Anisa Khalifa: In late September, Hurricane Helene made landfall and ravaged the southeast. Western North Carolina was hit especially hard.
Unidentified Speaker: It's, it's devastating. And I've got a couple friends I haven't heard from since this began. So fingers crossed.
Unidentified Speaker: This guy had a little cabin right over here. It flipped up and rolled down and went down in storage sheds. All kinds of stuff. It was crazy.
Anisa Khalifa: Helene is a devastating example of climate change's impact on communities. We're experiencing stronger storms, like Hurricane Milton, which formed in the Gulf of Mexico just days later. And it's not unusual now for someone to experience multiple so-called hundred year storms in their lifetime.
Unidentified Speaker: The funny thing is this is not my first rodeo, this is actually my second flood.
Anisa Khalifa: Now, recovery and relief are underway in Appalachia, but how do you deliver aid in a region with its unique geographical challenges?
Unidentified Speaker: When those little pockets get cut off, it's really hard to figure out what they need and what they don't need and get to all of them. It's not like you're dealing with a whole neighborhood. It's like you're dealing with hundreds of small places you don't even maybe know about.
Anisa Khalifa: I'm Anisa Khalifa. This is The Broadside, where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week, getting aid into the disaster zone and the long road ahead to recovery.
Jay Price: We followed the New River, uh, for miles and miles and miles. The rivers were kind of tame again, totally fine. They're, you know, shallow streams. Uh, except that they were just littered with chunks of houses. I'm Jay Price. I cover the military and veterans affairs for the American Homefront Project.
Anisa Khalifa: As a journalist, Jay has covered his fair share of hurricanes. Floyd back in '99. Katrina in '05. And now, Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, he began reporting on the response from FEMA and the U.S. military, both active and reserve. And recently, Jay met up with the National Guard and their fleet of helicopters in Salisbury, North Carolina.
Jay Price: You know, in the foothills well away from the disaster zone, they're trucking in FEMA supplies there, putting them on a host of helicopters.
Anisa Khalifa: The soldiers' objective was clear. Get FEMA supplies to people who needed them. But as they flew around the Blue Ridge Mountains, Jay watched them improvise and adapt to the challenging situation on the ground.
Jay Price: They have their mission changed regularly, a lot, and the mission probably changed six, seven times in the air because there's so much need out there, and there are different kinds of need.
Anisa Khalifa: In North Carolina, Jay says the National Guard is used to helping with hurricane recovery, but not in the mountains.
Jay Price: If you think about where hurricanes hit in North Carolina, they hit the east. And so you'll go and there'll be a whole neighborhood that's been flooded and then the water drains out of it and you can generally get to it. Not a lot of destruction to roads typically. This kind of gets at the heart of what the disaster, what it's being characterized by, and that's the verticality of the landscape. In this case, it was just striking. It was little nodes here, there, and yon. And that was dictated by the verticality of the landscape. Your neighbor might only be 200 feet away, but they may be 20 feet lower than you and 20 feet closer to the water and their housemate. be entirely gone and yours totally fine. Your, your yard untouched. I saw that again and again. There'd be houses just in beautiful condition and then right next door there would be kind of this patch, this house shaped brown patch on the ground where a house used to be.
Anisa Khalifa: Wow. As you traveled along these rivers, then what was your first stop? Can you set the scene for us?
Jay Price: It was a, just a small community called Creston, um, and we didn't even cut the motor. They stopped the rotor blades, but didn't cut the motor. And what became pretty quickly clear was this huge sprawling kind of ad hoc distribution system for commodities that, you know, that are coming in, some of them official, some of them not. Uh, the donations that are coming in, you know, FEMA trucks, uh, there was an airport at Hickory, there was a, just a menagerie, as I put it, of, uh, different kinds of civilian helicopters, just, just all kinds and all different colors.
Another thing stuck with me, the very first stop, the community folks who came out and unloaded the aircraft. One woman made a special effort to run around and hug as many of the crew members as she could. And that's a response you see a lot, you know, when those National Guard folks come out, giving their time and putting their lives on hold for this. The people out there understood that. She understood that. Then we dropped into the Ashe County Airport to pick up FEMA officials and I went to see what was going on because the little quiet airport was just overwhelmed with civilian aircraft flying in. These things were flying in from all over the place. I talked to a couple of pilots, Todd Eby and Grant Baker, who had flown down from Goshen, Indiana in a big, sleek, kind of corporate turboprop.
