Jail and Housing Conditions, Recovery in Post-Helene Asheville
This week on The Final Straw Radio, you’ll hear three interviews relating to community needs and recovering concerning Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina.
If you’re a non-Pacifica radio station airing the show, here’s a link for the 58 minute radio edition while Archive.Org continues to be down due to hacker attacks.
First up, you’ll hear Jen Hampton of the WNC Tenants Network about the re-opening of eviction courts in Buncombe County and conditions of housing in an already difficulty place to live.
Then, Bruce and G talk from the Asheville Community Bail Fund speak about conditions in the local jail during and after this unnatural disaster.
Finally, Yousef of the Palestinian and Arab-led Sumud Collective speaks about his experience of the storm and recovery work in the region in an interview recorded a couple of weeks ago.
Other links from Jen:
- Short term rental rules for Asheville: https://www.ashevillenc.gov/news/asheville-homestay-and-short-term-rental-update-regulation-changes-and-active-enforcement/
- Just Economics https://www.justeconomicswnc.org/
- FEMA: https://DisasterAssistance.Gov 1-800-631-3362
- Eblin Charities: https://www.eblencharities.org/
- Pisgah Legal Services: https://www.pisgahlegal.org/
- NC Legal Aid: https://legalaidnc.org/
- WNC Tenants Network: https://bit.ly/WNCTenantsNetwork
- NC Tenants Union: https://nctenantsunion.org/
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Featured Track:
- Reflections by The Supremes from Gold
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Jen Hampton Transcript
Jen Hampton: My name is Jen Hampton, she/her. I am in Asheville, North Carolina, and I’m with a few organizations. I’m the co-founder and co-chair of Asheville Food and Beverage United, which is a local labor union for service workers in our area. I’m also the Housing and Wages Organizer for Just Economics, through which I facilitate the Western North Carolina Tenants Network that is part of the North Carolina Tenants Union. I also lead the Western North Carolina chapter of the Southern Workers Assembly.
TFSR: Cool. Thank you much. For this conversation we’re probably mostly going to be focusing on the Tenants Network and the Tenants Union. If you’re willing to talk about those two organizations, I’d be curious about, especially with the local formation, what you know about the history of it, or if you can talk about the history of the group, like what the group does, how it’s structured, that sort of stuff.
Jen Hampton: Yeah. So the Western North Carolina Tenants Network came about through a series of tenants rights workshops that we did through Just Economics and Pisgah Legal Services, and we found that tenants were really wanting to organize this network to address things like living conditions, both in public housing and private housing, the cost of housing, as well as creating mutual support systems for each other and education and empowerment through education about our rights as tenants in North Carolina. We don’t have a formal structure per se, because we are still fairly new and finding our footing and figuring out our structure as we go. I am the facilitator of the group, and we have organizers in several different public housing properties in the area, working on addressing living conditions specifically. We also have members who are in private housing in the area who are working to create an Asheville Tenants Bill of Rights and doing research on where the points of leverage are in our community to address the housing needs that we have.
And then we are affiliated with the newly launched North Carolina Tenants Union, and that was launched in April of this year. I’m on the board of directors for that and helped found that organization, and that is comprised of tenants unions from areas across the entire state, down in the Charlotte area, Raleigh, Durham, Winston-Salem, Greensboro… We have a lot of members. We are working together to build power with tenants across the state. You may or may not know, in North Carolina, local municipalities can’t really do much in regards to tenants rights or affordable housing. Things like that have to be done at the state level, so we’re working on building this network of tenants across the state so that we can mobilize together and pressure our state legislators for things like Just Cause Eviction and other tenant protections that we desperately need in the state.
TFSR: Can you talk about what housing conditions in Western North Carolina were before Hurricane Helene? Things like: housing availability; the impact of short term housing; short term rentals like VRBO and Airbnb; empty secondary houses for people who own houses just out of state and don’t rent them out locally. That sort of stuff, like: the vacancy rate; the cost of housing versus pay scale; or what Just Economics or other organizations judge to be livable wage.
Jen Hampton: Yeah. So there’s a lot to unpack there. The housing conditions, when I think about that, I think about living conditions, and that for me encompasses a lot of things. There’s not a lot of availability. Before the hurricane, we had an occupancy rate of 98.2%, which means 1.8% vacancy rate for available rentals. We have the highest cost of housing in the entire state. I think we have the sixth highest cost in the entire country. To contrast that, we have some of the lowest average wages in the state. So the fair market rent for Buncombe County—which I hate that term, because it’s in no way fair, but that’s what it’s called—fair market rent for a one bedroom apartment in Buncombe County is just over $1,400. At Just Economics, we’ve calculated that for a person to be able to afford the cost of housing, they need to make $22.10 an hour, just to be able to afford housing. Our average wages are much lower than that.
We have so many Airbnbs and VRBOs, short term rentals. I read recently that we have the highest per capita in the country, and that’s just outrageous. People aren’t even supposed to legally have Airbnbs inside the city limits, like full house short-term rentals. But there are so many. Recently I saw that there was about over 3000 of them in Asheville city limits, so the regulations are not being enforced. I hear people arguing that that’s not contributing to the shortage of available rentals, which to me is just absurd. Of course it is. If you take a house off of the long term rental market, and use it for short-term then, obviously that impacts the number of available long term rentals. It’s adding to the crisis of lack of affordable housing in our area.
Empty second homes as well. I don’t really know what can be done about that, but I really just feel like when we have such a crisis, even before the hurricane, of a lack of housing for people in our area, that really that should not be allowed. I think that if people are going to own a home, they should either live in it or rent it out long term.
I wanted to speak more about the living conditions of housing, that there’s a lot of problems. I think we might actually get to that in a minute, but there’s a lot of problems with people who find somewhat affordable housing and have some pretty awful living conditions, but they don’t want to complain about it because then they might lose their relatively affordable housing.
TFSR: I’d be into going into that now. To go back to the concept of affordability, my understanding is cost of living and affordable housing is measured as a quarter of the median income for an individual or a family would go to cover housing. The state minimum wage is still, I think, $7.50 or $7.75 an hour.
Jen Hampton: $7.25.
TFSR: There’s a lot of people too that are working, or have been working up until now, in the service industry, in tipped work, or people in agricultural work or home care work, where they’re not covered by the National Labor Relations Act, minimum wage standards, because it’s assumed that they’re going to get tips. So the employers are paying them $2.25 an hour, and then hopefully they get enough off of the rest. Then they get a huge taxation off of that. Just to get a little nitty and gritty as someone who’s worked in the food industry here: bartenders and servers, which are a good part of the employment in the downtown hospitality economy, are folks that are in that position. While they might be making a lot in take home tips, they’re also, again, paying a lot of tax off of it.
Jen Hampton: Those are some really good points to raise. As I mentioned in the beginning, I am co-chair of the labor union Asheville Food and Beverage United. One of the things that we are fighting for is to get rid of that sub minimum wage. $2.13 an hour is the lowest that people can be paid, and lot of people are paid that wage. We don’t think that people should be reliant on customers to pay their wages. We don’t think businesses should be outsourcing the cost of their labor to their customers. We are one of only 11 states in the country that still allows that $2.13 an hour wage, and most of those 11 states are in the South, of course. In other states, they require that servers and bartenders, people who get tips, that they’re paid an actual wage, the state minimum wage. In some places like Seattle I think it’s $15, it might be $18 now an hour. People still make tips, and restaurants are still thriving. So we know that that’s a model that can work here, and that would afford people the ability to be able to pay their rent and not have to just scrape by shift to shift on tips.
