Thanks for posting this video, db.
Helene Recovery & Info
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Thanks for posting this video, db.
donbosco
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Ingles says it plans to demolish, rebuild supermarket in hard-hit Swannanoa
Community members have pushed the company for transparency, noting that the store had been a lifeline for many residents without access to a car.
www.bpr.org
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Good for InglesIngles says it plans to demolish, rebuild supermarket in hard-hit Swannanoa
Community members have pushed the company for transparency, noting that the store had been a lifeline for many residents without access to a car.
Carolina Fever
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Guess the MAGA folks in western NC and the Pubs that represent them are finding out you get what you vote for.
www.wral.com
FEMA denials hurting Helene recovery efforts, NC officials tell state lawmakers
The federal government has paid for just 6% of the estimated cost of North Carolina's Hurricane Helene recovery, raising concerns about how much local communities will have to end up paying, state officials told lawmakers.
www.wral.com
lawtig02
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A lot of people have speculated Helene will be a GOP talking point against Roy. If the NC Dems have any semblance of forward thinking, they should be getting ahead of that (non)story now by highlighting things like this.Guess the MAGA folks in western NC and the Pubs that represent them are finding out you get what you vote for.
FEMA denials hurting Helene recovery efforts, NC officials tell state lawmakers
The federal government has paid for just 6% of the estimated cost of North Carolina's Hurricane Helene recovery, raising concerns about how much local communities will have to end up paying, state officials told lawmakers.
Trump and the people who support him have absolutely FUCKED Western NC in its time of greatest need.
The majority of the fucked will vote for the next GOP candidate regardless, but NC Dems need to be focusing on improvement at the margins, and this may be the lowest possible of all the low-hanging fruit.
donbosco
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Panel suggests River Arts District be relocated - Asheville's 828 News NOW
The Urban Land Institute advisory panel presented strategies for Asheville's post-Helene rehab
828newsnow.com
uncgriff
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If you read one article, read this long amazing one. Hope the gift link works
www.nytimes.com
I Never Understood Our Data-Saturated Life Until a Hurricane Shut It Down
When Helene disconnected my part of North Carolina for weeks, my neighbors and I had to relearn old ways of knowing what was happening — and what wasn’t.
donbosco
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Just an excerpt from @uncgriff's post above (what is left off is the parallel story of Warren Wilson students coping with the disaster -- worth the read on its own):
"Natural disasters are foremost understood in terms of their material impact: as damage to bodies, buildings, infrastructure and economies. Helene brought winds, landslides and flooding that killed hundreds, displaced hundreds of thousands and wrought $70 billion in destruction across six states. This is how we catalog the wreckage left by floods and hurricanes, fires and earthquakes, blizzards and volcanoes.
But in the 21st century, these calamities also cleave through information networks, disconnecting vast regions from the media and communications that would normally inform them about what was happening. Everywhere else in the United States, people could simply glance at a screen to learn of Helene’s devastation. But those of us closest to that devastation had only the palest notion of its extent; even those who watched homes hurtling down mountainsides didn’t know whether the devastation was limited to what they could see or whether swaths of the country had washed away. To experience the disaster firsthand meant knowing almost nothing about it.
Soon after Helene passed over western North Carolina, a NOAA satellite photographed the region at night. The picture revealed all the clots and axons of electric light that signal technological civilization, a bright network tracing the highways and roads between major cities. But you could also see a wide plaque of darkness stretching between the Florida Panhandle and Virginia. This was the ruinous path of the storm — Fernández’s “vacuum of information” made visible.
When I saw that image, I thought of the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan. He once described electric light as “pure information,” because it was what facilitated so many other visual media. For McLuhan, anything that could deliver information was a medium: not just the obvious formats (television, telephone, photographs and so on) but also roads, railways, money, vehicles, satellites, clocks and more. In the dark void captured by that satellite image, nearly every medium examined in McLuhan’s 1964 book, “Understanding Media,” had been disabled.
Gales tore down more than 13,000 utility poles, slicing telephone lines and power cables. Broadband lines were unraveled by groundwater surges. The satellite dishes, cell towers and radio relays that protruded along the mountaintops were warped and toppled. Flooding sundered bridges and cleaved away jigsaw pieces of highways. Iron railways snapped in half. Thousands of vehicles were washed away. Banks closed. Digital clocks blinked off. And after sundown, interiors fell into a darkness in which even our trusty analog media — photographs, printed pages — became inaccessible. When information was needed most, it struggled to enter, leave or traverse western North Carolina through modern channels or ancient ones.
