Green Mountain, NC, is modern Appalachia in miniature. On one side of the picturesque Toe River, a mild mountain stream that forges a path through the Great Smokies en route to the Tennessee Valley, sits Whitson’s General Store, the Whitson home, a post office, and Green Mountain Presbyterian Church, a dignified red brick structure with a white steeple. On the other side, linked by a sturdy 200-foot concrete span 25 feet above the river, lies a large warehouse-like structure served by a CSX rail line: a plant that refines quartz sand into silicon for the microchip industry.
The Toe Valley is the true Silicon Valley, its hills laced with rich veins of the world’s purest quartz, an indispensable ingredient in the global microchip supply chain. But little if any of that industry’s billions has trickled down into these Appalachian hills. “This is a place where you retire with $30,000 in the bank,” one local tells me. “You’ve got the mountains and the river to keep you company, you learn to get by without much, and you know the community is there to take care of you.”
The river is fed by streams flowing down from the Black Mountains, an imposing ridgeline that rises northeast of Asheville. From Sept. 25 to Sept. 27, the Black Mountains received over 30 inches of rain, a 1-in-14,000-year event, as Hurricane Helene barreled into the southern Appalachians. The Toe River rose more than 30 feet in just a few hours, imbuing it and the neighboring rivers—the Swannanoa, the French Broad, the Rocky Broad, the Catawba—with the force of Niagara.
We came to Green Mountain on day 12 after Helene as part of an all-volunteer relief team under Robert Knight, a pastor at a non-denominational evangelical church in Asheville. The Knight home, a modest structure nestled in the hills north of the farthest-flung Asheville suburbs, had been transformed into an impromptu command center for recovery and relief operations. Their garage was piled high with food, water, toilet paper, and tools waiting to be dispatched to hard-hit communities. Robert’s wife, April, and their housemate, Lydia, churned out peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches while sharing stories of landslide victims miraculously rescued by possible angelic visitors … and of many others who hadn’t been so lucky.
Our drive to Green Mountain took us through a brilliantly green landscape whose resilient beauty defied the steady parade of fallen trees, landslides, washed out gullies, and road closures that Helene had left behind. Nothing had prepared us, though, for the sight that greeted us when we came down out of the hills into the Toe Valley. It was as if some primeval giant had gouged the valley with a great finger, leaving the twisted fragments of trees, houses, and roadways jumbled together in great brown masses of mud as far as the eye could see. In the foreground, 50-foot-long concrete segments of the bridge, each weighing perhaps a hundred tons, lay strewn downstream along the riverbed. Further along, a white pickup truck protruded halfway out of the water, the lack of a red X signaling that it had not yet been searched for bodies. In between, a knot of people were gathered around the ruined general store and Whitson home.
Our mission for the day: shovel the thick, squelchy, stinking layer of mud and debris out of Whitson’s General Store and the first floor of Green Mountain Presbyterian Church. Other groups were already there—a couple dozen folks all told, with work gloves and wheelbarrows and N-95 masks. The EPA had warned that the mud was likely toxic and that we shouldn’t touch it. But they weren’t showing up, and we did what we could with leather boots and gloves. Nick Whitson sorted through what could be salvaged from the almost century-old family business, while his 97-year-old mother, Parzady, looked on from outside her ruined home.
Throughout the day, the ruined valley saw a steady hum of activity. Helicopters whirred overhead every half hour or so. Pickup trucks dropped off loads of supplies to be transferred onto ATVs and UTVs and dispatched to cut-off mountain communities, under the energetic direction of Bettina, a no-nonsense local woman who had assumed unchallenged command of aid distribution. Around noon, a couple of EMTs from Houston passed through as they made their way painstakingly along the riverbank, methodically checking the rubble for any unrecovered bodies (one, I was told, was found near the church the following day—an odor we had mistaken for rotting food). Later on, a 60 Minutes producer, cameraman in tow, breezed through, finding the best angles to shoot disaster porn, but not stopping for interviews. Toward the end of the day, a medic came along, asking which houses in the valley needed medicine deliveries. Not a single law enforcement officer, FEMA worker, or national guardsman made an appearance.
