Yves here. We’ve posted from time to time on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, since it makes for a case study of how various institutions are coping with the fallout from more frequent and intense climate-change disasters. This topic is not just intrinsically important but also represents another window into a recent focus of study here, the decline of institutional competence, which we have also called “organizational capability” and similar turns of phrase.
Perhaps readers will disagree, but the post below, which describes the role that local groups are taking in contending with the long tail of Hurricane Helene damage winds up being an indictment of official relief efforts. While the bulk of cleanup (as in the physical sort) will inevitably fall to those in the community, the piece also covers alarming breakdowns and a failure of government intervention in dealing with the lack of clean water, or even enough water to flush toilets (which needless to say poses a public health risk). Except for those on well water, this remediation should fall to governments. Instead, a Flush Brigade stepped up.
We have criticized the structure of the Federal and FEMA role. They are conceived of as being last responders, when local and state disaster response efforts have been overwhelmed. This seems outdated in an era where communications are now cellphone dependent, versus the stone ages where copper wire phones kept working by design when power was done. Now, phones can run out of power and cell towers can be damaged in storms.
The loss of connectivity in North Carolina was widespread enough for locals in North Carolina to call for Musk to intervene and bring in his Starlink system. Trump made a point of touting that intervention in his acceptance speech. Whether it was actually effective is besides the point for this discussion. It points to a gap in Federal response. Studies have found that the ability of local systems to handle a big spike in cellphone traffic during emergencies saves lives. One has to correspondingly assume that a degradation of access would cost lives.
So one would imagine, in a “How do we improve disaster response?” big think, that giving FEMA, the National Guard, or even the military, the authority to establish emergency comms in an afflicted area would not need to depend on the disaster being first run up an official flagpole. Militaries have to be able to set up secure communications as part of their operations in hostile theaters.1 And it is not as if it’s reasonable to expect local or state governments to provide this sort of service.
Not surprisingly, given that the areas afflicted by Helene were spread out and many remote, views of the effectiveness of FEMA and other Federal assistance have varied. For instance, long-standing friend of the site Gordon H provided an early account of the disaster impact and response in his area. The fact that he was close to a major food distribution center meant his area got priority for power restoration. I also imagine that that center was a hub for distribution for emergency supplies. In other words, there seem to be reasons to wonder at how representative his experience with FEMA help is representative (even so, it got only a few, if important, mention in his original post; keep in mind also that Gordon had volunteered for FEMA after Katrina).
We filed a later piece, based on news and area blogs, that official responses to Helene, including FEMA’s, had come up short. Gordon provided a detailed comment that argued that FEMA did as well as could be expected. I still differ with him, given reports otherwise, and additionally in the distribution of funds to victims. For instance, he contended that drones would not have added to intel since everyone knew all the roads were out. But what about people stranded and in a bad way? What about using drones to drop supplies to those in locations where it will take a while to get to them?
But Gordon did make key points that tie into an issue raised by GM, that the US under neoliberalism is less well prepared to deal with disasters than post USSR Russia:
I think the real story lies with several societal shortcomings. Start with affordable housing. This area had been experiencing a crisis, as home prices escalated even as interest rates rose. That left those on the margins priced out and even more insecure. Many of those people experienced the most severe damage to their homes, simply because they were built in vulnerable areas and priced accordingly. Where do those folks go now, and what is society willing to do to turn this situation around?
A related problem is property insurance. I have dealt with exactly one person–in Bat Cave–who had flood insurance, and he needed it because his home was totally washed away. Florida teeters on the edge of disaster with its insurance markets with each hurricane that hits. Superstorm Sandy should have taught the country that we are all vulnerable as the intensity of storms increases, and perhaps Helene will drive that message home to more people.
A third problem we have been ignoring is the pitiful state of our infrastructure, about which the civil engineers have been warning us regularly with their Report Card. https://infrastructurereportcard.org/ In my work with public pensions, I tried to convince states to get their plans to full funding and then dedicate part of their assets to low interest, bond-like loans to water systems. Asheville has needed to upgrade its water system for years, and Helene has really forced the issue for us. Everywhere around the country, the water systems built in the fifties were built to last 50 years, and now the billed water ratios are way down, reflecting the leaks and lack of repairs/upgrades.
