The History And Legacy Of Hurricane Helene

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0:22On the night of September 27th, 2024, Hurricane Helene dropped a historic wall of rain on the southern Appalachians, 31 inches in three days. The Swannanoa River rose 27 feet, roads, bridges, and entire communities gone.

0:42I'm okay. My car is gone. I'm okay. It's okay. Everything's gone. It's all gone. It's okay. More than 250 people died across the Southeast, more than 100 of them in North Carolina alone. It was the deadliest hurricane to hit the continental United States since Katrina. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. Today, we're checking in on how much Western North Carolina has rebuilt in the nearly two years since the storm, and how far it still has to go. After this.

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1:57Want some good old-fashioned goofing around and stumbling to figure out what's going on? Well, I've been taking occasional car questions again. You can hear them by signing up for NPR Plus, along with lots of other bonus content. Just go to plus.npr.org. Let's meet our guests. Joining us from North Carolina is Corey Valancourt. He's the Helene Recovery and Investigations reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times. Corey, welcome. Hi, Jen. Thanks for having me. Also with us, Andrew Aydin. He's the National Book Award-winning co-author of the March trilogy about John Lewis. He wrote the series alongside the late congressman.

2:36Aydin lived through the storm himself, and he's since put together a graphic novel anthology that pairs storm survivors with writers and illustrators to tell their own stories of the storm. It's called Islands in the Sky, a People's History of Hurricane Helene. Andrew, thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me, Jen. Corey, you've been covering Hurricane Helene and the recovery since the storm hit. Where were you on that first day? Well, Jen, on that first day, I left my house about 3 in the morning and headed down to my office. I was working for the Smoky Mountain News at the time in Haywood County and pretty quickly got trapped in Waynesville.

3:15Bridges had gone underwater and a lot of roads were blocked. And so I just walked around as much as I could during the day, trying to take in whatever I could. I know if you're trapped in a place, you only get a sense of the immediate consequences of the storm. But when did the scale of the damage begin to come clear? The storm happened on a Friday, and that was quite a hectic day. But by dinner time, it had largely subsided and people were dealing with the fallout. It took me two days to get over to Canton, another severely affected community in Haywood County, and probably another day to visit some of the other counties or the other municipalities in Haywood County.

3:59And then even more days to get out to the larger region as a whole because there were so many interruptions with landslides, blocking roads and downed power lines and trees. So it was extremely difficult, Jen. And help us understand the scale of the damage the storm caused, because it's one thing to read about roads being washed out or power lines being down. But living through the results of Hurricane Helene, I mean, just give us a sense of what that was like. Sure. So there were more than 73 ,000 homes damaged across the 30-something disaster-declared counties. Some say much more than 73 ,000.

4:42Damage to 9 ,400 sites on state-owned roads. Damage to 7 ,000 sites on private roads and private bridges. Interstate 40 was destroyed and closed for more than five months. That's an ongoing$2 billion project that won't be completed until 2028. 30 ,000 septic systems failed. 2 ,000 landslides. Communications infrastructure failed. E-commerce was halted. gasoline and groceries were rationed for a time. The initial damage estimate from the state was $60 billion, billion with a B. As of June 10th, the last figures I could find from Governor Josh Dine's office were that the federal government had awarded North Carolina about$8.3 billion.

5:29A July 22nd letter from the governor's recovery office said we had actually received$3.3 billion. The General Assembly had appropriated about$2.4 billion, mostly for federal matching funds and administrative costs. So even if those numbers are a little old or slightly off, that's the scale of the aid that we've been provided from the federal government. $60 billion in damage,$8.3 billion awarded,$3.3 billion received. So a fraction of what's needed for a full recovery. Andrew, you lived through the storm yourself, waters rose around your home. And you write in the preface of the graphic novel, Islands in the Sky, that it wasn't just the scale of the storm that set it apart.

6:14We heard a really good description there from Corey. It was also the way it cut off communication from the rest of the world. How did you experience that sudden inability to talk to people on the outside? Well, you get that first ding on your cell phone that's just like, cell phone's dead. And you don't have a landline. There's no way to reach anybody. But the scariest was for me when I put in the batteries on the old radio and started dialing through and just getting nothing but static. And it's this loneliness that you feel. And then I remember walking outside and trying to hike down just to my driveway where the creek was and looking around and seeing nothing but water all the way across.