The hard work and masks left little space for conversation, but we learned a bit about a few of the other relief workers. When I joked to my son that this was what Hercules must’ve felt like clearing the Augean stables, our irrepressible 11-year-old companion, Jed, unexpectedly piped up, “Ah yes—I’d forgotten that story!” and began sharing anecdotes from his classical education. The camp-stove hot dog chef, Matthew Trafford, had come from an hour south in Fletcher, NC, where he’d set up a generator-powered mobile kitchen outside his own storm-damaged home to feed the neighbors until power was restored, and then hit the road to help other devastated communities. He’d helped pull thirty bodies out of the mud in Fairview, NC, and then found his way to Green Mountain, where he’d taken up Nick Whitson’s cause as his own. Two women, unfazed by the filth, were hospice nurses from Virginia, and one man had come all the way from south Mississippi, where his parents had learned what it was like to lose it all two decades ago in Katrina.
“There was a common thread: These were almost all church people.”
Amidst the diversity of ages and races and walks of life represented among the aid workers of Green Mountain, there was a common thread: These were almost all church people. In fact, across the region, most relief groups seemed to be organized by pastors. One local told me, “80 percent of the work is being done by churches. To be honest, if it weren’t for them, there’d be a lot more people dead.” Across the battered countryside, almost every little country church had been transformed into a distribution center for water, medicines, and other essentials. We’d spent the day before we went to Green Mountain at a north Asheville church whose parking lot had become the operations center for the Asheville Dream Center, a multi-church partnership working to help the needy in the community. In a county without running water for the foreseeable future, everyone was needy now, and the Dream Center volunteers were unloading and reloading pallets of bottled water, dry foods, and diapers as fast as the trucks came in.
Similar scenes were unfolding across the western North Carolina, and when I asked volunteers how much of a role FEMA or the National Guard was playing, the answer was often a quizzical expression or a rueful chuckle. Matt Trafford later told me, “FEMA showed up in Green Mountain almost two weeks after the storm with no supplies except a camera and a clean dressed team who had clean fingernails so they could take their videos and pictures. When I met you, you were covered in sweaty dirt. As far as we’re concerned, you are FEMA.”
There are two ways to tell the story about what happened in southern Appalachia with Helene. One is a triumphant story of Tocquevillian “little platoons” spontaneously self-organizing to aid one another in time of crisis; a seemingly divided nation and polarized citizenry forgetting their differences and joining together to dig their countrymen out of the mud. Another is a story of a failing state, increasingly unable to carry out the most basic functions of governance, and forced to outsource rescue, recovery, and relief efforts to the private sector.
The first was certainly a popular narrative both on the ground and on X. “When the chips are down, Americans have a much greater ability to pull together and act in community than we often think,” tweeted the American Solidarity Party in response to my photo of a little country church that had lost its sign out front to the Toe River had replaced it with a spray-painted poster: “FREE SUPPLIES.” The photo prompted many rhapsodies to the church’s role as “the real first responders” and unflattering comparisons to FEMA’s failures.
Indeed, X was awash in the days after the disaster with extraordinary stories of courageous locals—and not-so-locals—taking matters into their own hands and arranging helicopter search-and-rescues, insulin drops, mass resupply operations, and more. Capitalism also did its part, with Walmart losing no time in getting its stores restocked as soon as the interstates re-opened, and Elon Musk handing out Starlinks like candy at a parade.
Locals were justly proud of their ability to take care of one another in a crisis, deciding to stay and help after the storm rather than escape to somewhere with power and running water: “We knew these are our people and this is our city, and we had to stay,” said Michelle Coleman, director of the Asheville Dream Center. And for all the apparent fraying of our civic fabric apparent on social media and the constant chatter of “national divorce,” when it came to a real crisis, there were no red states and blue states, only Americans. The day after Helene hit, a convoy from the San Diego County Fire Department was on the road across the country to help their compatriots in Appalachia. In a Wal-mart in Weaverville, NC, I saw a team with “Riverside CA Search and Rescue” emblazoned on their uniforms. My own little relief crew came from northern Virginia with $30,000 worth of supplies contributed by friends, neighbors, and complete strangers.
“‘I don’t care what you are or what color you are, we still stick together.’”
Nick Whitson didn’t mince words about what he had seen: “I’m serious, these people is God-sent. And I mean we had people all over the nation. I don’t care what the government says about dividin’ people, this nation’s comin’ together and stuff like this prove it—I’ve had people all over the United States come in and help. No matter what the news media says, it’s all a lie. I don’t care what you are or what color you are, we still stick together, and it’s through God’s grace we made it.”