Finally, in our earlier piece, some readers took issue with the idea that Helene was a predictable disaster. Their reaction is an indication that the US is behind in recognizing that large scale flooding is becoming increasingly frequent, and more often than not, coming in the absence of blockbuster storms. For instance, here in Thailand, we’ve merely had much more regular and heavy rain this entire rainy season, resulting in serious floods from Chiang Mai to Phuket.2 Similarly, flooding in the UK is primarily the result of heavy rainfall.
Now to the main event.
By Damon Orion, a writer, journalist, musician, artist, and teacher in Santa Cruz, California. His work has appeared in Revolver, Guitar World, Spirituality + Health, Classic Rock, High Times, and other publications. Read more of his work at DamonOrion.com. Produced by Local Peace Economy
Hurricane Helene, which was a Category 4 hurricane, hit on September 26 and claimed around 227 lives as of October 5, 2024. The hurricane is now considered one of the deadliest “of the modern era.” Besides destroying homes, businesses, roads, and bridges, it caused power outages for millions and left countless survivors without food and water.
The hurricane has become a source of conflict and division, particularly concerning the federal government’s response to the catastrophe.
Media outlets like PBS, U.S. News & World Report, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s Hurricane Rumor Response page have addressed what National Public Radio (NPR) called, “[r]umors, misinformation and lies” about this issue on October 7. NPR stated that “Republicans, especially former President Donald Trump,” used the storm to attack political opponents on the handling of its aftermath and attempted to manipulate voters by “using misleading math to complain about immigration and foreign aid.”
Reuters—which the GlobalWebIndex listed as the world’s second most trustworthy news source in 2019—stated that FEMA’s flood risk assessments focused only on “rising seas and swelling rivers” without considering “the threat posed by the sort of extreme rainfall brought on by Helene.” While Hurricane Helene survivors with no flood insurance “will be able to apply for up to $30,000 in federal disaster aid, as well as loans from the Small Business Administration,” that amount is “only a fraction of the $250,000 worth of coverage available through the federal flood program,” Reuters reported.
Hurricane survivors have leveled complaints against not just federal, but also local disaster relief efforts. In interviews with NBC News, Asheville residents Devonna Brown and Sara Legatski criticized city officials for being unprepared for Helene. “There should have been a more urgent call for people to be prepared,” Legatski said. “Were they stationing water off the mountain ready to be trucked up here, knowing how fragile our water system is? None of this is a surprise. Anyone acting like this is a surprise has not been here long enough, is not from the mountains, and does not understand how water works.”
Buncombe County Manager Avril Pinder said during a press conference on October 1 that despite requesting water supplies from FEMA before the storm, the county only got the first shipment of water three days after Helene hit, according to NBC News. The Asheville news outlet Mountain Xpress noted Pinder’s disappointment in the state partners that fulfill disaster relief requests through FEMA. “There’s a large need in our community, and we would like to see a different response from our state partners,” she said.
“Asked whether the county had its own reserves of water for such emergencies, Pinder acknowledged it didn’t,” NBC News reported.
Community Support
In an NPR broadcast from October 5, 2024, Blue Ridge Public Radio’s Laura Hackett said federal aid was moving through western North Carolina—the area hit hardest by the hurricane—but was taking longer to reach isolated areas, especially where roads were blocked. While residents of those regions waited for assistance, community members and grassroots organizations stepped in. One notable example is the Flush Brigade, a project created by the human rights advocacy group BeLoved Asheville. “[P]eople are crowdsourcing buckets and trucks and delivering non-potable water to neighborhoods, especially in public housing, where people have struggled to flush their toilets without running water,” Hackett explained.
