Sense-Making and Gratitude in the Aftermath of Hurricane Helene

Early on the morning of September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene roared through the Southeastern United States, leaving a trail of devastation to be followed by a recovery period that will last months, and, in some places, even years. The purpose of the current study was to analyze the extent to which online posts in response to a well-being prompt yielded positive affective responses despite the magnitude of the crisis.

One week and 2 weeks after the hurricane, a local news agency prompted followers on Facebook to respond with how they were coping. BERTopic modeling conducted on 1941 Facebook comments in response to the first prompt resulted in 25 non-noise topics. In the first sample (1 week after the Hurricane), the largest topic, centering around lack of power, contained 277 comments. The smallest topic, centering around the lack of Internet access, contained 11 relevant comments. Three categories generated from these topics were labeled "Outages" (702 comments), "Gratitude" (352 comments), and "Physical Recovery and Response" (257 comments). In the second sample (2 weeks after the Hurricane), the largest topic centered around gratitude and contained 30 comments. Outages again represented the largest category, with 67 comments, followed by gratitude with 57 comments. Sentiment analysis showed that gratitude had the highest sentiment with sentiment ratings increasing with the second sample. Significant differences by gender were not observed.

These results show that people can experience significant life upheaval and potentially catastrophic loss and still find joy and gratitude. Focusing on factors where people still hold power, such as gratitude for being alive and for community support, allows people to reframe tragedy into an opportunity for growth.