TFSR: Yeah, for sure. You mentioned people living in pretty dingy circumstances, sometimes because there’s such a lack of available housing—you said that 1.8%—and because of the high cost compared to wages and the deposits that are expected and all the other stuff. And moving just sucks, most people don’t want to move anyway. Can you talk about how that impacts people’s ability to push back on bad conditions?
Jen Hampton: Yeah, absolutely. So there’s really two buckets here for living conditions. I moved out of public housing in Asheville last summer when I became a full-time organizer and my income went up. Before that, I was working in the service industry for 31 years and making really low wages. I was placed in public housing through a local domestic violence shelter. While I was really grateful to have housing that was based on my income—I was only paying a third of my income and having my own space to live in—the living conditions are just atrocious in public housing in Asheville. The buildings, most of them, are completely infested with bed bugs and roaches in the walls, and there’s not really much you can do to get rid of them in your own apartment. You just have to live that way. Ceilings falling down and crumbling all over your clothes. In my shower, the ceiling was falling in. And it wasn’t just my apartment, it was apartments all throughout the building. We have a lot of elders in these buildings that are dealing with that, and it’s unacceptable that people have to live that way. I didn’t really feel like I could do anything about it and make too much of a stink or a fuss because I could not afford to live by myself anywhere else in town. That was the only thing that kept me from from going back to a domestic violence situation, that I had this place that I could afford by myself on my my low wages. A lot of people in public housing are in that same situation. They don’t like living like that. It makes you feel shamed. It makes you feel like you’re not deserving of living a decent, comfortable life.
Then outside of public housing, I’ve heard stories of one person who has an actual hole in her wall that goes out to the outside. She lives up on a mountain, and her rent is very affordable. It gets very cold in the winter time because it’s also not very well insulated, and she doesn’t want to complain about it and just puts plastic sheeting over the hole to try to keep some of the air out, because if she complains about it, she’s afraid that she will lose her housing. In North Carolina, it’s particularly a problem because landlords can evict you for no reason at all. They don’t have to have a legitimate reason unless it violates your civil rights. So there’s not many protections for people. We live in the mountains, and it’s damp, and there’s a lot of mold problems. I recently talked to a tenant who said they’ve been really sick from the mold, they believe, in their apartment, and the landlord won’t do anything about it. It’s fairly cheap, they don’t want to move, but they don’t want to have to live like that either, and be sick all the time. Unfortunately, in our city, we don’t have any regulations in our municipal codes about mold. There’s just so many things that people are living with right now that they shouldn’t have to. And that was all pre-Helene.
TFSR: Any place that’s been inundated with water, or the substructure got inundated with water, all the mud that people have been forced to track into their houses is a bit toxic anyway. Everything seems way changed. If we could talk a little bit about how things have changed because of the storm, for individual renters or the rental pool at large in the area since the storm, I’d love to hear some of that.
Jen Hampton: A lot of people have been looking up the municipal codes, and they make it difficult to understand using all this legalese and attorney-speak. It’s hard to decipher for the normal person, but a lot of people are misunderstanding and think that because they don’t have water, running water or electricity, that they don’t have to pay their rent. That’s not true in North Carolina. In North Carolina, even if your home does not have those utilities, you’re still required to pay your rent. There may be some cases where it could be deemed uninhabitable, and then that would allow you to move and break your lease, but you can’t stay there and withhold your rent legally, which I think is just horrendous.
One friend who lives in an apartment that is almost under the ground, in the basement, got flooded during the storm. It’s not flooded so bad that it was uninhabitable, but it’s flooded enough that it’s already caused major mold issues. She was telling me that her 20 year old pair of Doc Martins that she just loved were completely molded all the way through, and she had to throw them away. Valuable pieces of textile arts that she had from her great grandmother and stuff like that, and no help from the landlords, because they’re not required to fix those types of things.
TFSR: And this is maybe avoiding the collective care, but in those cases, would someone’s stuff be covered with renter’s insurance if they had gotten that?
Jen Hampton: I don’t really know much about renters insurance, so I really don’t know what it covers. I would hope that it would cover things like that. But, you know, some things are irreplaceable. I have a friend whose art studio in river arts district was completely destroyed. She lost all of her pictures from when her daughter was little. Those things you can’t get back, even through renters insurance. It’s just awful.
Another thing I want to mention about the rental pool at large in the area, is that so many homes have been destroyed, as we know, and people have been displaced. You would think, as a rational, compassionate human being, that landlords in the area who were able to would reduce the rent a little bit. If they don’t have to charge so much, maybe don’t, because people are in crisis right now. I’ve seen a couple of instances of that, but I’m seeing more in the local rental Facebook groups and stuff that landlords are actually increasing the rent quite a bit because they realize that there’s an opportunity here, because there’s not as much housing and a lot of desperate people. That, to me, is just infuriating and just gross.
TFSR: So that’s like anecdotal among folks in groups on Facebook?
Jen Hampton: Not just anecdotal, but listings that I’ve seen. Somebody shared on West Asheville Exchange (WAX) a Zillow post of a home that was $2,500 last month, but now they just raised it to $3,000 or $3,200. That, to me, is just obvious, opportunistic, greed.
TFSR: Gouging.
Jen Hampton: Gouging. That’s the word I was trying to think of. Thanks.
TFSR: We can come up with lots of other words that maybe would not be appropriate for the airwaves, I’m sure.
Jen Hampton: Yeah, we could.
TFSR: So by the time this airs, Buncombe County will be reopening eviction courts, despite, as I understand, saying that the courts would only be open for essential operations because they don’t even have running water in one of the buildings. I know that there’s a protest that will have happened tomorrow, Wednesday, of this week. Can you talk about what you know is planned, since the network and the Food and Beverage Workers Union were both promoters of that event? Like what you’re hoping is going to happen. And if the county has given any reasons for why they’re actually reopening the courts at this time, when people are still unable to get water or electricity in a lot of parts of the area.
Jen Hampton: So Buncombe County, under the executive order issued by North Carolina’s Chief Justice Newby, allowed for the courts to remain closed through October 28th. Well, our district court judge is the person who has the authority to keep the courts closed or reopen them. It’s not actually our county employees or officials who make that decision. The district court judge decided to go ahead and reopen them on October 14th, when right after the storm, the county officials told me personally that they would be keeping the courts closed through the end of October. I’m sure that’s what they understood at the time. I don’t think that they lied, and I know that they didn’t make the decision to reopen. I know it was at the judicial level that they made that decision.
I do want to note, though, something that I found out this morning from my friend who’s an attorney with Pisgah Legal, that same order that Chief Justice Newby sent out last week, it extends the filing deadline until October 28th. Which means that even though evictions are being filed right now, attendants have until October 28th to respond to that. So essentially, new evictions will not go through until after that. However, when the courts reopened this week, there are already 40-plus evictions on the docket from before the hurricane. So those are going through and we think regardless of when the eviction was filed, people should not be getting evicted and displaced right now. We’re in crisis. We have a long recovery road ahead of us, and this will only add to the disaster and create a second economic disaster for people to be getting evicted and then moving out of the area if they have the means to.