BeLoved Asheville also recruited hikers to deliver food, blankets, and other supplies to areas inaccessible by vehicle. Mountain Mule Packers made similar deliveries with the help of pack animals. “As government agencies, organizations, and businesses haul food, water, and other emergency supplies into North Carolina’s mountain towns using semi-trucks, helicopters, and military planes, Mountain Mule Packers enlisted its mules to help with the load,” Axios reported.
Asheville was considered a “climate haven” before Hurricane Helene, whose destructive force was intensified by global warming, according to ClimaMeter and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
In a post describing the aftermath of the Helene disaster, Asheville resident Jacquelyn Dobrinska states that besides relief efforts from military personnel, former Green Berets, FEMA workers, church groups, and local solar companies, Dobrinska witnessed “[m]embers of an anarchist bookshop setting up water systems for low-income and elderly apartment complexes” and high school students shoveling mud. “One day, I volunteered with the register of deeds where teams checked on residents in all sectors—ensuring they had water, sanitation, food, and medication. By the time I reached the front of the line, all the places in need had already been checked.”
One Asheville-based cooperative that has aided Hurricane Helene survivors is the trans-led arts organization Pansy Collective. According to the LGBTQ+ information and entertainment platform Them, this group collected and delivered food, water, batteries, propane, baby formula, diapers, and other essentials.
Also based in Asheville is the nonprofit Equal Plates Project, which gathered donations, purchased food, and prepared, served, and distributed meals to hurricane survivors. Meanwhile, organizations like PODER Emma and Colaborativa La Milpa gathered and delivered essential resources in Asheville’s Emma neighborhood, “especially… [to families] living in mobile home parks,” says East Fork.
Grassroots groups, local businesses, and community members have launched catastrophe relief efforts throughout North Carolina. For example, using small donations and working with groups like Food Not Bombs Charlotte Chapter and the Reproductive Rights Coalition, the social justice group SEAC Village purchased, gathered, and distributed items such as food, generators, and baby supplies to survivors in North Carolina’s most populous city, Charlotte.
In the Blue Ridge Mountains town of Boone, High Country Mutual Aid raised funds and brought community members together to “help folks navigating the damages and challenges left behind by tropical storm Helene.” Residents of areas like Brevard and Hot Springs received free veterinary services, while mutual aid hubs have collected essential supplies in cities like Durham, Greensboro, Carrboro, Raleigh, and Marshall.
Explaining the strong community response to the storm, Garrett Blaize, executive director of the Appalachian Community Fund, told the Guardian, “Because of the region’s history, there is a unique tendency to look after our neighbors. … We come from an area of the country that has oftentimes been defined by scarcity. … [W]e have a lot of embedded cultural values around taking care of each other.”
To support mutual aid efforts for Hurricane Helene survivors, you can reach out to the following organizations:
- Helene Response & Build WNC Resource List
- Appalachian Helene Response Fund
- Mutual Aid Disaster Relief
- Food Not Bombs Tallahassee
- Mutual Aid Athens
- Asheville Survival Program
- eKy mutual aid
- First Aid Collective Knoxville
- Tri-Cities TN/VA Mutual Aid and Solidarity Network
- BeLoved Asheville
- Appalachian Medical Solidarity Street Medics
- PODER Emma
- Disaster Relief for Western NC Cooperatives
- Mountain Access Brigade
- Rural Organizing and Resilience
- Voices of Florida
- Pansy Collective
- Seeding Sovereignty
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1 Awkwardly, Musk did precisely that for Ukraine. It’s one thing to privatize mercs, since that gives the US plausible deniability for nasty behavior. But this is a core function and the inability of the US to assist Ukraine here when we have lavished them with so many other goodies is not a good look. But I have not seen any reports of Musk providing similar services to the US in other theaters of activity, like Syria. Readers?
2 Luckily not in my current environs.
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Reuters is a reliable news agency? Lordie, what would a biassed one look like?
