Name: How do Americans REALLY Speak? | English Lesson with Asheville Flood Survivors
Uploaded: 2025-09-16T17:56:49.000Z
Duration: 17 min 40 s
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Adverbs of manner

I recently visited Asheville, North Carolina about one year after the devastating Hurricane Helene.

North Carolina is cleaning up from the worst flooding ever on record for the state.

Today, we're going to talk with some residents of Asheville and study English vocabulary in this English lesson.

I have a background in opera singing, and I've been teaching the American accent to non-native speakers for over 20 years.

Scan this QR code or go to rachelsenglish.com slash free to get my free course, The Top Three Ways to Master the American Accent.

It will change the way you think about speaking American English.

On September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene went over Asheville, North Carolina, a region already drenched with rain, causing devastating flooding and killing over 100 people in North Carolina.

I sat down with an Asheville resident, Rodney, the father of one of my dear friends from growing up in Florida, to hear about that day.

Okay, we live on Swannanoa River Road, and we're about two and a half blocks from the river itself.

And when the storm hit, the next morning I went down to the river as close as I could get to it, and it took a couple of days for the river to get to where I could get across the bridge, and there were literally at least 100 cars and at least 25 to 50 semi-trailers.

The whole thing together is called a semi-trailer truck, but it's usually shortened to just semi.

There are a lot of semis on the road today.

Literally is a word that gets misused in English a lot.

It gets misused when people use it even though they're exaggerating.

There were literally millions of cars in the river.

In this case, you shouldn't use literally.

But here, the numbers that Rodney is giving me are real, so he uses the word literally so that I know he's not exaggerating.

There were literally at least 100 cars and at least 25 to 50 semi-trailers that were scattered along the riverbank.

Scatter as a verb means to cause to go in different directions.

Here, as an adjective with the ED ending, it's scattered.

Another great vocabulary word that means the same thing is strewn.

The cars and trucks were strewn along the road by the flood.

And at least 25 to 50 semi-trailers that were scattered along the riverbank and smashed.

And I was looking under one of the huge semi-trailers and there was a dead cow, a big one, who had floated down the river, which had to have been a couple of miles that he floated to get to where he landed there near us.

When the police and the rescuers came along, they had to check each one of the cars and the trailers and they would put a big X with a circle to show that there were no bodies inside the cars.

When I was standing there when the water was still rising, I was a good block away from the river and it was coming towards me and I had to keep backing up as the flood was coming through.

I was taking a picture down towards the other side of the river and there was this house that came floating down the road that was spun on a river road and he, the house hit the light but it kept going and it ended up in Lowe's Garden Center.

Here, he's describing a house that floated down the river and ran into a light.

This was a surprising occurrence, the flood lifting whole houses with people inside off of their foundations.

That is, the part of the house that's underground that supports the structure of the house itself.

We can use this word for situations other than buildings as well.

You could use it to mean the starting point or the basis of something.

For example, the foundation of a good relationship is communication.

It's the base layer applied before other makeup.

What happened was, I was trying to find a way to get to Sarah and Chris's house here and I went out to 40 to the next exit on the way to Black Mountain.

I got off the exit to try to come back into Asheville but the bridge was out.

I stopped by the bridge and got out to take some pictures.

There were some people that were by the river and they had these large sticks and they were poking down the river on the bank looking for things.

I asked the man that was there, I said, what are you looking for?

He told me that they live on the hill up from the river and they had walked down as the flood was beginning to where these two houses were in a row.

There was a couple in one of the houses and they were trying to help them get out but the river had surrounded the house.

While they were trying to do all this, the two houses lifted up off their foundation and one of them floated down the river and hit the bridge, which was what knocked out the bridge.

The other one went down a street and turned on its side and that was the house that the couple was in.

The rescue people came and they cut a hole in the roof to try to get the people out, but what they discovered was the people already washed down the river so they weren't able to save them.

That's what they were looking for, the couple.

I've been through probably 12 to 15 hurricanes in Florida and I had never ever seen anything as bad as this.

This is Rodney's daughter, Sarah, my friend from high school.

I get together with Sarah and six other awesome ladies from growing up every year and this year we were in Asheville.

We had no access or no way to communicate with anyone from the outside world.

The outside world is a term used to describe the rest of the world outside of a restricted remote space.

It's used to show a lack of communication with the rest of the world.

Sarah was able to contact her neighbors only.

She couldn't get out of her neighborhood because of all the trees that fell on the roads and she couldn't reach any family including her parents who also lived in Asheville because the cell service was down.

They were cut off from the outside world.

We had no access or no way to communicate with anyone from the outside world and so we lost our cell service like a few hours after the storm ended and we so we couldn't communicate even like okay no so I wasn't able to communicate with my parents for over 24 hours and we couldn't get out so we had to cut our way out of our neighborhood so people were just walking around with chainsaws like sawing chainsawing the trees so they could get out of the neighborhoods so we could get to them but we couldn't contact anyone in my family to let them know we were okay um and we had so everyone else in the world knew what was going on and we had no idea because we didn't have any way to find out.

The city of Asheville has done an amazing job trying to clean up the debris over the past year but there was still evidence as we drove around the town.

I asked Sarah about their lives right after the storm came through.

So Sarah when the hurricane hit you were thinking probably not a big deal?

Yeah I mean having been born and raised in Florida I've lived through lots of hurricanes and we don't have hurricanes in western North Carolina so I thought it was basically going to just be a lot of rain.

And it was a lot of rain which was part of the problem because it had been raining for two days before the hurricane even hit.

If you're blown away by something that means you can hardly believe it.

One thing that blew me away was you said you were without power and water for how long?

Yes so we were without power for a little over a month and we were without water for over two months.

So how did you deal with not having power?

So it uh was really good at getting our kids to go to bed when it was dark because it was pitch black.

Pitch black is a phrase that we use to mean the darkest darkest black.

Pitch is a thick sticky substance that comes from the distillation residue of coal.

And this has been used for waterproofing.

I think of it especially as something that's used in roofing.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How do Americans REALLY Speak? | English Lesson with Asheville Flood Survivors

literally

constantly

accent

access