So the Food and Beverage Union and the Tenants Union have joined forces and are holding this action on Wednesday, October 16th at 10am, outside of the Buncombe County Courthouse. The purpose of this action is to show community support for a call that we have put out to have a 90 day eviction and foreclosure moratorium in Western North Carolina. The reason we included foreclosures is because a lot of people who have homes, lost their jobs due to the storm. Also there are small landlords who aren’t necessarily price gouging. Many of them are, but we don’t want their houses to get foreclosed on either and end up in the hands of vulture capitalists. I don’t know if vulture capitalist is the right word, but that’s what I’m calling them. You know, people who are going to come in and just buy up all the property, and then we’ll have even more corporate landlords.
So we have joined forces also with another coalition made up of several state and federal organizations such as the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Pisgah Legal Services, and NC Legal Aid, and my nonprofit I work for, Just Economics, my labor union. A whole bunch of other organizations are putting out this joint letter to our governor and our Chief Justice, asking them to do this executive order to put this moratorium in place to protect our people and our region, to help us recover from this disaster. So that’s what we hope to come from it. We also want people to put pressure on our state representatives and state senators, because they’re meeting again on October 24th and they can put some legislation into law that would solidify this, that would fortify this executive order that we’re hoping to have happen.
TFSR: Is there any sort of organizing from the grassroots, besides going out to protest outside of the Buncombe County Courthouse. There’s been discussion of rent strikes. I don’t know if there’s any sort of solidarity funds that are being set up to support people if they’re going on a rent strike, or I don’t know if the tenants union is something that is supporting those efforts.
Jen Hampton: I wish that we did. We were a brand new organization, so we have very limited resources. We don’t have membership dues or anything to support a solidarity fund. But now that you’re mentioning it, the wheels are turning and I’m thinking about who we could reach out to for that kind of support.
Grassroots organization is happening. We recently organized an emailing campaign to the Housing Authority President and CEO. We sent about 3,500 emails to the CEO demanding that they cancel rent for public housing residents for October, and we also put pressure on HUD to let them know what was going on here. That came about because one of the tenants who I’m organizing with in public housing sent me a picture of a notice that the Housing Authority put on their doors just four or five days after the storm when they still didn’t even have any water or food or anything brought to them. They put notices on the door saying “October rent is still due, just a reminder.” So that lit a fire under me, and it lit a fire under everybody else, and we have been organizing to address that and to demand that they forgive the rent for October. I feel like that pressure worked to an extent, because the HUD Acting-Secretary came down this past Friday to visit the Housing Authority properties, and she and the President, CEO of our Housing Authority did a joint press conference Friday saying that they have decided that anybody experiencing hardship in their housing properties could let them know, and they would immediately reduce their rent to zero. Now, people still have to individually apply for that, but we we do feel like that was directly because of our grassroots organizing. So that’s really empowered people, and I’m hearing a lot more fire, I think is the best word, from tenants. I’ve been out there talking to them about every other day at different properties, and since that happened, people are like, “Oh, wow. Well, we could do that. What else can we do? You know, maybe if we come together and use our collective voices, we can get them to do something about the living conditions in these properties.”
TFSR: I’m sure that for a lot of folks there’s going to be the need to request some cleanup of the properties too. So what resources are available for people concerned about their housing stability who have lost income from the storms or who want to pursue legal or economic support related to Helene?
Jen Hampton: Well, there is FEMA, obviously. FEMA has a website, disasterassistance.gov, or people can call them at 1-800-621-3362, and I found out today that if you were without power and water for more than three days, which most people have been without for 18 days now or something, that FEMA can provide rental assistance. So people can apply for that, and they have made the application process just really daunting online, in my opinion. So I’ve been telling everybody to call them and get help that way, because it’s easier to just talk to a human, and most of the FEMA representatives, from what I’ve heard, have been really helpful and kind. So I’m suggesting that people do that. I also heard from a local charity called Eblen Charities today, and they said if I encounter anybody who’s having trouble paying their rent right now to please send them their way, because they have the funds to help them. People can also apply for unemployment. Our unemployment is one of the lowest in the country, but that combined with hopefully FEMA assistance will help get people through this. Then also, if people are facing eviction, Pisgah Legal Services is prioritizing those cases right now, and they have a lot of staff attorneys on board who are just just solely focused on preventing evictions. So I would also suggest people go online to pisgahlegal.org and get help from them. If you are denied FEMA assistance, either just regular FEMA assistance or rental assistance, NC Legal Aid is handling those cases and prioritizing that right now. So I’m telling people to go to legalaidnc.org and request help from those folks as well.
TFSR: That’s a lot of really helpful information. I’ll be sure to put a lot of that in the show notes too, so if folks want to find it at ashevillefm.org or at our website for this episode, there will be links for the websites and for the phone numbers. How can folks learn more and get involved in the Tenants Network?
Jen Hampton: You can go to nctenantsunion.org and fill out the contact form there, and that will be sent directly to my email, and I will reach out to those people and make contact and get them involved.
TFSR: Jen, thanks a lot for the work you’re doing and for taking the time to have this chat.
Jen Hampton: My pleasure. Thank you so much for reaching out and wanting to get this information out there.
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Asheville Community Bail Transcript
Bruce: My name is Bruce. I use he/they pronouns. I live in Asheville, North Carolina, and I’ve been a part of the Asheville Community Bail Fund for almost two years now.
G: My name is G. I am based in Asheville, North Carolina. I use they/them pronouns, and I’ve been doing work with the Asheville Community Bail Fund for the past couple years.
TFSR: Awesome. Thank you, both of you for being on the call. I really appreciate it. Would you tell listeners about the bail fund, how it started, and the work you all do?
G: Yeah, so the Asheville Community Bail Fund initially spurred out of a more political, arrest-oriented bail fund that has been around for a bit longer and was fairly active during the 2020 uprisings. As we were getting towards the leveling off point, or like wind down of that period of more frequent directly political or protest arrests, that bill fund was still getting a fairly large influx of donations. As protest arrests were winding down, it was a little bit more and more out of pace with the need. So towards the end of 2020, with that extra cash sitting around, we set up a group that was interested in addressing what some folks call non-political arrests, what our group kind of looks at as inherently political but not necessarily directly protest or movement related arrests. We took some of that leftover seed money to start a community bail fund that has been operating now for a couple years and focuses a little bit more on first-come, first-served, non-charge specific bailouts, where we are taking requests from the community and doing our best to just get people out of jail around pre-trial holding, where most times people are doing time for their family not having the money to pay their ransom before their court dates. Even as like the nominally more explicitly political arrests of those 2020 uprisings wound down, we’ve watched overlapping social crises over the past couple years in our region be addressed through local government, primarily through policing, taking people off the streets and locking them up in response to any number of structural social issues that are ongoing, long-term, systemic issues here in the Western North Carolina region. That has been more of the role that the Community Bail Fund has tried to step into addressing. Just one small piece of that much larger web of criminalization here by trying to at least give people the space and time to address other overlapping issues, hopefully from outside of a cage instead of inside.
Bruce: I would just add, if it’s not clear already, that the way our fund operates is as a revolving bail fund. So that means that once we bail somebody out, and they complete their court appearances, and the county returns that money to us, we can use it again to bail somebody else out.