Todd Eby: We brought 1,500 pounds down and we're going to go get another load.
Jay Price: Todd told me that he had been sitting there watching the vice presidential debate. But also thinking about the disaster and just got disgusted with politics, uh, the nation's partisan divide just didn't seem that important to him anymore. And he called his friend Grant and said, we ought to do something.
Todd Eby: We put it out on Facebook and the next day we had probably, what would you say, Grant, 2,000 pounds of stuff to fly down.
Jay Price: They had flown 1,500 pounds of stuff down from Indiana, and we're turning around and about to go back and get more and then come again.
Anisa Khalifa: So, you've covered other large scale disasters in the past, both inside and outside North Carolina. What's the most important thing in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster like Helene?
Jay Price: Food, water, shelter. You know, the basics of life. This one is extremely tricky because of all the little pockets of people throughout the mountains. I have this kind of silly sport I'm involved in. I race bikes on gravel roads and I've been over hundreds of miles out there in the west and seen how isolated some of the pockets are. When those little pockets get cut off, it's really hard to figure out what they need and what they don't need and get to all of them. It's not like you're dealing with a whole neighborhood. It's like you're dealing with hundreds of small places you don't even maybe know about. You know, getting a handle on who needs that water, shelter, food has to be about the trickiest part of this.
Anisa Khalifa: Is North Carolina uniquely situated to offer aid because we have such a large military presence here, or is there just as much, you know, procedural red tape as you would find in any other state?
Jay Price: Well, the red tape is going to exist. There's no way around that. And I can assure you that the troops at Fort Liberty who were involved in this were ready to go well before they got the authorization. It's just how this works. You know, these things are pretty tricky. It is not the norm to get federal active duty troops involved in disaster recovery. That's just not what they're set up for, and it has to be a pretty extraordinary situation, and this is. It did take, you know, a little while for the, the order to bounce up and down. President had to authorize it, you know, had to go through the Office of Secretary of Defense, and then up and down. Uh, it took a couple of days, but, you know, that was fine.
The Guard was already on the job, and already had probably more than a thousand people working the case. You know, one ongoing issue in the country is there are politicians who like to call for active duty troops at the drop of a hat, that whole, the cavalry is coming thing. But if you think about it, most of what the military is trained and equipped to do isn't relevant for this sort of response. You don't need combat infantry units, really. Some of their capabilities though, like moving a lot of supplies and equipment around by air to remote places and things like water purification on a large scale, and road clearing and road repair so they can move around in war zones, high clearance trucks that move through really rough terrain and streams, you know, those are, those are some of the key things the active duty side is bringing to this.
Anisa Khalifa: So, Jay, you spent a day with these soldiers, but these soldiers are going to spend a lot more than a day out there working on this, helping people out. What is that going to look like for them?
Jay Price: Yeah, I mean, it's, when they get called up for this duty, they're, they're all civilians. Um, they're part time Guard soldiers. They all have civilian lives. They have families, they have jobs, and they put that on hold, kind of indefinitely, as long as they're needed. The pilot, the chief pilot that day, was Chief Warrant Officer Nathaniel Ernst.
Nathaniel Ernst: I think we're looking kind of the Spruce Pine, Burnsville, North Carolina area. Flying around there yesterday and just could see the devastation, and the need. Uh, so we'll probably go up there and find a location to drop off the food and water.
Jay Price: And you know, I asked him because it was such a crazy day. I mean, we had like 11 takeoffs, 11 landings. We kept getting redirected for a mission change. We flew here. We flew there. We flew to Tennessee to get fuel. We were stopped on the tarmac there by a delay for President Trump's aircraft to land and for the motorcade to leave. The Secret Service pushed us inside. There was a sniper on the roof. It was great fun.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh my God.
Jay Price: Yeah. It was, you know, and so you think, okay, what a crazy day. And, and, you know, Ernst just looked at, you know, the Secret Service guy looked at the, the, at the Trump aircraft and said, well, I didn't see that coming, but he didn't sound that excited about it one way or the other. It was just one more crazy thing in a crazy day. We saw all kinds of wild things and they had to be flexible to do this work. And you know, when we got out of the aircraft, I asked him about it and you know, I said, how do you keep that flexibility and how do you keep doing this? This was a long day. And he said, you know, everybody's struggling now and our problems are pretty small compared to the people that we're helping.
