Hurricane Helene, Part One: The Arrival
Today marks 2 weeks since Helene swept through our region and left a path of destruction I am still struggling to comprehend. Outside folks ask us if we are ok, if so-and-so is ok. I’ve stopped saying we’re ok. That doesn’t feel like the right word. Instead I say “We are safe.” My partner and I are safe. My home and studio are safe. The majority of my immediate community is safe. We feel incredibly fortunate to have suffered minimal damage. I want to write about my experience, and what I’m seeing here on the ground as we work towards recovery. Writing helps me process, particularly events as emotionally charged and traumatic as what we are living through here in WNC. Whether you have also been directly impacted by Helene, or perhaps are on the outside looking in, I thank you for taking the time to be here with me.
The recovery in WNC is patchy, unequal. I worry for the countless communities that are remote, whose roads have been washed away, whose folks have spent weeks isolated, for the people who are still unaccounted for. I feel fortunate to live close to town— the damages in our neighborhood are significant but we were able to start accessing centralized resources within days after the storm. On October 8, after eleven days of darkness, our home regained power. Immediate neighbors on the next street over are still, as of today, without. Running water is another story. The systems that supply water to 80% of the area were destroyed. They say it could be weeks, optimistically. The main city hospital dug its own wells. The city schools are talking about doing that, too.
The morning of the storm, I woke up at 4am. I knew the worst of Helene was going to hit us between 6am and 10am. We had received significant rainfall in the days prior, and were already dealing with standing water in our basement. We rent a home, which is at times a blessing and at times a curse. The gutters on the house are ancient, and lately their derelict state has meant that any heavy rains in our area have been sending roof runoff directly into a window of the unfinished basement. The last time it rained, the unnerving sound of a waterfall emanated from the basement door. I had emailed our property management company weeks prior to Helene, expressing general concern about flooding. The maintenance decision was caught up in a back-and-forth between the company and the owners of the home. Finally, they scheduled a work order for the gutters the week of September 23rd, and then had to reschedule “due to the rain” (womp womp). As the eve of Helene’s landfall approached, we grew nervous. We became resourceful, using what materials we could find around the house to fashion makeshift ways of diverting the water. We dug trenches in the yard. We set out buckets. We ripped apart large soil bags and used them over pieces of plywood propped against the house at an angle— anything to keep the runoff from going directly into our basement.
As weather reports began to amplify the severity of the hurricane on Thursday night, my texts to the emergency maintenance man grew frantic. He was inundated with requests from other tenants also dealing with flooding in their homes. Again, his ability to provide assistance was hindered by a lack of response from the homeowners. Finally, they were able to send someone out that evening to install a sump pump in the basement. His name was Mr. Impossible (I kid you not). He had found one of the last pumps in town. It was a relief, but ultimately I knew that once we lost power it wouldn’t matter anymore. At 6:35am on Friday morning, just after I finished brewing a pot of coffee, our power went out. We were in the dark, and the storm had barely arrived.