TFSR: I guess to step back, could you all talk about, if there’s someone in the listening audience who’s like, “Wait, you’re getting people out of jail, aren’t they there for a reason?” Can you talk about pre-trial detention, the class ramifications of that? I think G already mentioned because people’s families can’t pay the ransom for their kidnapping. Also, addressing stuff behind bars. Can you talk a little bit about what you understand of conviction rates and people’s ability to defend themselves, or the realities of working class life and family structures or support structures when someone is taken away and put in jail for a crime they haven’t even been convicted of when a rich person can buy their way out of it?
G: A lot of the things that we are able to address as a Community Bail Fund are basically just paying a dollar amount that the state has decided to set for someone that has not been convicted of any crime yet as they await trial. We are a volunteer-run fund and there’s definitely within that some range of politics and opinion. Aside from all of that, not even to get into the abolitionist baseline that the entirety of us are working from, that people should not be in cages to begin with.
Bruce: It’s important to realize that the people that we’re bailing out have not been convicted of any crime, and they are just being held in the jail pre-trial. The courts have set a dollar amount for their bond, and that bond amount can be anywhere between $500 and over $100,000. A lot of people cannot afford to pay that amount of money, so they have to sit in jail awaiting trial. This wrecks havoc on their outside lives. They can lose their job. They might be providing the important financial backing for their families. That all goes away. So the burden of the cash bail system falls on people without money resources. It’s also important to realize that not only have the people not been convicted of any crime, a lot of the people that we’re bailing out have not been even charged with a crime. They’ve simply been arrested because of the technical probation violation, such as not calling in to their probation officer or showing up at a housing project that’s supposed to be off limits to visit a family member. Things like that. It’s a real problem.
TFSR: The other approach that people can take sometimes in this situation, if they don’t have the money to pony up initially, is going through a bail bond company. I don’t know if you could say a few words about how those businesses operate and the trouble it puts people through.
Bruce: The bail bond companies, they’re of course a for-profit industry, generally backed by large insurance companies. They’ll charge anywhere between 10% and 15% of the bond, and that’s non-refundable. So even if there’s a $10,000 bond, that’s somewhat typical, the person or the family members have to pay $1,000 and never see that money again. Sometimes they even have to put up collateral for the full bond amounts like mortgaging their house or something like that in case the person misses a court date.
TFSR: As a rotating bail fund, that puts you all in the position to be able to, assuming that you get the money back from paying someone’s bail, the whole thing comes back into community use and then can be applied to someone else’s bail or bond, right?
Bruce: That’s correct. We get a lot of the money back. Sometimes, another issue that we have is that it’s not just one court appearance that a person has to go to. They go to an initial court appearance, and then the next time that they go to court, the case is continued, and then it might be continued again and continued again. This can go on for a year or more, and if they just miss one of those court dates… So again, this affects people that don’t have the ability to miss a job and go to court. Maybe they don’t have transportation. Maybe they’re living on the streets and really can’t keep track of when their court dates are. It just takes missing one court date, out of many, to cause forfeiture of the bond.
TFSR: I’ve heard about prisoners moved from the Craggy, Swannanoa, and other western North Carolina prisons after Hurricane Helene, though this being after days of being left without electricity or with potable water or water for flushing, and ending up at other North Carolina prisons to be housed en masse. A bunch of people were taken from the Swannanoa facility and moved to the Raleigh, North Carolina Women’s Detention Center and were being housed separate from the rest of the population there. This was an after-the-storm thing. I wonder if you know anything about these circumstances or how people in these prisons fared during the storms.
Bruce: I don’t have any first-hand information about that. Our group deals with the county jail and not necessarily the state prisons, but I have seen some reporting about that, and yes, the prisons in Western North Carolina were without power or water after the storm. The people inside are reporting horrific conditions, like being locked for days in their cells without functioning toilets. So you can imagine what that was like. I have read that these prisons were evacuated after five days.
TFSR: That’s got to have been pretty terrifying. I know that in the run up to both Helene and Milton, and in the run up to past hurricanes, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina prisons have been the focus of different phones zaps to try to check in on the conditions of people that are incarcerated there, to see if there’s going to be evacuations just because they’re easily, in a lot of cases, the first forgotten by our society when a crisis like this happens. I mean, they’re forgotten on a regular day to day basis, and that’s the point of prisons in a lot of ways. But also they can’t escape, like a lot of other of other people could, so that’s really frightening.
Y’all mentioned that the bail fund works with the county facility specifically, and you all had called for a phones zap concerning the Buncombe County Detention Center, which is the county that Asheville is in. It’s run by the Sheriff’s Department. What’s the capacity at BCDC? I know you mentioned there’s a lot of people that are pre-trial or pre-charge, that are that are there, but I wonder if you could talk about who’s kept there. My understanding is there are some federal prisoners. Also, what are the conditions like at this moment?
Bruce: I can talk a little bit about the detention center and what the conditions have been like for the past three weeks. And then maybe G can talk more specifically about the phones zap.
G: I think that’s great. I mean, the majority of what I was about to say is, Bruce, you’ve been doing great work talking with people on the inside. I think the really tricky starting point that you and others in the fund have already been faced with is that the media that the jail itself is putting out is so opposite with what people inside have been saying. So you being able to communicate with people has been really crucial to us understanding what’s even happening inside.
Bruce: Thanks. The detention center here in the county holds approximately 400 people. Some of these are serving sentences for lower level crimes. Some are awaiting transfer to state prisons or federal prisons, but most are being held pre-trial, unable to afford the bail that’s been set. I should say that for some serious charges, for example, murder, no bail is allowed, but most of the charges we see are for low level charges such as trespassing, shoplifting, things like that. Since the storm and hurricane over the past three weeks, the detention center was without power for the first few days, and we were unable to hear from anyone on the inside until Monday, September 30th, following the storm. During the first week after the storm, the conditions were described as horrible and rough. There was no running water. People were urinating in non-functioning toilets. Some people were taken outside to Port-A-Johns that had been set up. We’ve had reports that they were only taken to the Port-A-Johns when the guards allowed it. Others were locked in their cells with toilets full of urine and feces, and this is so contradictory to the information that was being put out by the sheriff and the sheriff’s office.
During this time, the sheriff was at a county press briefing and stated that the conditions at the jail were normal. At around this time, the jail did transfer about 25% of the population to other counties, and there were some people that had their bonds unsecured so that they were able to be released. We really don’t know how many people were released. During the second week, we continued to receive reports from inside. At the beginning, people were only given one 20 ounce bottle of water, twice a day. At some point during the second week that amount was doubled and there was some non-potable water pumped into the building so that people could flush their toilets during certain times. Whereas there were no showers for the first week, during the second week, some showers started being allowed with cold water, of course. Clean clothes, sheets, blankets were a problem. They wore the same jumpsuit for two weeks. No change of clothes for two weeks, and they were only allowed to wash their undergarments during the past couple of days. So they went nearly three weeks with the same undergarments.
For most of this period there was no air conditioning, and it was very, very hot in there. We’ve had reports of people on the inside concerned about their medical condition. There have been complaints about headaches and stomach aches, styes in their eyes from not being able to wash their hands and faces. There’s been a head and body lice outbreak in the men’s side of the detention center. There is a woman being held that had to have emergency gallbladder surgery. When she came back from the surgery, the nurse at the jail told her to shower so she could cleanse her wound, but the guard there did not allow her to take a shower. Fortunately, somebody came up from booking and overruled the guard. But this speaks to the attitude that some of the guards have had during this period. We’ve had reports of them being very mean and vindictive. Currently, as of yesterday, water is back, even some hot water. But even at that, there’s concern about the quality of the water. In the county as a whole, there’s a boil water advisory. We’re not sure if that’s being followed at the jail. They’re now allowed to flush their toilets during the day, but not at night. Many of the people that have been transferred to other counties have been returned. That’s pretty much the situation as I understand it.