This profound disconnection occurs during many disasters — the wildfires in Southern California, the flooding in the Hill Country of Texas. Disasters can sever us, for a time, from what McLuhan called humanity’s “extended nervous system.” The process of slowly mending your connections to that network is an experience out of time. In western North Carolina, recovering from Helene felt like recapitulating the entire history of information, or some harried version of it — racing from the “primordial” back into modernity. We communicated first by word of mouth, then by handwritten signs and newsletters; we turned back to radio; we contended with fading cell signals and fickle satellite internet until our connection to the great network was fully restored. To return to the Age of Information was to feel, all at once, how important information is to human survival, and how our reliance on it leaves us perfectly vulnerable to manipulation and misinformation. Yet our strange deprivation also forced us to remember how minuscule the universe of information is, compared with the greater world that contains it."
"Natural disasters are foremost understood in terms of their material impact: as damage to bodies, buildings, infrastructure and economies. Helene brought winds, landslides and flooding that killed hundreds, displaced hundreds of thousands and wrought $70 billion in destruction across six states. This is how we catalog the wreckage left by floods and hurricanes, fires and earthquakes, blizzards and volcanoes.
But in the 21st century, these calamities also cleave through information networks, disconnecting vast regions from the media and communications that would normally inform them about what was happening. Everywhere else in the United States, people could simply glance at a screen to learn of Helene’s devastation. But those of us closest to that devastation had only the palest notion of its extent; even those who watched homes hurtling down mountainsides didn’t know whether the devastation was limited to what they could see or whether swaths of the country had washed away. To experience the disaster firsthand meant knowing almost nothing about it.
Soon after Helene passed over western North Carolina, a NOAA satellite photographed the region at night. The picture revealed all the clots and axons of electric light that signal technological civilization, a bright network tracing the highways and roads between major cities. But you could also see a wide plaque of darkness stretching between the Florida Panhandle and Virginia. This was the ruinous path of the storm — Fernández’s “vacuum of information” made visible.
When I saw that image, I thought of the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan. He once described electric light as “pure information,” because it was what facilitated so many other visual media. For McLuhan, anything that could deliver information was a medium: not just the obvious formats (television, telephone, photographs and so on) but also roads, railways, money, vehicles, satellites, clocks and more. In the dark void captured by that satellite image, nearly every medium examined in McLuhan’s 1964 book, “Understanding Media,” had been disabled.
Gales tore down more than 13,000 utility poles, slicing telephone lines and power cables. Broadband lines were unraveled by groundwater surges. The satellite dishes, cell towers and radio relays that protruded along the mountaintops were warped and toppled. Flooding sundered bridges and cleaved away jigsaw pieces of highways. Iron railways snapped in half. Thousands of vehicles were washed away. Banks closed. Digital clocks blinked off. And after sundown, interiors fell into a darkness in which even our trusty analog media — photographs, printed pages — became inaccessible. When information was needed most, it struggled to enter, leave or traverse western North Carolina through modern channels or ancient ones.
This profound disconnection occurs during many disasters — the wildfires in Southern California, the flooding in the Hill Country of Texas. Disasters can sever us, for a time, from what McLuhan called humanity’s “extended nervous system.” The process of slowly mending your connections to that network is an experience out of time. In western North Carolina, recovering from Helene felt like recapitulating the entire history of information, or some harried version of it — racing from the “primordial” back into modernity. We communicated first by word of mouth, then by handwritten signs and newsletters; we turned back to radio; we contended with fading cell signals and fickle satellite internet until our connection to the great network was fully restored. To return to the Age of Information was to feel, all at once, how important information is to human survival, and how our reliance on it leaves us perfectly vulnerable to manipulation and misinformation. Yet our strange deprivation also forced us to remember how minuscule the universe of information is, compared with the greater world that contains it."
Unfortunately, the Setzer Hatchery near Brevard (the main trout hatchery for NC) is set to have a full renovation that will take it offline for a few years. It was supposed to be this year, but the other trout hatchery was damaged in the storm, so they delayed the reno. The Walhalla hatchery (main trout hatchery in SC) is also due for renovations, probably at the same time as Setzer. A perfect storm of suck if you're a trout angler.
Beyond the stocking aspect, many western NC streams are near the upper thermal tolerance for coldwater species like trout. Removing all the canopy, either through the storm or from the hatchet job that the Corp of Engineer contractors are doing to stream banks and beds will only serve to increase water temperatures. Add the loss of habitat due to siltation of streams and it's not a great picture in some areas. The next administration will have to do a LOT of thoughtful restoration to nurse these areas back to health.