Black Mountain volunteer firefighter David Billstrom hails the fire chief on a handheld radio.
“401 from 494 on VHF,” Billstrom said into the radio. It clicks as he releases the push-to-talk button.
The number 401 is the fire chief’s callsign. He’s at Fire Station 4, so the callsigns are start with 4, and 01 refers to the chief. Since Billstrom is a volunteer, he’s a little farther down the line. “Now we’ll see if the chief heard me.”
“Go ahead 494,” Fire Chief John Coffey said. A short “krr” sound tells Billstrom that Coffey has finished speaking.
Coffey is standing 15 feet away in the parking lot of the fire station. They’re testing a backup system that could save lives during the next emergency. The VHF, or very high frequency, system was already in place for first responders when Hurricane Helene flooded Black Mountain a year ago. It relied on a combination of batteries and gas-powered generation.
“But all these things have moving parts, except for the batteries,” Billstrom said. Those moving parts can become a liability, especially if they haven’t run in a while. “So the batteries are really the only thing you can count on. And the outage here was so long that it's my understanding, most of those towers exhausted their batteries.”
When power to the tower was cut off and the batteries ran out, the backup system failed. Meanwhile, the primary system became too congested to function.
The difference a couple of degrees makes
Helene hit Black Mountain hard, Fire Chief Coffey said.
“The projections, no matter which way it came, if it hit our area, they kept referencing 2004,” Coffey said.
That’s when hurricanes Frances and Ivan flooded western North Carolina in rapid succession.
“It caused a lot of devastation in the area. There was no water for about a week in some areas along the Swannanoa River. We affected dozens of rescues,” Coffey said. “So we had that on our minds.”
2004 was a benchmark that Coffey and many others in Black Mountain understood. But as the storm got closer, it became clear that Helene would be much worse.
“They kept referencing 1916,” Coffey said. “No one was alive that's alive today. [...] You're saying it's bad, but how bad? Where was the affected areas?”
In 1916, two hurricanes hit the Southeast in mid-July, dropping nearly 20 inches of rain on western North Carolina. Approximately 80 people lost their lives.
And therein lies the insidious effect of climate change. As Chip Konrad, director of the Southeast Regional Climate Center, put it on Charlotte Talks:
“Climate change did not cause Helene,” Konrad said. “Helene would have been very bad without climate change. Climate change made it worse.”
Many Black Mountain residents understood what 2004 meant. And if the Gulf of Mexico hadn’t been 2 degrees warmer than its historic average, they might have gotten 2004 again. Instead, they got something much worse than even 1916.
The week before Helene made landfall, Coffey and his team knocked on doors, asking folks to evacuate.
“We heard, ‘Well, I've lived here my whole life, and the water's never come up, but right there. I'm fine. I'm not leaving,’” Coffey said.
On Sept. 8, 2004, a U.S. Geological Survey gauge near Biltmore measured 19 feet. In 1916, the rain gauge measured 21 feet — the highest reading of the century. When Helene flooded the Swannanoa on Sept. 27, 2024, waters rose to 27.33 feet.
“You ever see one of those documentaries where they talk about the end of the world and they show all these clips of just horrible weather conditions? That was it,” Coffey said. “I saw oak trees bend like I've never seen [them] bend before. They were bending like palm trees.”
Communications severed at the trunk
Coffey was trapped. And so were many residents. Because cell service was out, they had no way to call for help.
Communication started to break down on the primary network, called a trunked radio system. The fire department, paramedics and police were constantly responding to crises. Agencies from outside the county had converged on the area. All that chatter overloaded the system.
“If you're on a trunking system and those channels are already in use, you get what's called a ‘busy bonk,’” Billstrom said.
During the emergency, the firefighters started to get the “busy bonk” on their radios. When they tried to use the VHF channels, the generator failed and the battery conked out.
The signal booster for the backup frequencies, called a repeater, sits atop Allen Mountain, overlooking the town of Black Mountain. A nondescript shed juts out from the vegetation and wildflowers. Billstrom points to two chargers mounted on the wall inside. One is connected to the grid; the other will connect to solar power.
The nonprofit Footprint Project donated a 400-watt solar panel that will fully charge the battery in six hours. Billstrom plans to connect it in the next couple of weeks.
“The modeling that we've done is we could run for two or three days, which is what we would have needed to do during Helene,” Billstrom said.
But they’re not just strengthening the backup radio system. They’re also training private citizens on how to use this technology, starting with 30 two-way radios. Billstrom and his fellow volunteer firefighter Borden Borden are training the first Black Mountain Community Emergency Response Team, or CERT.
“It’s one thing for a citizen to volunteer the use of their chainsaw or their side-by-side or even their helicopter,” Billstrom said. “It’s quite another thing for any municipality or government official to task such a citizen with doing something.”
CERT volunteers are able to accept tasks — if they choose to — from government officials without the local government assuming too much liability. This can help relieve some of the burden on first responders.
They’re also receiving General Mobile Radio Service training. It’s old, relatively cheap tech that’s easy to use. But of course, they don’t want to run into the same problem on the backup system as they did with the primary system:
“Citizens need a little bit of training to how to use it — the same training we would have given a tow truck driver or a police officer 15 years ago [on] how to use this radio,” Billstrom said.
These radios also require a license to use.
The plan is to add another channel and eventually a second tower in case the first one fails during an emergency. Borden has been helping lead the initiative.
“Having suffered through having no communications, are really happy to have some form of communications and know that they have someone that they could possibly talk to to get the help they might need,” Borden said.
But the old radio tech has given them some peace of mind. As storms continue to worsen, strengthening communication systems like Black Mountain’s will help rural communities stay connected next time the power goes out.
“People are excited to have a device that actually works — that's not connected to the internet, because they all had that trauma of not having a phone, in some cases, for a couple of weeks,” Billstrom said.