6:59I mean, it must have been 500 to 800 feet wide from a creek that was usually five feet wide. And then you're trying to get in touch with your neighbors. And at this point, we're kind of, we're friends who have walkie-talkies. And we were so glad that we were playing like eight-year-olds and had our walkie-talkies to communicate. And that was how we were swapping information. And you just have to process the loneliness first, and then you can process the damage that you're seeing. Well, as Corey laid out, Helene caused roughly$60 billion in damage. Here's North Carolina Governor Josh Stein in July talking about the recovery effort.

7:40We need federal support. We need the government not to forget Western North Carolina. And I will do everything in my power to make sure they do not. A Jenny in North Carolina also wrote to us. Her Asheville apartment was flooded and she and her family eventually permanently relocated. Here's what she had to say. The trauma of losing our home was only intensified by the stress of dealing with FEMA. We were met with a slow, outdated system that felt out of touch with the reality on the ground. At one point, we were even asked to fax documents despite having no power, no Internet and no way to access 20th century technology.

8:15There was a stark contrast between the kind, helpful people we met in person and the dismissive experiences we had with phone agents. In the end, the aid we received didn't come close to meeting our family's needs. Because the appeals process was so sluggish and complex, we eventually gave up, turning instead to the incredible local community and mutual aid networks to help us piece our lives back together. Corey, why has only a fraction of that federal money needed for a full recovery come in? First and foremost, the process is long and arduous, even under the best of circumstances. You're talking about submitting applications that have to be reviewed by human beings.

8:57You're talking about sometimes having to do engineering reports and then the time the correspondence takes back and forth. So even under the best of circumstances, this is an onerous federal process that takes time. However, we have known for quite some time, a lot of folks think that FEMA is indeed broken. And President Trump convened a FEMA review council to present recommendations that would modernize FEMA. Now, that report, none of it has been implemented to this point. But a lot of folks think that what it does is it places an uncomfortable amount of responsibility on states, local governments, tribes, and territories and positions the federal government in the rear.

9:42Now, this is the exact opposite of what local leaders like Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers have asked me about. They've told me we want that money coming closer to the tip of the spear. It needs to come to the county level in big blocks instead of being trickled out over months and months. So that's at least part of the reason why it's been such a long and kind of drudgery to get recovered here. And if the money isn't coming through quickly from the federal government for recovery efforts, Corey, how well positioned is North Carolina to provide support for recovery as a state? It's not, Jen. It's typically not the role of a state to assume the bulk of the costs.

10:28North Carolina, I think, has about a$40 billion annual budget. And again, we're talking$60 billion. So mark that down to your household income and talk about having a debt or a damage that you have to fix. That is one and a half times what you earn each year. So the state government has, as I said earlier, they've appropriated about$2.4 billion, but that is mostly for matching funds from the federal government to draw down federal funds and the administrative costs within agencies like North Carolina Emergency Management and the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Andrew, in your graphic novel, as we said, you pair residents with writers and artists so they can tell their own story of the storm from their perspective.

11:14The subtitle is A People's History of Hurricane Helene. Why is that distinction important to you? Because so much of what happened after the storm was fighting against misinformation. The governor's office was fighting against it. The local municipalities were fighting against it. And it slowed down not just the recovery in those instant moments after the storm, but the long-term recovery of what the region is able to say about itself and how we bring people in and how we help them understand what we went through. And I think all too often these histories get told by people who weren't there. And we saw that over and over again.

11:54We have to take a quick break, but coming up, how illustrators and authors came together to tell the stories of Helene's survivors from their perspective.

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13:26Let's get back into the conversation by hearing from Jim and Allie Bordy. They shared their stories in islands in the sky. When Hurricane Helene hit their community, they escaped their home by climbing onto their roof with their dog. And Andrew, your team recorded an interview with them about that experience. we saw literally anything that got carried down river people's cars houses sheds we saw a lot of sheds and then all of a sudden there was this armada of ducks like so many rubber ducks i would say close to a thousand so all of a sudden you're in this space of terror and survival mode. Destruction.

