trauma's lasting damage

"That six-month mark is a really critical time," says Helene, who spoke to NPR on the condition of partial anonymity because she fears retaliation for talking to the media.

Until April 1, Helene worked at the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her team parachutes in after storms, wildfires, factory explosions, or toxic spills to help state and local officials assess where to put emergency resources. Helene and her CDC colleagues lost their jobs in Elon Musk's DOGE-directed layoffs of about 10,000 staff at federal health agencies.

On April 1, Helene and about 55 other public health workers from the county and state government, as well as a local university, were set to go door to door, surveying 210 households about any enduring challenges facing residents of Asheville's Buncombe County.

They'd prepared detailed questionnaires about food insecurity, unsafe drinking water and toxic chemical exposure. The mission of Helene's CDC team was to collect and process that survey data and write up a report — all within 48 hours — so that local officials could solve residents' most pressing problems.

"The hardest phone calls"

Helene and other CDC colleagues were en route, or already on site in North Carolina, when they all received the "reduction-in-force" emails placing them on administrative leave. They had to abort the mission, and Helene had to deliver the news to their partners at the state and county level.

"It was really one of the hardest phone calls I've ever had to do in my career," says Helene.

The suspended Buncombe County survey is just one example of the many local and state efforts supported by federal health agencies caught up in the Trump administration's deep cuts to government staffing and spending.

Helene says she feels heartbroken. "I feel like I let down the community; I let down the health department; I let down North Carolina itself," she says. "I lost my job, but people have lost so much to these disasters and we're not out there … finding out what the community itself needed."