G: I think the only additions I would add to that are a little bit more about the operations of the detention center. One being that despite conditions being varying levels of pretty intense, like health concerns and safety concerns for the people inside. At the same time, they have continued to arrest and incarcerate. As of last night, my count between North Carolina’s emergency declaration on the 26th and yesterday, the 16th, there’s 51 new people booked into the county jail. Simultaneously, for a good portion of that time, they were operating on an “if there is no water, there is no court” basis. So people that were already inside on pre-trial holding were having their detention extended because their ability to access court dates that could allow them to be bonded out sooner, could lower their bail amount and make it actually accessible for us as a fund or their family, those sorts of court dates were not taking place. Not only were they increasing the number of people inside during this entire disaster, but also extending the period of time that people were subjected to this. It’s really tricky, like Bruce was saying, to pick apart how directly oppositional the information we were getting from people inside felt like it was from what the county was putting out in press briefings about the jail. When we were trying to put together our phone zap, for example, one of our demands was to evacuate people. Evacuation, which Bruce was mentioning, did take place for a portion of the people inside, significantly later than you would have expected it and was still framed as a preventative and proactive measure in media from the jail itself, as opposed to anything to address the conditions that were actually occurring inside.
TFSR: To recall in 2020 as there was a lot of unknowns about COVID-19 and word of lots of infections in prisons and jails around the so-called US, the Buncombe County Jail decided to release on recognizance with a promise to return, of a bunch of people that were in the jail. The DA and I think the Police Department made a point of saying that they were going that they were going to be decreasing the amount of people that were picked up or the nature of things that people were going to be arrested for, so as not to put them into the dangerous position of being incarcerated during an emergency. I heard that the DA during this had played with the idea of an amnesty or some sort of change in the way that they were approaching prosecutions during the storm. Is that a thing that y’all know anything about? Was that just to assuage public concern while still continuing to do the same stuff?
G: From the portion I’ve been able to see around the potential Amnesty Day and managing of some of the sentences, looking into releasing people that are being held on secured bonds, and some small version of precedent for how the county has attempted to address that during other crises, we were definitely hoping for and trying to push for some of that and did not see, aside from maybe minimal talking points, a whole lot of action.
TFSR: Are y’all still bailing people out since the storm? Are you fundraising for this and what’s the post release support looking like, considering the devastation that the region has suffered?
G: As we were talking about a little bit earlier, initially, we did have a phone zap. That was more oriented towards things within control of the DA, that being evacuation and releasing folks. Since those demands have been either partially met or ignored in the ways they have, our focus has definitely shifted more towards fundraising and bailing folks out. That has been both long-term and unfortunately, during this crisis as well, one of our only mechanisms for actually getting people out of those conditions. So we are currently definitely trying to focus on fundraising. I wish I had more up-to-date numbers on this, but early in the hurricane, as we were starting to get a grip on what our capacity was, we’re looking at, with the exclusion of our two highest bond amounts, a backlog of over $80,000 in terms of the requests that we’ve received. That is certainly a funding need that is outpacing our actual funding capacity. We were hoping to be able to get some of those same people released through, again, some sort of amnesty, some sort of ethical operation on the side of the county, which is what it is, i.e. non-existent. So we are definitely back to trying to fund raise, post bonds, and continue with that work over the coming weeks.
Bruce: We’re aware that once we bail somebody out during the current situation, they’re going to come out into a world that’s quite a bit different from what it was when they went in. Some of them will have lost their residence. Some of them will have lost the spot where they usually camp. Some of them will not know where the resources are. One positive thing about the disaster is that there’s now a lot of resources available out on the street, a lot of distribution centers. But if you’ve been inside for the past three weeks, you might not know where those places are. We’re trying to be very proactive, trying to put together lists of places where people that we bail out can go for help. We’re going to try and be real diligent about staying in touch with them and helping them find the resources that they need.
TFSR: If somebody is looking to get involved with the bail fund or to make those donations, where can they find ways to donate or ways to get involved if they’re local?
G: Regardless of if folks are local or not, there are ways that they can get involved in terms of helping support with fundraising. We would always welcome folks to reach out to us through our website, which is avlcommunitybail.carrd.co, or by email at avlbail@riseup.net. They’re also welcome to call or text us at 828-542-1312. For local folks that are potentially looking to get involved, either as someone that’s trying to support people getting released, or as someone that needs to file a request to be helped and to have a loved one added to our logs, those same numbers and emails would be a good starting point for getting in contact with us and getting that process rolling.
As Bruce mentioned in the response to the last question, we are at a point where we’re navigating a really strange post release scenario. Because of that, we’re looking at both an incredible amount of devastation to our community outside, and an incredible amount of complete cut off that folks who have been incarcerated have experienced from the aid that has been coming in. For all of the resources that people have been trying to get to the city of Asheville, for all of the medical support, for all of the housing assistance, people inside have not had any means of accessing that support. As Bruce was starting to say, our post-release support is going to need to look a bit more involved, both financially and in terms of hands on the ground. Being able to support people over the next couple weeks is definitely going to look a little bit more intensive than than it has for us in the past.
TFSR: Was there anything that I didn’t ask about that you all wanted to toss in before I say my thank yous?
Bruce: I think you’ve covered it. I mean, I just want to thank you for having this show and getting the information out to people. Thanks very much.
G: Yeah, I really appreciate you doing this. I really appreciate you bumping the bail fund for this. I think if I were to try and add anything, I would just want to really try and drive home for folks that we have watched unparalleled devastation in this area from climate collapse and continued intensification of climate change in our region in a way we haven’t seen in a very long time. We’ve also seen an incredible influx of support from both within and outside of the region in trying to help people come out the other side of that. I think one of the hardest things we’re watching now as media coverage begins to shift to the next thing in the media cycle, as as we start to step outside of this window, is that people have been trapped from accessing any of that aid for the duration of this experience. The devastation that they are going to come out to, whether it is us as a bail fund getting them out, or whether it is unfortunately having to stay in longer and maybe not coming out for another 2, 3, 4 months, on the other side of this, people are looking at a very long term recovery. As was alluded to early on, one of the major functions of jails and prisons in this country is to disappear people from social awareness, to disappear them from social support. That not only does not go away during a crisis like this, but becomes that much more exacerbated. The impacts are going to be felt that much more acutely by people that have had to experience the dual devastation of being in a cage and also going through a natural disaster on this scale. I would encourage that to be something that people are pouring energy and awareness and resources into over the long-term. Not just here, but also in all of these other areas that are currently and continually being hit by the impacts of this climate collapse., knowing that our incarcerated community members are going to be some of the hardest hit and some of the least able to accept aid during the recovery process.
TFSR: Yeah, that’s very well put.
. … . ..
Yousef on Helene Response
Yousef: My name is Yousef. I am a Palestinian, and I came to Asheville in 2017. I used to do human rights work and journalism back in Palestine for about seven years. When I came to Asheville, I got involved with the community and activism here as well.