And yet, if Helene revealed wells of hidden strength and solidarity within a deeply divided nation, it also laid bare a vacuum of political leadership and a dangerous decline of state capacity. For all the good intentions and can-do energy of the volunteer groups that descended upon the southern Appalachians in the days after Helene, there’s only so much that individuals with bottled water and wheelbarrows can do. Supply depots were soon overwhelmed with donations which struggled to reach the hardest-hit areas and the individuals most in need, as pallets of diapers and baby food far outnumbered boots on the ground. Freeloaders and hoarders happily picked up the slack, carting off supplies as soon as they arrived. In the air, the extraordinary response of citizen-piloted rescue and resupply aircraft soon turned dangerous, as more than thirty near-mid-air collisions were reported in just one day. In the first few days after the storm, the lack of power and cell service across much of the affected area meant that finding those most in need was mere guesswork.
“Helene … laid bare a vacuum of political leadership and a dangerous decline of state capacity.”
The fact is that rescue, recovery, and resupply operations on such a scale (covering more than 8,000 square miles of the southern Appalachians, home to 1.5 million people) far exceed what a patchwork of private individuals, churches, and nonprofits can be expected to coordinate effectively. Indeed, even FEMA is woefully understaffed and underfunded to tackle such crises single-handed, and has a history of corruption, bureaucratic mismanagement, and under-deployment. Natural disasters like Helene are—or should be—one of the main reasons why we have a military. In the days and weeks after Helene, the lack of military mobilization to Appalachia prompted online speculation that the government had engineered the hurricane to devastate MAGA districts, and then left the hillbillies to perish without food or water. Such theories attribute far too much competence and agency to a federal government whose decrepitude and lethargy were personified by an amnesiac 82-year-old president lounging on a Delaware beach throughout the storm and aftermath. His peppy and positive vice president, meanwhile, was on the campaign trail recording an interview on the X-rated “Call Her Daddy” podcast.
In the wake of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the federal government was heavily criticized for only mobilizing 20,000 National Guard and 7,000 active-duty military personnel to South Florida within five days of the storm. During the much-maligned Katrina response, considered a national scandal at the time, 7,500 National Guard troops were on the ground within 24 hours of the storm, a number that ultimately rose to 43,000, plus 18,000 active-duty military. On Oct. 6, nine days after the similarly catastrophic Helene, the White House proudly announced that 6,100 National Guardsmen had been deployed (1.4 percent of the nation’s total) and were now being joined by 1,500 active-duty military (less than 2 percent of those stationed in North Carolina alone). Indeed, more than 120 hours after Helene’s rains washed away whole towns, President Biden’s press releases were boasting that hundreds of search and rescue personnel “are arriving in the region in the coming days.” Residents trapped in collapsed houses without food or water could be forgiven for being unimpressed.
This is all the more damning because the enormous resources invested in weather prediction over the past half century have at last paid off spectacularly. Forecasters had little clue where Andrew was headed or how strong it would be just two days in advance of landfall, missing by a full 100 miles and three Saffir-Simpson categories. Katrina’s forecast was off by 150 miles three days in advance, a typical forecast error for the time. For Helene, however, almost every detail of the storm’s track and intensity was predicted from the moment the storm formed.
Even the catastrophic impacts in the western Carolinas, hundreds of miles inland, were warned of by forecasters in increasingly apocalyptic language. “This has the potential to be an extremely rare event with catastrophic flash-flooding that hasn’t been seen in the modern era, with major to record breaking flooding likely. Numerous landslides are expected in the mountains, with a few large, damaging landslides/slope failures,” warned the National Weather Service 36 hours in advance. “No one could have predicted something like this would happen in the mountains,” locals and government officials alike repeated over and over in the days following the storm; “no one could have predicted that the rivers would rise this much.” No one, that is, except for the Weather Prediction Center, the National Water Prediction Service, the National Hurricane Center, and the regional Weather Forecast Office in Greenville-Spartanburg, SC.