14:11But those ducks were just a bright light in the day for sure. Jim and Allie were ultimately rescued by a neighbor in a kayak. And after more than a year, they were able to return to their home in Swannanoa, North Carolina after it was rebuilt. But not everyone was so lucky. And I have to say the panel that captures that moment with the ducks in the graphic novel, it just captures, I mean, to see it on the page, it's so surreal. They're literally clinging to the edge of a house. And there's just this armada of ducks that float by. And I'm really curious to circle back to this question about the misinformation, because that's such a real moment, right?

14:58And then you look at what circulated on social media in the aftermath of the storm, Andrew, and what do you make of the narrative that you were able to see unfolding once you reconnected with the world? Well, first, Josh Adams is the illustrator of that beautiful story, and he's a Pulitzer Prize winner, and he's an extraordinary artist in the comics community, and that's why it was so important that we bring in these types of creators to help show these moments that would have otherwise been lost. And to your point about the misinformation, There are those of us who believe there is a systematic and deliberate effort to manipulate what people saw about Hurricane Helene outside of Western North Carolina for political purposes.

15:43We don't necessarily know all of the people who were engaged in it. There hasn't been a deep dive into researching and tracking down through social media where these content providers or creators were coming from, who was paying them, whatnot. But we all saw a tremendous number of outsiders come in videotaping us. I remember seeing one down in my driveway playing. That's what it felt like, right? Like there were sort of tourists in the creek and making videos and looking around at the damage. And I'd never seen them before in my life. We know everybody in town. There's 3 ,000 people in Edneyville.

16:23We are all either cousins or friends or go to neighborhood events together. We know each other. And so when these people came in, we knew they weren't from there. And then once we got back online and we saw the content they were posting, we saw that it was routing GoFundMes and things to places that never reached any of us. And that there was a narrative that was consistent of attacking political officials or the local officials in ways that weren't true. You would see people who were helping and their stories would get ignored. And you would see people who were doing nothing but recording videos and posting them and they were getting the attention and they were getting the money.

17:03And that's what made this book so essential because if those stories, that misinformation is allowed to continue to exist online and no one's really going through and taking it down or rewriting the stories that were written at the time, then we've lost this moment in history that is so important of people coming together. of the people of the mountains saving one another, of what really happened in an ecological disaster that was driven by climate change that then caused people to lose their lives and their homes and ignore the lessons. And the lessons are the most important part. We have to understand what happened during the storm because this is coming for other people.

17:41This is coming for other regions. If that storm had been 90 miles east or 90 miles west, the death toll would have been 10 times what it was because the people of Western North Carolina and Southern Appalachia were able to take care of themselves. They had the tractors, the chainsaws. This is how we live. But if we don't learn those lessons, if we allow the misinformation to cover it all up and turn it into social media fodder, then the next storm, the next tragedy, is going to be just as bad, if not worse, and we're going to miss an opportunity to preserve a history that can help us save lives.

18:14Corey, what kinds of conversations are being had in North Carolina in the aftermath of Helene about the next storm and ensuring that the community is resilient in every way possible to either prevent another disaster, to shore up the infrastructure in a way that makes it more resilient, or to be able to better recover, have better communications in place, whatever is needed. How has that conversation played out over the last two years? Yeah, Jen, that's an important question. Right now I'm working on a package of stories for the Citizen Times for the two-year anniversary, and that's one of my main goals.

18:54As we're tracking these recovery projects across the region, the question that I keep asking is, are there resiliency and mitigation measures being implemented when we rebuild? Are we building back better, or are we just building back? Those are the questions that are being asked, and in In some cases, there is significant mitigation and remediation. The FEMA buyouts, once those occur on municipal property or on private property, they prohibit that land from being built upon again, except for very storm-friendly things like playgrounds and things of that nature. So the bigger question is the water systems that were destroyed.

19:34Are they going to be destroyed next time this happens? My good friend, Mayor Zeb Smathers in Canton, four years ago, he said to me, after Tropical Storm Fred decimated his town, he said, this is no longer a question of if, it is a question of when. Well, that echoes what we hear from Cindy in Weaverville, North Carolina. I'm a real estate agent in the Asheville area and have been telling people for 20 years that we in the western North Carolina region are in an environmental oasis with milder seasons and lower incidence of natural disasters. But our planet is changing, and Hurricane Helene, unfortunately, is the canary in the coal mine for our planet.