With the number of disasters like this one increasing in frequency, I think that the Federal government is going to be forced to make some changes. For a start, perhaps make the National Guard the primary responder in case of huge disasters like this. They often know the region, they have the trained people, the transport and the communications networks. But it should be made clear that they are not the only responders but more of the framework for relief efforts. In practice then, all those grassroots groups, local businesses, and community members would plug into the National Guard network for better coordination and support but would not be under their orders. Of course it would be hard if the Feds have sent your National Guard to Kalamazoo or Tierra del Fuego because national security but in that case you would task National Guard units in neighbouring States to cover for them.
Pretty sure each state has its own Emergency Management Agency, certainly the ones in hurricane country do. These less red tape and hierarchy to deal with than the military, and do a great deal of the coordination work that gets done.
Agreed that the transport and communications might be better at the Guard, but their autocratic style and need to ‘secure the area’ was iffy during Katrina. The states need to be the lead agency, with FEMA doing little besides rapidly shoveling cash and cell towers in the right direction, and without Washington lobbyists grabbing billions of the pie for their clients. If you had to have a lead federal agency, the Corps of Engineers should perhaps take over FEMA, since they have a better grip on the concept of logistics and rapid deployment, and since FEMA has proven itself not up to the task on several occasions.
Widely expressed dissatisfaction with local governments’ response to emergencies (not just in western NC) seldom addresses what I consider the single biggest cause of such failings: not just “poor planning,” but privatization that makes prudent and effective planning for severe disaster difficult to impossible.
Once upon a time, streets and roads, water distribution, drainage, trash collection, and often even electric power nets were managed and maintained first-hand by city/county/state EMPLOYEES (not “team members”). That gave governments the flexibility to reconfigure a much larger pool of staff and equipment than now and ensured that detailed technical knowledge of those systems was sustained in-house. Nowadays, many if not most of these services are contracted out to “more efficient” private firms and the barriers to redeployment of those resources are high to impenetrable.
We should be at least as concerned with effectiveness under the stress of major disasters as we are with the cost effectiveness of those services under ordinary circumstances. Nouriel Rubini’s teachings about long-tail-probability catastrophe and the risk of ruin are as applicable here as in high finance.
First time poster. I was part of a mutual aid group that formed as kind of an offshoot of the East End/Valley Street Neighborhood Association. The area is just to the east of downtown Asheville and is a relatively high-density part of the city. We did not experience severe flooding. Some individual homeowners experienced property damage.
I want to say that the federal government’s response was abysmal in the immediate aftermath of the storm. When I-40 and I-26 were both down, no supplies were available. No information was available. As we were lucky enough to have power (most people in our immediate area speculate that our section of the grid was more resilient because of our proximity to Mission Hospital), we spent the first night listening to a Baptist guy on AM radio who just kind of marveled at how bad everything seemed to be, and then started talking about how to fix drywall with water damage.
Things did not improve for several days, but we managed to get toilet water from the apartment complex’s pool before our version of the flush brigade was set up by two guys who rigged up a pump to a stream behind Mountain Springs Apartments at the corner of Miller and MLK. Our drinking water largely came from breweries, since both Burial and Terra Nova had thousands of gallons stored when the public water supply went out.
I won’t pretend to have an answer for how we fix things at the federal level or preach about the need for more infrastructure spending. What I will offer is some advice.
As frustrating as the federal response was, what was so frustrating was the complete lack of a plan or any kind of organization. There were no lines of communication, so a community of people came together spontaneously, organized, and managed to distribute information by knocking on doors and talking to their neighbors. When resources started coming in (exclusively due to private citizens initially), we could effectively distribute them from a centralized and accessible location. We also had gas to give to people who drove supplies to people who could not get around on their own. It wasn’t perfect, but it eventually served its purpose until better help arrived. This took around two weeks. Non-potable water started flowing again about a week after that.
My point: Make a plan now. Go to community meetings. Create that network during the good times so that you don’t have to start from scratch when everything goes to shit.
I don’t live in NC and haven’t tried visiting (the NC governor now says you can) but I do think the overwhelmingly widespread nature of the event has to be taken into account. Here we are fine except for the unfortunates and not that many really who had their houses smashed by trees. And while we did have flooding the reason nature trails get built in flood plains is because there are no houses there. I believe the mountains did get a lot more rain than the piedmont–here about 8 inches.