One can hardly blame residents for failing to heed such forecasts; forecasters speak in data, but people do not think in data. People think in pictures, and it is hard to form a mental picture of what it is like to flee a crumbling mountainside along a winding road choked with fallen trees beside a raging torrent higher than you have ever seen. But government officials are paid to translate data into action. Indeed, it is hard to see what the point is of investing in new supercomputing forecast models and state-of-the-art weather satellites if not to use the additional lead time to prepare for natural disasters. “We’re doing the best we can; there’s no way you can prepare for a thousand-year flood,” defensive public officials insisted during the painfully slow disaster response. Well actually, yes there is. Here are a few suggestions:
- Pre-emptively activate 20,000 National Guard troops and send them to staging areas in Charlotte, NC, Greenville, SC, and Knoxville, Tenn., together with pallets full of drinking water, MREs, medicines, and other essentials.
- Appoint an experienced major general to coordinate the response, with additional military units on call to be activated as needed.
- Deploy 1,000 helicopters and light aircraft to surrounding airports for immediate use in search-and-rescue and resupply.
- Station swift-water rescue teams in and around Asheville, NC, for immediate deployment.
- Identify major roadway bridges most likely to be impacted by floodwaters and create contingency plans for alternative routes.
- Deploy generators and Starlink kits to every municipality in the area likely to be affected so that public officials and first responders can communicate seamlessly in the likely event of power and cell service outages. (That is, instead of waiting for Prince Elon to swoop in after the fact.)
- Begin a mandatory evacuation in all identified flood zones 24 hours in advance of the anticipated life-threatening conditions, sending all available local law enforcement to go door-to-door and implore residents to leave. (That is, instead of waiting until the flash flood emergency was underway and notifying residents via cell phone alerts on networks that were already offline from the well-forecast high winds.)
It is easy, of course, to Monday-morning quarterback, and public officials can also err by over-dramatizing the risk a storm poses, leading to complacency the next time around (such as when Tampa Mayor Jane Castor somewhat melodramatically declared in advance of Hurricane Milton, “I can say this without any dramatization whatsoever: If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die.”)
That said, something is unquestionably wrong with America’s disaster preparedness and response. In the half-century between 1954 and 2004, only three hurricanes managed to take more than 90 American lives, despite the fact that forecasting was little better than throwing darts for much of this period. In the two decades since, ten hurricanes have managed to do so, most of them in the past eight years, despite quantum leaps forward in storm prediction. Some of this can perhaps be chalked up to climate change: stronger storms, intensifying more quickly. But if that’s all it were, why are our much poorer neighbors faring so much better? Last year, Hurricane Otis made a direct hit on Acapulco as a Category 5, the strongest ever to hit the Mexican Pacific coast, after a dramatic last-minute intensification; the death toll was 52. When Hurricane Irma ravaged the northern coast of Cuba as a Category 5 in 2017, it went down as one of the deadliest Cuban hurricanes in decades, with a grand total of ten lives lost. Helene took at least 250 American lives, with hundreds more thought to be lost under the mud.
Perhaps this is just a matter of bad luck, but it is hard not to suspect a deeper cause: a breakdown of public trust. In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, the only thing that moved faster than volunteer-coordinated supply drops was misinformation. Frustrated with the slow government response, locals were primed to believe the worst: FEMA was seizing supplies and blocking incoming aid. Such stories proliferated rapidly on social media, so much so that as I planned to take a truckload of supplies down, I received numerous messages warning me of the roadblocks and confiscations that I was likely to face.
The rumors soon escalated: Government agencies were cordoning off affected areas so they could hide hundreds of bodies, bulldoze damaged buildings out of the way, and seize property for nefarious purposes. Not only that—the entire hurricane, a 500-mile-wide force of nature with the power of the world’s entire nuclear arsenal—had been geo-engineered by the government to wash away North Carolina towns sitting on top of valuable lithium deposits.
A citizenry ready to believe that their government is actively spawning hurricanes in a laboratory to rain destruction down on them is clearly not a citizenry ready to believe forecasters’ dire warnings of impending doom two days in advance. So self-absorbed are our experts, however, that they like to think this is a situation to be solved by more fact-checking, in the form of breezy, smug dismissals of the idea that officials could have done anything wrong. Consider this “AP Fact Check” story, which proceeds immediately from debunking the idea that “the government can create or manage hurricanes” to indignantly repudiating the notion that the federal government was guilty of any lack of response to the storm. Somehow our public officials persist in believing that if they never admit to making any mistakes, people will be more likely to trust them. Anyone with real-world leadership experience knows the opposite is true.
