‘Put Your Head Down, Help Each Other Out’: Inside Asheville’s Helene Response

It could be any other food truck spot in West Asheville, North Carolina, with camp chairs grouped under the nearest shady tree and dogs nearly outnumbering the people. But at this bait shop parking lot on Tuesday morning, the lunch — bacon sandwiches with sprouts, and a side of veggies — is free. Only the nearby pallets of bottled water and stacks of diapers let on this is an emergency setup. Across the street is the West Asheville branch of the fire department. There, a white board is updated daily to share which highways and major roads are passable, that school is canceled all week, and the phone number to report missing persons.

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Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina on Sept. 26, leaving 85,000 customers without power in Buncombe County; many people in the city are without water and a boil water advisory is in effect for those who do. Access into Asheville, the region’s urban center, is limited by downed trees and power lines, flood waters, mud and debris. In the days following the storm, water began to arrive from the outside world. The city established distribution centers at the main park downtown and Asheville Middle School. But “NO GAS” signs are a common sight. And not everyone owns a vehicle, anyway. Helene’s destruction and the need for immediate response has activated a community long considered to be so-called blue dot in a red sea to provide care for their neighbors while they wait for aid to arrive.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, cheap rents established Asheville as a welcoming community for tree huggers and artists, LGBTQ folks, and the sort of people who rely on old copies of the Whole Earth Catalog to equip their homes with toilet facilities and electricity. This atmosphere enticed monied Californians and New Yorkers during the pandemic, and those looking for a second home in the mountains, driving up prices. Somewhere along the way, the Blue Ridge Mountains — and Asheville in particular — gained a reputation as a “climate refuge,” a place that would be safe from the harshest climate impacts. Yet Hurricane Helene was exactly the type of climate disaster from which some were led to believe Asheville would be protected. In the aftermath of Helene, some residents have decamped to Atlanta, Greenville, Raleigh, Winston-Salem. Those who’ve stayed behind have stepped up to provide community-based mutual aid.

By its most basic definition, mutual aid is when neighbors help neighbors. It can mean money, tanks of gas, first aid, food, water, transportation, or anything else a community in crisis needs. It means to address the support that isn’t offered, or is horribly bungled, by large bureaucratic charities and governmental response.

Elliot Patterson is a volunteer at a first-aid supply tent set up in front of Double Crown, one of West Asheville’ proudly grimiest dive bars. “The primary goal is to reduce people overloading the 911 call center,” explains Patterson, who has spent the day giving out free band-aids, electrolyte drinks, and over-the-counter medications that people can administer themselves. Volunteers, including those with medical training, point people toward where they can access insulin, antidepressants, and anti-seizure medication, and where they can keep their insulin cooled.

Patterson is also a native of the area — which can feel like a rarity in Asheville these days. “As somebody who grew up in Appalachia in rural spaces and recognizes that checking on your elderly neighbors all the time is a core value, that’s just what we’re doing here,” he continues. “It’s the same as somebody plowing your driveway or bringing you a casserole.”

THE FOOD TRUCK IS THE WORK of Asheville resident Amanda Krause, her husband Dave Anderson and their nonprofit group Grassroots Aid Partnership . They have traveled to serve warm meals after hurricanes in Ft. Myers, Panama City and Cape Fear, and tornadoes in Tennessee. Now they’re serving the needs of their own community.

They have partnered with Mother Earth Foods, in normal times a weekly vegetable-box service to spread the bounty of Western North Carolina’s farmland to Asheville. Since Friday, Krause, Anderson ,and Mother Earth Foods are persuading grocery stores like Sam’s Club to redirect perishable foods from their dumpsters to Asheville’s residents.

The story of how this all started is very Asheville: In their daily lives, Krause and Anderson work for hippie soap company Dr. Bronner’s, traveling the country to bring its All-One Magic Foam Experience to events like Miami Pride and Burning Man. Their production gear for this type of work includes generators, showers, and a former Lockheed Martin bus they bought at auction. “It’s a Lockheed Martin ‘Mars Experience’ bus that was given to the Smithsonian,” Krause explains, referring to a 2016 VR project housed in a school bus. “And they were like ‘What can we do with this?’ We got it for a really good deal! It’s got an onboard generator, A/C, heat.” Now, it’s powering the walk-in coolers with Mother Earth Foods’ rescued meat, dairy and produce. In the days since the storm “we were able to save $50,000 of food,” Krause says, including “a lot of salmon, pork patties, and pizza” from Sam’s Club.

Local chefs Rich Envol, Elina Talyad and Rambo Strongheart are cooking; the couple meets many kindred spirits at Burning Man and Rainbow Gatherings whom Grassroots Aid Partnership can call upon for help. “This is a really good town to say ‘Hey, there’s a disaster — let’s deploy,” Krause says. And Asheville happens to have a lot of chefs who are going to be out of work at least until the water supply is back — and that could take weeks, according to the City of Asheville.