20:16We also heard from Jessica, who writes, I don't think the nation understands how unprepared residents were before this storm. We had no idea of the scale or potential impact. We were cut off from the world for four days with no cell service. My husband stood in line at Publix for four hours just to come home with bread and spaghetti sauce. We had no idea what happened in town, and friends from across the globe thought we were dead. We were eventually able to stay with family in another county for the next 13 days. My son's school was closed for over a month. It was so much worse than it looked.

20:49You know, sometimes an event feels very different when we have some distance from it, But I'm interested in hearing from both of you if there are certain themes or emotions from the early days of the storm and the recovery that continue to resonate with you today. Andrew? I think about the fact that we didn't have social media. None of us were online and we were talking to one another. And I think a lot of people who survived the worst of the storm will tell you that there was a moment, brief, maybe a week or two, maybe a month or two, where everybody set aside all of their differences. That's something we talk about in Islands of the Sky and we're trying to do with the Appalachian Comics Project, is that they set aside their differences.

21:29They stepped away from their personas that they have online. They helped one another. They cared for one another. They had dinners together. They shared food. They shared meals. They shared life. And as tragic as it was to bring those moments about in this way, I think a lot of people who went through this look back and miss that moment after of us caring for one another, of us not caring what party you were or what organization you were a part of, of helping one another, being together in the moment. And I think that's a thing we all need to think about. Maybe we should put our phones down a little bit more and not have a tragedy force that moment upon us.

22:09Corey, what about you? I think what time has done is given a lot of us the opportunity to reflect and to realize the emotional trauma that comes with something like this above and beyond any physical damage that may have been suffered. I recently wrote a story about a documentary called Scars on the Mountain, and it chronicles Yancey County's experience, Yancey County's just to the northeast of Asheville. And so I watched the screening copy of the documentary and all the footage was locally sourced. And when I started seeing that chocolatey, frothy, roiling water carrying homes away, refrigerators and cars, I didn't realize that I wasn't exactly prepared to see that imagery again.

23:03at one point in this documentary, I looked down and I was holding onto my kitchen table with white knuckles and I didn't even realize it because once that sound and that visual hits you, then you remember the smell and you remember everything else about it and how truly traumatic it was. You might not experience it in your daily life, but it just takes another image or another sound until you go about re-experiencing that trauma all over again. Is that part of the recovery, the emotional recovery, something available to residents in North Carolina? We can talk about roads and homes and bridges and businesses, but at the heart of all of that is people.

23:55And so, Andrew, are there spaces you see where people have a chance to grapple with both the trauma, but also those lingering questions about next time. Right. We have been holding events throughout Western North Carolina with the launch of this book and then new book events. And the creators who wrote the stories were local. They come, and then people from around in the community come. Corey helped put one together in Haywood County. We have done these now for almost a year and they are not sad. They are joyful. They are a way of people coming together, processing that trauma. We read the stories and we talk to one another and it's a way of taking this painful memory and make it something that can have joy in it.

24:43And we were doing another one on September 27th on the anniversary of the storm in Marshall, North Carolina at Mainstream Comics, which had been totally destroyed when the floodwaters came up out of the river in Marshall. And we refused to let the storm's memory be painful in that way. We're going to have a party. We're all going to go. We're going to be together. We're going to talk. Corey's come to several of them. Congressman Lewis used to call it a happening. We would all come together and we would commiserate and just be in fellowship. And I think there isn't enough space for that. So much of what the government has had to do for the recovery is how do we build a bridge?

25:25How do we build a road? How do we fix a house? And when we don't think about the necessary investment needed in art and culture and coming together and that catharsis, we leave out an essential point of healing. But I also wonder, because you, thinking back to something you said about the community being so interconnected, if not by blood, then at least by knowledge and experience. So we had an event in Edneyville where I live, and it was at the Community Center, and it was sponsored by the Edneyville Grange, which is the farmer's organization. And we had more than 100 people come. And there was a joke after because it was such a wonderful time.

26:02We all had so much fun. It was so many people coming through. It was the first traffic jam started in Edneyville that wasn't started by a tractor. And then I went to the food truck across the street. Shout out to my best friend's Chewy's, El Taqueria. And they were making fun of me because they were like, we've never been so busy, man. We ran out of food. And it's like, okay, we're saving ourselves. And because we know each other, it's like one person hears about it and then the Edneville librarian is like, well, will you come and talk to us? Because we've got people who are really only available two to four.