Helene Recovery & Info

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Carolina Fever said:
Guess the MAGA folks in western NC and the Pubs that represent them are finding out you get what you vote for.


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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.
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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.

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.
 
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."
 
lawtig02 said:
The fish hatcheries in the mountains will be absolutely vital for the next 2-3 years. I'm confident in NC and SC, believe it or not. If TN and GA stay strong, the mountain fish populations should rebound quickly.
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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.
 

About this event​

Community • State
In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, we saw the heart of the mountains. Neighbors became lifelines, and communities across the region rose together.

One year later, journalists from across the state are coming together to honor that resilience through the power of story.

Join us for an evening of stories and conversations about how we’ve helped one another, what we’ve lost, and what we’ve learned as our region continues to recover.

NC Local, in partnership with UNC Asheville and newsrooms across the state, is hosting this evening of connection and storytelling as part of UNC Asheville’s Post-Helene Symposium: “Remembering, Rebuilding and Reimagining.”

This free event is open to the public, but we ask you to register.

Event Schedule:

5:30-6:30 pm | Pre-event reception: Attendees are invited to meet journalists who have been covering Helene and community partners who are providing opportunities to document and reflect on the last year. Light refreshments provided.

6:30-8:00 pm | The Heart of the Mountains: Join us in the Blue Ridge Room for an evening of storytelling and interviews highlighting the voices of unsung heroes who made a difference in their communities in the days, weeks and months after Helene.

Featuring:

Michael Hayes, Umoja Health, Wellness, and Justice Collective Founder and Executive

Director

John Coffey, Black Mountain Fire Chief

Travis Long, News & Observer Photojournalist

Emily Cadmus, Buncombe County Special Collections Hell or High Water Project Coordinator

Delia Jovel Dubón, Tierra Fértil Coop Co-Founder

Amanda Watts, Yancey County Nurse and Field Hospital Organizer

John Arndt, Swannanoa resident who rescued families using his kayak

Phillip Cooper, Operation Gateway and Voices of Affrilachia Founder

Brandon and David Davis, Owners of DayTrip

Donna Ray Norton, Madison County 8th Generation Ballad Singer



Spanish Translation:

Live interpretation in Spanish will be available via headset, provided by the Cenzontlé Language Justice Cooporative. We are also excited to present a portion of the event in Spanish with English subtitles.

More Details:

Want to share your story ahead of the event? Learn more about Buncombe County Special Collections "Come Hell or High Water" Community Memory Project here.

UNC Asheville’s Post-Helene Symposium: “Remembering, Rebuilding and Reimagining” takes place September 24 to 26, 2025. This free event is hosted on the campus of UNC Asheville, with additional ticketed events taking place at select locations across our city. Learn more and register for other events here.

NC Local is a nonprofit news organization that works in partnership with other newsrooms across the state to ensure all North Carolinians have access to accurate, trustworthy and useful information about how issues affect their lives. The Heart of the Mountains event is produced in partnership with Asheville Citizen-Times, Ashevegas Hot Sheet, The Assembly, Beacon-Tribune, Blue Ridge Public Radio, Buncombe County Special Collections, Carolina Public Press, The Charlotte Observer, Enlace Latino NC, Mountain Xpress, The News & Observer, Smoky Mountain News and UNC Asheville.

Thank you to our presenting sponsor Dogwood Health Trust.

By providing your email address during registration, you agree to receive updates from NC Local. We may also send you emails about future events, products, or services that may be of interest to you.

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The Heart of the Mountains

Stories from a year of courage, kindness, and community after Hurricane Helene
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