Nathaniel Ernst: You know you've got to keep going because everyone else is struggling right now. And so you put in the hours to do it, you get a mission, you figure out what needs to happen to get that mission done and you do it.
Anisa Khalifa: Coming up, we talk with a climate reporter based in western North Carolina about the situation on the ground…and the first hurdles people are facing as they begin to pick up the pieces.
Katie Myers: My name is Katie Myers and I am the climate reporter at BPR, um, and I'm also with Grist, a national environmental news organization.
Anisa Khalifa: Katie is based in Asheville, North Carolina. The city was one of the many mountain communities hit hard by Helene.
Katie Myers: And there were a couple of folks at the station who were out in more rural areas and who we initially um, couldn't contact in the hours after the flood, so you know, I was worried about folks.
Anisa Khalifa: Since then, Katie has been extremely busy reporting alongside her colleagues at Blue Ridge Public Radio on the recovery effort around the western part of the state.
Katie Myers: The search and recovery, search and rescue efforts are still ongoing. So in a way it's still feels like the very beginning. People are in very desperate situations stuck, you know, up mountain roads. And this is like, you know, the moment where the sort of initial shock of the storm starts to wear off and the reality begins to set in, that this is not going to be over anytime soon. So, you know, even for folks who are reachable, who maybe just have power or water outage, they're beginning to worry about their jobs, you know, a lot of this area is very reliant on the service industry, and a lot of restaurants are closed because there's no water in Asheville at the moment.
And the thing is, there have been so many volunteers coming here, so many that some communities have asked them to slow down, um, or had to redirect resources, like pallets of water, food, all this stuff. You know, they have such a glut of supplies, and it's so hard to take them out, you know, they're still distributing. So the infrastructural challenges are keeping supplies in one spot and preventing them from getting distributed where they need.
Anisa Khalifa: Are there environmental hazards compromising folks ability to safely recover and rebuild?
Katie Myers: Yeah, I mean, if you think about what a flood is and what it does, it knocks over and sort of rushes through everything. gas stations, hardware stores, like, you know, sewage plants, kind of like everything that was on the surface of the earth at this moment in time gets stuck in this mud. It's not nice. It's not fun to be around. It smells like a landfill. As it dries out, it turns particulate into the air and you breathe it in. And folks have gotten sick, you know, just from breathing that in. And then, you know, there are the indoor hazards as well. If the mud isn't cleared out in a timely manner, and sometimes even if it is, mold can become a hazard. And then of course, without water, uh, sanitation in general can become an issue. So, you know, floods are a big public health problem, and I think people should recognize that.
Anisa Khalifa: What do authorities need to do? What do they need to pay attention to, to minimize all of these public health risks that come in the aftermath of a hurricane like this?
Katie Myers: It's a difficult situation, right? Governing through this is not something that most people expect. You know, I, I've met a lot of small town mayors in my life. Many of them just owned a car dealership and thought they could do a good job as mayor. And that's not the case in Asheville, Asheville's a bigger city, but some of these areas, you know, governance through this crisis is going to be very difficult. So I want to appreciate that. That said, there's water infrastructure here that has been struggling for a bit. And so I think this is a chance to really strengthen, in particular, water infrastructures because that's so key to public health, right? Like, the jail needs water. The hospital needs water. People need water to wash their hands, flush their toilets, everything. And so I think that seeing to that will be very key in making sure this doesn't, you know, sort of turn medieval.
Anisa Khalifa: That's, yeah, that's an evocative image. And we don't really think of flooding as a common risk in western North Carolina. So, how common is it for people to have flood insurance for their homes?
Katie Myers: It is not very common. Recent Reuters analysis shows only 1 in 200 homes in flood hit areas in western North Carolina has flood insurance. And Appalachia in general, it's just, you know, it's devastating when it happens, but it's not a regular enough occurrence that many homeowners feel like it's a worthwhile investment for them to make.
Anisa Khalifa: So kind of moving bigger picture, in your reporting you've covered the effect of quote climate whiplash on western North Carolina and how that contributed to Helene's impact. What is climate whiplash and how has it influenced North Carolina recently?