WATER IS STILL ONE OF THE GREATEST needs for much of the population; many people are without it entirely, and those who aren’t have been under a boil water advisory since the storm hit. In response, existing water resources are being re-routed, like the 1,000-gallon tank of water with dual stage carbon filtration that just was sitting in local brewery DSSOLVR’s main room in downtown Asheville.

“Obviously we can’t move forward with our business because we don’t have running water,” explains Erick Gonzalez, DSSOLVR’s general manager. So on Saturday, staff began to distribute water from their tank to anyone who brought empty containers. “We had a line out the door — people were filling up 10-gallon containers if they wanted to,” he says. By early Sunday, it had all been taken. So now a handful of Asheville breweries have coordinated with Devil’s Foot, a local soda maker, to distribute drinkable still water. It’s been packaged in ‘bright cans’ — meaning clean, empty beer cans — at breweries in Charlotte and driven up. New shipments of canned water are arriving daily to fan out through the city.

Helene is actually the second time DSSOLVR has distributed their tank water; the first was during a storm over the Christmas holidays in 2022 when Asheville’s water supply crashed almost city-wide during freezing temperatures. “We generally run as a community hub that tries to help when we can,” Gonzales says. “Oftentimes [that’s] through donations but obviously in more physical ways when possible.”

He anticipated that he would feel more acute grief once he has the bandwidth to grapple with the devastation. For now, it is “incredibly warming to just see everybody come together and want to help each other out,” Gonzales says.

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PATTERSON, THE VOLUNTEER AT THE first-aid tent, also participated in mutual aid efforts during Asheville’s 2022 water crisis. That experience, particularly the local government’s response, fuels his present concerns that the communities who are most on the margins will be underserved by the ‘official’ disaster response.

“State resources are mostly delivered in ways that are efficient for the state, which means having to stand in line,” he explains. “I’m really concerned about people who aren’t able to come to these [centralized distribution points],” citing residents of nursing homes and undocumented communities in rural areas as two of the more marginalized groups.

The volunteers at the first-aid tent can refer people to resources to access prescription medications, including medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder. They’ve spoken with “people who are on Suboxone [a MAT medication], who want to be in recovery, who aren’t able to get it,” Patterson says. He notes that there are a number of “normal, day-to-day maintenance medications,” such as benzodiazepines for anxiety, that can induce withdrawal symptoms if suddenly stopped. “A lot of this is about reassuring people that you are going to be okay and … helping to talk people through what their options are,” he says.

The volunteers Patterson is working with are in it for the long-haul. “Neighbors who are helping neighbors are the first people in and the last people out,” he says.

OTHER MUTUAL AID PROJECTS ARE EXTREMELY localized and grassroots — just neighbors with camp chairs and extension cords eking into a house that has power.

Sarah Brown and Sophie Mullinax are neighbors on Riverside Drive, a road at high elevation in West Asheville. It has become a street where people congregate in hopes of cell service or 5G.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Brown began to put donated free food and household goods at a table in her front yard for anyone to take. On Friday, the neighbors saw the bustle on their street and decided to revive the practice. Each day, the neighbors set up two tents on the side of the road. Underneath one is a radio, and people gather in camp chairs two times a day for the twice-daily county media briefings.

The other tent covers a “community table” stacked with Cup Noodles, tomato sauce, bags of onions, tampons, and diapers. Some neighbors who decided to leave Asheville until the power and/or water were resurrected emptied their pantries before departure. The Riverview Drive community table became a centralized location for those drop-offs, and neighbor Jerick Wilson notes it’s more accessible for East-West Asheville folks than heading two or three miles deeper into West Asheville or downtown.

“Asheville talks a lot about community,” Brown continues. “We’re meeting neighbors we’ve never met. We’re meeting folks that never would have stopped by and said hello otherwise. It’s pretty breathtaking.”

The Riverview Drive residents realize they’re in a privileged position, literally and geographically: Some don’t have power and water, and some have trees down, but their houses are still standing. “The reason we can do this is because we’re so resourced,” Brown continues. “We have our own resources. We don’t have to go search for resources. … The harm here [is] an inconvenience compared to whatever everyone else is experiencing.”

Those providing aid are doing so while their personal experiences with Helene and its aftermath are still sinking in. Gonzalez from DSSOLVR lives up a hill from the French Broad River in Woodfin, a town next to Asheville. The flooding got 100 yards from his house, and he says he hasn’t even begun to wrestle with that close call.

“Right now is not the time to process [what’s happening],” explains Gonzalez. “Now is the time for action. Put your head down, do what you can, help each other out. And worry about everything else some other time.”

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