TFSR: Thanks for being on the show. I appreciate you taking the time to chat. Can you talk a bit about your experience of Hurricane Helene, particularly in the community where you live, or the places that you live, and about the immediate grassroots or community responses that you saw?
Yousef: Yeah, absolutely. My experience of the hurricane, at first, it wasn’t as scary as it revealed itself to be with time. On Friday, when the storm started to calm down, I did not feel there was that much damage at all in my neighborhood. I did not see that much damage. So we thought that this is done, and we are potentially going to have power back soon. Immediately after that, we lost phone service in Oakley area where I live. So we were not able to see the news. We were not able to see what was going on, and we decided that we were gonna just go for a ride and see what’s going on with the phone service. We were not able to call people and find out what was going on. When we started to drive around town, first of all, we barely got out of our neighborhood. That’s when we started to discover trees had fallen into peoples homes and vehicles. The river had risen to the point that a main road around our neighborhood was totally underwater, and that’s when we discovered and realized that the shock of this was actually worse than what we thought it was going to be.
The amount of trees and the amount of debris that we witnessed when we were driving around on Friday was definitely a shocking moment and a realization that this is not something that any community member was actually prepared for by any means. We weren’t, and I’m confident that the immediate friend circle that we were around for the most part were not either. My neighbors were not ready for the power to go down for days and right after that for water to go out as well. Not realizing that the reservoirs were damaged, and not realizing that the power grids were damaged and so on and so forth and observing that shock lasted the entire day on Friday.
Me and my partner decided to drive around and check on our friends and family. That’s when we discovered that everybody had lost service. People were texting each other thinking that we might be injured, but we didn’t receive messages at all. So the panicking clicked in and started a couple of hours after the storm calmed down on Friday. We decided that we were going to meet the next day, on Saturday at a community center in West Asheville and try to spread the word within our friend circle that this meeting was gonna happen at 2pm. We were communicating ritually with a pen and a paper and leaving it stuck on people’s doors, saying that there is a community meeting going to happen in West Asheville to regroup and find out what we do need as a community here to survive this and to function through it, to find out what peoples needs are, who has power and who doesn’t, who has water and who doesn’t, and who would be able to provide these essential needs that community members needed and how could we actually achieve that. The immediate response from the community the next day was also, from my perspective, great. A community, again, where the majority of the community members haven’t dealt with such a catastrophe or disaster before. For them to be able to meet up and share resources, information, and share their needs, that has been something that was an immediate response that I have seen from the community members around me. Down the road, we discovered that community members around the region had done the same thing. The neighborhood would create a circle, create a house that functions with power from a generator and has a well. This house would become a hub of the neighborhood and so on and so forth. People were on hand clearing roads and providing for their community from the first two, three days in the aftermath of the hurricane.
For myself as a Palestinian, as a person that has dealt with crisis and catastrophes from back home, growing up in that atmosphere, the immediate essential thing that clicked in my head is how can we, us, the Palestinian community and the community in general, provide for the people who are in need. How do we address essential needs, such as water, food, heat if needed, shelter if needed? And the immediate respond from the Sumud Collective and the Palestinians and the Arab community members of the collective was that we decided to start to collect donations and started to drive vehicles up and down from the Charlotte area to Asheville, full of essential supplies such as water, canned foods, wipes, sanitation materials such as hand sanitizer, diapers, food formulas… And that list continued to grow the more and more that the community hears about us and the more that we actually tried to provide for our community the things that they most desperately need for survival. So that has definitely been a survival mechanism that we were able to establish immediately from Sunday of that day. By the late afternoon, we were able to bring a big load of supplies to West Asheville for the community, and that continued for about a week.
TFSR: Can you say a few words about Sumud Collective?
Yousef: Sumud Collective came to life in the Asheville area when the Palestinian and Arab communities realized that we need a collective that Palestinians and Arabs are leading, in relation to the catastrophe and the disaster that Palestinians are dealing with in the Gaza Strip. We provide a lot of educational material and do a lot of raising awareness about the human rights violations that Palestinians are dealing with and how Palestinians do not have essential needs met under the oppressor power and hammer in the West Bank and Gaza strip and in Palestine in general. So that collective came to life throughout the bombing that has been taking place in Gaza for the past year. We focused in the Asheville area, we have done a lot of film screenings and made educational material in the hopes of raising awareness among the community of Asheville about what it means to talk about essential needs for Palestinians, how we are we trying our best to raise awareness and funds, to provide for the Palestinians who do not have access to water, shelter, food, clean water or safe shelter.
TFSR: I mean, they’re different scales, for sure, between the damage that the hurricane did in western North Carolina the recovery efforts and the isolation that people have, versus, obviously, the last year, let alone the last nearly 100 years, that’s been impacting Palestine. But I wonder if you could speak a little bit as someone who is experiencing disaster in two of your homes simultaneously, if you have any reflections you can share about the idea of resiliency or remote and widespread networks of solidarity and the ongoing nature of surviving in catastrophe.
Yousef: As an immigrant in this country, I heard all the time about the American Dream all the time in this country, how the system functions, how America functions, how the United States functions as a country and government from an outsider perspective. When the hurricane hit my town, my home in Asheville, I needed to keep reminding myself that there is a functioning system that’s going to be able to support me and my community if something happens. It didn’t take long for that theory to be demolished and bulldozed to the ground. I realized that, “No, wow. Okay, how can I pull myself out of this shock? I need to think of the number one star country as a third world country, and try to react based on that.” That was kind of a shocking thing for me to realize, to find out that, “no, we cannot even call for help if we were struggling. How about the people who were struggling, that weren’t able to reach out in an emergency needsand find help and be provided for?” So for me as a Palestinian, I have dealt with my own hometown in Palestine not having a functioning government umbrella to provide for its people. It was easy for the community to adapt and provide and find alternatives, ways to cope and have mechanisms to survive and to not panic during such a disaster and find ways to support each other in community.
It took time for me and my community in Palestine to differentiate between a panic mode and and a survival mechanism, in the sense of knowing what I need, what are my essentials, how can I be supportive at the same time, and how can I actually not be a burden on on somebody else because all of us are dealing with the same thing. Here in Asheville, one of the things that I came to realize immediately is that, “wow, how amazing it is that the community members of surrounding towns have managed to survive and cope and try to adapt to a rapid change in a matter of less than 12 hours between Thursday night and Friday morning.” There were just a couple of hours to suddenly deal with an entire disaster. By Saturday morning families and community members started to provide food or drinks or what they had in their house and gave it to the community. At the same time, there was also, from my observation, a level of panic as well, particularly when some supplies started to come into town from outside sources. There was definitely that panic mode of like, “I’ll take it because I might need it. Or, I don’t need it right now, but I don’t know how long this is going to last.”
I’m able to read the environment. In my observation, a lot of people may have thought that this was a long-term crisis, but there was definitely some analysis that showed that this is a short-term crisis. People, again, did their best, and community members have done their best up to their capacity due to the fact that the system that they are living under, this capitalist system ,did not support them with what they needed what it should have provided. The community members needed to survive based on what they know and what they have dealt with before. So there is a learning process and learning curve with what we have dealt with. Hopefully we will never deal with it again. I’m pretty confident, if we deal with this again, the community would be much better prepared for it if it happens again, hopefully it will not. The reason they will be much better prepared is because we learned that the system that we are living under wouldn’t function, wouldn’t help and support us meet our essential needs immediately after a crisis or catastrophe.