Katie Myers: This area and many, many areas are experiencing drier dries and wetter wets, just more extreme fluctuation. This dry period we've had, we had been in a drought since the summer, um, a number of western North Carolina counties had been in a drought, which was affecting, you know, the corn crop, affecting some farmers. And, you know, this dryness of the soil does make it more prone to things like landslides. And then this rain comes and pummels the soil and the mountainsides just kind of slip off.
We did see a number of landslides. That is one of the deadliest results of a flood in the mountains. And it's something that, you know, we've called this unprecedented, but It's something that mountain communities are prone to, and that is not covered by insurance. There is no such thing as landslide insurance. I know some dear friends up in the Boone area had their home wiped out by a landslide, and they still have to pay a mortgage on it.
Anisa Khalifa: So basically, because the ground was drier when the extreme rainfall came, it just wasn't able to absorb the water as quickly as it normally would if it wasn't experiencing drought conditions. And we had, I saw in your reporting that they've estimated that 40 trillion tons of rain fell from Helene in the Appalachia region. Just a number that I can't even wrap my head around.
Katie Myers: It's a crazy amount. There's some statistic about how many times, like, could have filled the stadium 51 times or something like that. I mean, that's what's unprecedented, right? It's like, not that these areas aren't prone to floods and landslides, because they are. We've had floods, we've had landslides. It's just that this huge, insane amount of rain fell in this such a short period. And the focus is rightly on Western North Carolina because that is where the bulk of the damage from the storm in Appalachia happened, but it affected six states. So South Carolina is also struggling. Um, East Tennessee, which is a place that's very dear to my heart. Um, there are towns that were washed away. This is a wide ranging storm. These are rural, very low income. communities that were hit and, you know, my hope is that they'll receive the resources they need to recover, but I worry that those areas will, will see a slower recovery.
Anisa Khalifa: You and your colleagues at Blue Ridge Public Radio have been working around the clock to get people helpful and reliable information during times when people really don't have a lot of other ways to communicate, and it's been especially important as we've seen a lot of misinformation and rumors swirling in the wake of the hurricane, especially the last few days. Is there some misinformation that you've seen that's especially important to debunk?
Katie Myers: Yeah, I mean, people are relying — in the absence of any other reliable, more organized communication, a lot of folks, particularly in rural areas, are really relying on social media to deliver them information. And so, you know, these things are not fact-checked and it kind of means people are grasping onto whatever threads of information that they can get. And so if somebody hasn't seen FEMA in their area, they're kind of like, where's FEMA? FEMA's nowhere. You know, it's, it's just kind of like these rumor mills just kind of begin, um, in a disaster scenario like this. Which they are, they are present. They are here. Um, FEMA is doing, you know, door to door visits to people's homes to assess the damage. Um, FEMA agents are available in shelters, um, are setting up disaster recovery centers, but there is this perception that the, that the government is not here and that the government is not helping, which is not true.
Anisa Khalifa: In the wake of Helene, we've seen communities really band together, big communities and smaller communities, um, to make sure people are safe and cared for. What have you seen within that communal resilience that has really stood out to you in the last week and a half?
Katie Myers: Rural Appalachia, people have always had to be a little bit more, and I don't want to romanticize this, um, people have had to be resilient and self-sufficient often because, you know, their areas have been disinvested in for a long time. But, you know, that kind of built up experience has allowed people to really run around and help each other. People are going. into the forest on ATVs and cutting trees with chainsaws so that other folks can get out. Um, people are hiking in to check on their neighbors. One man hiked miles and miles, um, to check on his parents because he didn't know how else to get to them.
There are organized efforts. In Marshall downtown, um, everyone is just helping each other muck out because it's such, it's work that has to be done really quickly and, and there's no other way to do it as quickly, except through volunteers and neighbors helping neighbors, or else it's gonna start to get moldy. So it's out of necessity, and that's why I don't want to romanticize it, but it's, people have really, uh, sprung into action, and it's inspiring to see. I just want to emphasize that the recovery process is long. It takes years. You know, the FEMA application deadline is in November. After that, people will still be in temporary housing. This is a tenuous situation that people are going to be in for a long time. It's going to affect the economy of this area for a long time.
Anisa Khalifa: This episode of The Broadside was produced by Charlie Shelton-Ormond and edited by Jared Walker. Wilson Sayre is our executive producer. If you'd like to check out more of Jay Price's reporting for WUNC and Katie Myers' work at BPR, we've dropped some links in this week's show notes. The Broadside is a production of WUNC-North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR Network. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend. I'm Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.