Even more important than admitting mistakes, though, is getting busy. Although we are most likely now to remember the New Deal for the big entitlement programs it created, FDR’s greatest political success came from putting the government to work in formerly neglected and alienated swaths of the country. The rural South, left to fester in bitterness and poverty after the Civil War, was integrated into the nation through massive infrastructure projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority. Indeed, the massive network of flood-control dams and reservoirs that span western North Carolina and East Tennessee, an aging legacy of that great nation-building effort, probably saved thousands of lives during Helene’s deluge. At the height of the storm, four different dams in the region were announced to be at imminent risk of collapse, triggering urgent evacuations. But all four somehow held firm—one, the Nolichucky Dam, about 70 miles downstream from Green Mountain, surviving a flow rate of 162,000 cubic feet per second, double the previous record. Anyone tempted to say “we don’t need the government; we can do this ourselves” should shudder to think what might have happened if that philosophy had been applied to these feats of civil engineering.
“Helene’s destruction offers government at every level an opportunity to restore trust.”
Going forward, Helene’s destruction offers government at every level an opportunity to restore trust by getting to work. The area’s drinking water infrastructure was eviscerated by the storm, with more than a dozen plants knocked completely offline and hundreds of thousands still without running water more than two weeks after the storm. The damage to the region’s road and bridge network was catastrophic, with two major interstates washed out and not anticipated to reopen for a year. Locals might be forgiven skepticism about even this distant deadline; the other two major interstates in the region have been under seemingly perpetual construction for the past decade simply to add an extra lane to each, with little visible progress. The Eisenhower era, when 10,000 miles of interstate were built in five years, seems a mythical bygone era unlikely ever to return. But in a tourism-driven economy whose crown jewel, the Blue Ridge Parkway, was devastated by the storm, there is no time to make excuses: If the wealthiest and most technologically-advanced nation on earth cannot fast-track bridge construction and road repair, it cannot blame its citizens for doubting its commitment to their well-being.
Once the dust has settled, the roads are rebuilt, and the drinking water is flowing, it will be time to ask, “How can we improve?” The Army Corps of Engineers’s reputation was at a nadir following the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, when poorly-maintained levees and poorly-mapped flood zones led to the preventable deaths of nearly 1,000 New Orleans residents. The government responded, however, with a $14.5 billion investment in a levee system that could protect the sinking city from a future flood. The levees were soon tested—by Hurricane Isaac in 2012 and Hurricane Ida in 2021—and performed perfectly.
In southern Appalachia, the dams may have held, but they were unable to prevent catastrophic flows upstream and downstream. With extreme rainfall events becoming more common in a warming world, substantial investment in repairing, upgrading, and expanding flood-control infrastructure in the mountains seems essential. It is also critical that we complement our huge advances in weather forecasting with equivalent investments in communications and preparedness. A common excuse after Helene was “no one knew hurricanes could hit the mountains like this,” but that’s not quite true. Numerous hurricanes have caused inland flooding disasters, especially when their rich moisture streams hit the Appalachian uplands; however, while many coastal areas have invested in detailed mapping of flood zones and evacuation protocols, inland areas prone to even more deadly flash flooding have not.
For now, though, the focus must be on helping the people of Appalachia recover. Few were insured, since no one is expected to have flood insurance outside of rated flood zones, and of those who are, many have been denied claims by stingy insurance companies. It is easy for Americans to band together for a week or two, donate rolls of toilet paper, and make an Instagram reel of it. It is much harder for us to commit to the long, hard, expensive work of digging out and rebuilding.
The people of the North Carolina upcountry are resilient, self-reliant, and committed to caring for one another, but with winter coming on and the layers of mud hardening into cement, even they will grow tired of shoveling. Conservative media enjoyed shining a spotlight on their plight when it could be used to score political points against the Biden-Harris maladministration, but with Election Day looming and our civic fabric fraying, our attention will move on, and the streams of volunteers are likely to slow to a trickle. The extraordinary mobilization of mutual aid following Helene was a refreshing reminder that we are still one nation—if only just. To remain one, however, will require a reinvestment in state capacity that seems hard to imagine in a time of declining trust and rising deficits. If we cannot manage it, western North Carolina today—with washed-out roads, empty drinking water pipes, and armed militias said to be hunting skittish FEMA officials—offers us a depressing picture of our national future.