TFSR: I think that there’s some mythology around the frontier and the frontiersman, like a white person going up into the mountains and living on their own and being resilient. A story that’s told about Appalachia and people living in Appalachia in a lot of cases—they don’t have to be white people—but who are resilient and can survive being left behind by the government, not getting support or infrastructure.
Depending on the part of Appalachia (not our part) the coal mines come in, and then the coal mines leave. Then the community survives, and people take care of each other. That is something that I think exists in a lot of rural communities but also it probably has to do with, as you’re saying, how close we are or have been to being destabilized. When I talked to Chris, who’s a medic in the area who works with homeless communities, he was mentioning a lot of people who are homeless, who they were moving to shelters at various points, decided to kind of wander off when FEMA took over, because they got what they needed immediately, and they saw that some degree of stability was coming, and they’re used to living on the margins. At least now, maybe there’s a little more food distribution and other stuff for them to be able to to use. But if somebody is used to being abandoned, then as long as they’re not acting from immediate trauma-response, then they’ve learned to deal with that abandonment and not expect someone to come in and save them, who might not actually come in and save them.
Yousef: I agree in that regard. I think what I am trying to shine a light on is that there’s a difference between, from my perspective, a disaster that happened that forced you to be unhoused, forced you to not have shelter, transportation, or even communication with people, that kind of shocking aspect of the disaster itself—“What am I supposed to do? I was holding my phone yesterday, and I never leave my phone and lose communication with people.” That’s one aspect to it.
The other aspect is that, again… I love to hike, to camp, to be in the woods and away from civilization, and to try to survive on my own in the wilderness. But how that can be possible when I am dealing with a disaster? How is dealing with a disaster going to impact my comfort? Like if a snake bites me, I could run to a hospital, or I could use my satellite phone and communicate with a helicopter or medic crew who isn’t overwhelmed with the crisis that we are dealing with. There is some level of comfort with the folks who are living in the wilderness and not self-reliant. There is that level of comfort provided by the system, because even though they are on the outskirts of it and they do not want to be a part of it, there’s potentially some disaster mechanism/survival mode where, “Oh God, I don’t know what’s going to happen next. The storm hit. I am in the wilderness. I do not want to be on my phone. I do not want to be in communication over the internet. Suddenly the wind and rain hit. Suddenly the mountain starts sliding around and trees fall on my shelter, on the food collection that I built to be protected from bears. But I did not realize that that tree was going to fall down or an underground storage supply for seeds or whatever else got filled up with water.” Whatever you were preparing for, you weren’t preparing for that amount of rain and wind and speed to knock down trees. That’s the level that I am speaking about, not being ready and not being able to process this. Potentially it transfers from the survival skills of, “I know how to build the fire out of scratch or to build a shelter out of scratch,” to “I’m panicking. Where can I actually survive on whatever is being provided for me?” That’s what I mean when I talk about the governmental umbrella that failed, as being shocking for me, as an outsider to this community. I am part of the community, but I’m an immigrant to this community. I’ve experienced non-functioning governments, and for me to be part of this community and see the same thing, that non-functioning, and people were in this panic mode.
Yes, I have years of experience of survival. I had the comfort where I could potentially call over satellite for a chest pain. A helicopter could come pick me up and take me to a hospital. Then the system of this county was overwhelmed and help was unreachable. That’s the level I’m talking about, in terms of the panic that kicked in. At the same time, a survival mechanism was also is involved, obviously, where people needed to intervene and do the work themselves: cutting trees, cleaning roads, getting to where they needed to be, and getting the supplies that they needed to survive and function. That took place almost immediately and was done by community members, people who weren’t even the folks who were preparing for such an occasion or living in the wilderness.
The National Guard came on the third day of the catastrophe. This is not a functioning system or response or reaction. For community members have to have a body bag in the back of their vehicles, anticipating that they would find a body in the mud, while they are trying to clean their homes and neighborhoods. It is devastating to find out that there’s not infrastructure for an immediate relief, for an immediate response during a short-time crisis. This is what we have been finding out, as we were running around, trying to distribute supplies and finding out what the community needs and what they are asking for. The first couple of days, the community was asking for essentials, such as water, canned food, outdoor stoves, propane tanks, sanitation, solutions for how to make bathrooms functional and clean, how to have good hygiene. That was the first couple of days. After that, some community members were asking for chainsaws to clean the roads and cut trees that were in the way. They were asking for generators, trying to create these hubs of homes and neighborhoods to power so the community would have a house where they could charge their phone, have access to a refrigerator, and so on and so forth.
A lot of the requests that we were receiving and struggling to provide, not even having a way to figure it out, were medical requests. People were requesting oxygen tanks, asking for essential medications. People were asking where to go. The clinic was closed for chemotherapy for their kids. I was like, “Oh my God, how?” Everything in this country requires a permit, requires a license, require transportation, it requires everything that we cannot provide. When we call a CVS in Charlotte, we need the people who requested their medication. They have to call the pharmacy to inform them about a change of drop-off or pick-up location. Who’s going to pick it up? I was like, “There’s no phone service.” It was shocking for me when we were trying to meet these needs for the community that people in the surrounding towns were asking, “Is it really that bad?” Like, “Do you really need to fill all of these cars with these supplies and put me to work to refill these shelves behind you?” I was like, “Wow, okay, we are to the point of not even having empathy, not having understanding. Like, how come you are not able to go and help out the community that’s an hour away from you and have supply chains?” That they would say, “Oh, we send our all of our supplies to Buncombe County and surrounding areas.” So there’s a high demand for these things. These were the first three days that we were trying to collect supplies.
TFSR: So for instance, somebody gets out of Buncombe County, or one of the affected counties. They go, say, to Charlotte, Mecklenburg, or whatever, ask for something at a store, and the store’s response is, “Oh, yeah, we sent it to our stores in Asheville.” But there’s no phone communication in Asheville, so people can only purchase things, let alone the fact that their house may have been destroyed, that their car may have been destroyed. They don’t have a job and their phone doesn’t work. Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) is down, because you don’t have cell phones, you don’t have the internet, so somebody can’t use a card or can’t use Venmo to pay for something. You had to have cash
Yousef: Exactly.
TFSR: And not everyone could get out of town to get cash. It’s pretty a ridiculous profit motive. Instead, the stores should have been very clearly sending them to a distribution point for the store to give it away to people and take a tax cut or something like that. Or just take a loss.
Yousef: Exactly. I was literally responding by saying the same exact thing that you are saying. Like, “Guys, have you seen the news? Did you know that we are out of power? Do you know that we can’t get cash out, we can’t use our cards, we can’t reach our banks? Are you aware of that?” And people would be like, “Oh, wow. I didn’t realize how bad it is.” And I was like, “Wow, I’m out of words. I can’t even respond to you right now. I’m gonna get what I need. I’m gonna continue on my day.”
There was also that level of organizing outside of the impacted region in Charlotte, where NGOs or activists were trying to form some sort of hub of support. On day four or five, they were like”Oh, okay, we are ready right now to supply water and food.” And I was like, “Guys, we informed you on the second day that these are essentials and that essentials are gonna change over time. In a broader view, when I when short-term crisis, I am not saying that it’s gonna be behind us in a matter of two weeks. This is never gonna be behind us in two weeks. I’m talking about not having power, not having water, not having access to our our essentials, open stores, and so on. I could stand in a line for an hour potentially and get what I need. That’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about a short-term crisis.