There is a question whether the Western NC housing boom has put people in harm’s way who didn’t used to be–sort of like those LA houses teetering on hillsides. So it’s not just a government problem but also a private development and people where they weren’t problem.
At any rate good luck.
Thanks! Yeah, the housing boom is a concern, especially the desire to avoid high-density development to maintain WNC’s quaintness. I think that put some people in harm’s way. However, the amount of rain that came down here was unfathomable (I’ve heard 14 inches over 72 hrs, which is more than 4 times the amount of rain we get in an average September). Places where people have safely lived for generations got destroyed.
I don’t know what kind of infrastructure you build to manage floodwaters of that magnitude and how to plan accordingly as a homeowner or responsible developer (they’re rare, but they exist). I guess we have to figure that out.
Thanks for this post and the comments.
Child care an issue, unaffected myself but know some who on their own set up child care on a pay as you can basis. Something I had not thought of, but of course, with schools and daycare closed.
Agree with the set up the networks now. Difficult work while the sun shines. Seems to come more naturally in some areas, maybe reflecting old settlement patterns. I read Albion’s Seed a time ago and was: Oh, I see!
I don’t know answers, but current institutional trust is low; community cohesion is often broken by politicians and interest groups for political gain. The combination of those two factors I think complicates any sort of effort. I think our natural inclination mostly is to help, but we face strong headwinds.
We’ll just thinking about it, I don’t know how many around here where I live appreciate the complexity of the systems that support us. So relatively simple or straightforward things like supporting local businesses are not done. The people here consider themselves independent and they just shop online.
But of course it’s not just money, it’s capacity. That person who can fix things or hook up power equipment. That type of resilience goes away- lots of knowledge in those older deaths of despair. Not replaced
2 bits re communications, wasn’t FIRSTNET a legislative response post Katrina to improve communcations in an emergency, as well as events such as Butler, PA? Wonder if such got off the ground in NC?
As a resident of WNC, I find myself in agreement with the many of the comments made by fellow residents here (like Gordon H in the prior post and in this post). Just my two cents on the response here. First, as with me, it appears the local governments had no idea what was coming and so were caught flat-footed from the get-go. That said, I find myself truly proud of the local response.
For me, a couple of things stand out. First, we have an incredible local digital newspaper called Asheville Watchdog. https://avlwatchdog.org/ Their coverage has been outstanding, and, I feel, like newspapers of old, they have the ability to cover the local news in a manner that holds people to account. Time to give them some more money! I feel like the other local media have done a good job, too.
Second, the City of Asheville’s water supply, as I understand it, has two main pipes coming out of the reservoir that feed the water system and the City has an auxiliary pipe. My understanding is that it is the auxiliary pipe that is feeding the water system now, not the two main pipes. I understand that in response to a weather event in 2004, the City at that time hardened the two main pipes and came up with an auxiliary pipe. The hardened main pipes could not withstand the onslaught of Helene (which, when you look at the pictures you can see why), but Helene did not entirely wipe out the auxiliary pipe and it could be repaired and brought online relatively quickly. If I have that right, I have to say that was good planning! Kudos.
Third, and I’m not sure I read this anywhere and think I just heard it thru the grapevine (so, big, big grain of salt here), but I’ve heard that the local community in Marshall, NC, was so on top of recovery efforts that the Army and Guard that arrived to help just started getting their to dos from the leadership of the community recovery efforts. If true, that is simply amazing on so many levels.
Our place still does not have potable water and we go to a close-by volunteer-run site that filters stream water to fill up gallon jugs with potable water, but that is nothing compared to what others have had to deal with and I can’t complain. Moreover, and while I’m sure there are many things that can be improved upon for future calamaties (this area is most definitely NOT a climate haven) but I definitely feel that the City of Asheville is doing its very best (and the Asheville Watchdog is watching them) and so things are definitely ok and, again, I can’t complain. I’m most definitely proud to be part of this community!
Maybe I’ve got this all wrong, but that is my quick 0.02.