The story below is my account of my experience of the days leading up to and after the storm.
For local accounts and factual information,Blue Ridge Public RadioandTheAsheville Citizen-Timeshave been indispensable sources of on-the-ground insight.
This was a last-minute trip, spurred by a friends offer to crash in their temporarily empty rental house.
A van flows in floodwaters near the Biltmore Village in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on September 28, 2024 in Asheville, North Carolina.
On Wednesday, it poured torrentially.
I asked the bartender.
Nope, he responded.
A scene near Ashville
And that was not Helene.
That was an entirely different weather system that came and went.
On Wednesday people were talking about heavy rains, not hurricanes.
Sean Rayford/Getty Images
The unanimous consensus was: Expect heavy rain, but we dont get crazy floods and hurricanes.
Were in the mountains.
It seemed conservative, but I decided to cancel my dinner plans.
A scene from the streets of Asheville.
I thought Id use up the last of my groceries since I was leaving town in 36 hours anyway.
Asheville is wonderfully verdant, leafy…and just crammed with enormous old trees.
The power was out by then.
Sean Rayford/Getty Images
I couldnt update the weather app; my data was too slow.
How do you know if its live?
Was the storm over?
When the rain stopped, I looked out the window to see what had happened.
Sheds and cars were crushed.
The road behind the house was blocked.
A power line was dangling two or three feet from the metal doorknob of the houses front door.
I was not sure if it was safe to even touch the door to begin to go outside.
A man roaming around, surveying the damage, told me he had touched several power lines.
The power is out in the entire city, he said.
He showed me how he safely stepped over the downed power lines.
Perhaps I can walk down the block, I thought.
By this time, I had lost any cell service at my house.
I filled two large stockpots from the tap.
Water was still coming out of the tap like normal.
Meanwhile, I was very hungry.
I was supposed to leave town in 24 hours.
I began to cry a bit as the reality began to sink in: I had zero connection.
I had zero supplies.
I had zero way out.
I was pretty much alone.
I texted him that I was becoming very stressed and needed food.
If he got this message, could he send me his address?
I strained to catch enough of a bar for my text to go through.
When one did, I wasnt sure if he would even have the service to receive it anyway.
I realized I needed to ask for help.
I was not getting a lot of connection, cell- or human-wise.
In hindsight, everyone was so shocked.
After about an hour, cell service was fully gone for everyone else.
I saw a family I had briefly greeted on a dog walk a few days before.
I said I was grateful and had to be honest: I was in real need of support.
We had a nice evening together, and it restored my frayed nerves.
I hadnt realized how much emotional energy I was spending to keep the panic at bay.
At dusk, my next-door neighbors set up their firepit, and neighbors on the block all gravitated over.
No one was looking much beyond the weekend.
The teens were wondering if school would be canceled on Monday.
before the full picture.
They were aware theyd have to stay put to stay safe and were making the best of it.
But I was in a different position.
I went to bed and prepared for tomorrow.
I wondered if I could, and should, leave Asheville.
I knew the power was out throughout virtually all of the city.
I knew no one had cell service anymore.
But I was not sure about the roads, and I would need to find out.
I decided to walk.
Along the way I would see clusters of neighbors.
My situation was an extraordinarily complex puzzle with high stakes.
I decided to go find Wi-Fi and figure out road conditions.
That was step one.
So I walked downtown and saw a vast improvement in neighborhood roads.
People were out driving among the debris.
Others were out walking dogs.
Some were even jogging, and I wondered if they had thought through the whole no-shower issue yet.
But people in the neighborhood were okay.
There was a subdued friendliness, a cautious stepping-out energy to the day.
Desperation was, perhaps, looming, but people were problem-solving.
There was stress but not pandemoniummore calm community than calamity.
Downtown was where tourists were trapped, calling airlines and rental cars and soothing panicked relatives.
Some businesses had power and were open and packed, bizarrely; bars served beers to tourists.
Some texts came in from friends who told me about theboil-water advisory.
My connection was spotty.
Your phone cant load a screenshot.
Its wise to consider your cell service as finite a resource as water and gas.
I used that time to connect with friends in Durham and to request road conditions.
Were all roads out of Asheville unpassable?
Could I afford to detour on backroads with zero familiarity and no way to check real-time conditions?
People were running out of gas on every exit.
It was just a shitshow.
It seemed reasonable to buy groceries and prepare for three to five days.
I still had running water in the house, but I stopped flushing the toilet.
I drove around, looking for a grocery store.
I parked there and walked across the street to the only open grocery in town, Harris Teeter.
I waited in line for at least an hour, perhaps two.
He was happy about it.
The Harris Teeter manager said they could only accept credit or cash.
The store was calm, organized, well stocked, and eerily normal.
They limited people who could come in to a very small number.
They had power but absolutely no water, no propane, no charcoal, nothing like that.
I bought some Powerades.
Then I drove around downtown looking for gatherings of people who might have found Wi-Fi.
Now I really could conduct some business.
He said he had gotten my text but a day late.
His water tap was fully dry.
He ran into some friends who were planning a cookout.
That told me I could leave tomorrow.
It was my only option.
Her young-adult son nearby looked at his phone.
Not everyone was getting alerts since there was no service.
Some people did not know about the boil mandate.
Meanwhile, a pregnant woman was crying on the phone, worrying about running out of water.
I understood, after going to the grocery store, that shipments were not coming in for days.
I had one stockpot left of drinking water.
I woke up with the daylight, packed my bags, and got ready to go.
I distributed my groceries and remaining water among my neighbors, said my thanks, exchanged numbers and goodbyes.
A lot became very clear on Sunday.
My tap had gone totally dry Sunday morning.
Aid was slow to come in because only one interstate into town was passable.
I learned later the neighbors left, too, with their elderly parents.
Most locals I knew were out of reasons, and options, to stay in their homes.
Asheville is a town of about 100,000.
I shudder to think about anything like this happening where I live, with a population of millions.
And someday it will.
Within 30 minutes I was past the airport and getting a single bar of service again.
And another 15 minutes after that, I was back in the land of normalcy.
I got BBQ and realized it was the first hot food Id had in days.
I started trembling a bit from the stress comedown of keeping it together.
I chugged two 32-ounce iced teas.
Meanwhile, everyone else…was just normal.
For most of the city, there wont be water for weeks or power for days.
Whats needed is an infrastructure rebuild, not a substation restoration or the fixing of a plant.
Coming back into connectivity was a relief and a heartbreak.
Areas were simply wiped off the map, with hundreds stillunaccounted for.
No way to SOS.
Running out of oxygen tanks, medicine, food, in flooded conditions, with no roads out.
The spectrum of devastation starts at a terrible place and ends in catastrophic tragedyhuman suffering that hurts to conceptualize.
As of this writing, there is a massive need for immediate aid.
The needs are rudimentary and immediate: water, food, power.
That means bottles of water and propane.
In 48 hours, with little resources, I built a support system in a community not my own.
I relied on a group text of very new friends to help me get the right information to evacuate.
I depended on the hour-by-hour decision-making and day-to-day survival of my neighbors, charging these folks with my safety.