I’ve been trying to educate these volunteers and folks in the Charlotte area that, “Hey, this is an immediate request. You cannot spend three or four days, NGO-style, to tell me that you need to create a system to function according to and then you are going to provide aid. This is an immediate request. You can’t do that.” But you can’t convince people who have never dealt with a crisis before. So day five, they gave me a call to say, “All right, we have a lot of water. We have a lot of canned food.” I was like, “Alright guys. Well, here’s a list of the things that we need right now. We need chainsaws, we need generators, we need, we need, we need, and so on and so forth. That is totally different from what you have filled up your hub with. Good luck finding a way out to where you’re going to take these supplies to. Yes, there will still be a need for clean water. Yes, there’s going to still be a need for canned food. But these demands are changing and shifting every single day based on the communities needs”. So when the Palestinian and Arab community members in Asheville decided to come down with us to Charlotte to try to fill these vehicles with essential supplies, we were doing a day trip every single day, up and down. We would drive up that day and drive back the same day. We would create a list at night and the next morning we are shopping and so on and so forth. That is what I feel immediate response is, not three days after.
TFSR: Hurricanes are not a new thing to the Southeast, and every time communities do get together, bring together resources, more and more, as these are occurring, more widespread and larger because of climate change, we see more formations like Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, which is mostly a network that local activists can plug into. I think that as communities, we’re learning better how to respond. There’s a lot of people who live here that have participated in disaster relief, in hurricane Florence, or Hurricane Katrina, or other ones around the region. I was recalling to friends, there was a water crisis that happened in West Virginia, I think in 2012. I did interviews about it with local activists who were going up there and bringing water. There was a chemical plant on the Elk River that dumped a bunch of chemicals into the river when there was a flood. It polluted the water sources for the Elk River, including the capital of West Virginia, and the jails were forcing people to shower with this water. People were getting rashes, and people were forced to drink this and getting sick. People who lived off of wells in the back country were getting sick. So activists, not just from here, but from also from here, were driving up with pallets of water that they delivered. They bought them from Walmart, and would go into the hollers and deliver them. I think that those people are still involved, and people who are setting up hubs are also developing and gaining more intelligence. So hopefully, as we move forward, we can deal with these crises as they become more evident, because this is not going away.
Yousef: And there is still a need. Right now we are back in town in a way where we are actually helping these hubs deliver supplies to community members, and trying to create that system with them and help to create connections directly with people in need. Like today, we managed to get electricity up and running to a house and then a well that feeds four houses on the same property. So being with the community and doing that shows a different level of stress and a different level of need that the community has, even how possible it is to drive on these back roads and mountain roads.
TFSR: One exciting thing that I was hearing about: I know Pansy Collective was soliciting ATVs so that people could bring chainsaws or bring immediate basic medical supplies up into communities where the roads had been cut off. It’s not a solution, but it’s a stopgap. It’s a tourniquet on a wound. So that that sort of stuff is really impressive.
Would you mind shifting gears? Could speak a little bit about how your loved ones are in the West Bank and in occupied Palestine, or if you have family in Lebanon, or friends? I’d just be curious and want to give space for you to talk about that if you want to.
Yousef: Absolutely, definitely. I appreciate the question. I would definitely love to speak about that. I have family members, mainly in Hebron, which is a town in West Bank. They are relatively safe, in a safe neighborhood, and doing all right. But definitely the economy of the region is totally underground. They’re unable to have direct income, to work, to provide. It has definitely been a struggle for my family members. Honestly, they have been more concerned about me than they are concerned about themselves, in regards to what we have been dealing with here. My Mom and my family members, all of them were calling and checking on me. I was like, “Don’t worry about me. I’m, all right. What about you all? How are y’all doing?” Just knowing how things are back there, how my family members and my community back in Palestine is. The day-to-day survival aspect of things. I was like, “Oh, we are doing all right.” Like, “Well, I know that you are not doing alright, but you know, can you tell me more?” That’s for sure, one of the ways that we just know,”Oh yes, thank you for asking how I’m doing. I’m doing alright.” But you can read between the lines.
I have friends who have family members in Lebanon, and they were definitely expressing their fear and frustration about how terrible the situation is in Lebanon. People are leaving and trying to survive that as well. So that is difficult to hear, and we all, most of us, also have friends who have family members in the Gaza Strip as well. There’s still bombing happening, and injustice is happening as well there. It’s really hard to tell what the upcoming day is going to hold for the region, but it’s really hard to read between the lines anymore. It was potentially easier to have a feeling of where these things are going. But right now, with potential ground invasion of Lebanon and the war, with all of it combined, it’s just super hard to have a reading on and understand where all of this is gonna take us and how my family is going to be doing a year from now or even a month from now. Is it going to change dramatically in a day or two, or this is just for the long run? We have experienced that before. Is this just a continuous reflection of what we are dealing with from the Israeli government and just dealing with that oppressor power that just drains us every single day, bit by bit?
TFSR: Thanks for sharing that. My heart goes out to you and to your family. It’s a really terrible situation.
Yousef: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And this thing that has happened here, this hurricane and this disaster, has just triggered that helping-aspect of the survival mechanism. It has been such a relief for me to be able to do this. I have been saying all the time that I feel terrible being away from my family and community, not being able to help and not being able to be there for my community members and friends in Palestine. When this disaster happened, I was just eager to get out on the roads and help and be there for my new community, my second community, for lack of a better word, to help out as much as we can. And here we are today. We are still in it for another day. The feeling of not knowing how long it is going to go either or just the flashbacks of disasters. It’s just following us somehow, for some reason. Seeing military jeeps and all of that on the roads and highways or trying to get supplies to a family member who has reached out to us and there are checkpoints and military, all of that stuff. It’s just like, ?wow”. It super hard for me to shake myself and wake myself up. I was like, “Hold on a minute. You are in a different country.” And you know, again, it’s just hard to believe the layers of how it should have been from my perspective. I have this perfect image of how it should have gone and how it should have been taken care of. But I feel that as a community, we did the best that we could. When it comes to this umbrella that we are living in, it’s not that we are relying on it, but this is a wake up call. We are living under this umbrella that functions from their own perspective. They thought that it functions, but it’s obvious that it’s doesn’t.
TFSR: One thing that I think about, and this came up in conversation recently, is someone saying, “How could this happen?” I was like, “Do you remember Flint, Michigan?” Like there was a water crisis there, this is a whole town. The US empire is crumbling on the inside, but they can still send billions of dollars for fighter for Israel to bomb people in Gaza.
Yousef: Again, wrapping my head around the fact that the supplies and the amount of preparation, the amount of resources, that would put in place for Trump to come to Asheville was incredible, in a day and a night just with downtown Asheville, from what the normal is to port-a-potties and bathrooms and accessibilities, all of this that could happen and switch in a day and a night. And for the past week and a half, we are telling people how to be safe using a bucket as a bathroom. And I was like, “Where are these resources? How could this even be possible? We are an hour away from a functioning city, for God’s sake. How is it even possible that we cannot get this function equipment and essential needs from an hour away to a community that may have lost these essential needs.” Again, I cannot wrap my head around the fact of this US interest around where the money is, what’s serving, what’s billing, this umbrella of capitalism. That’s just what it is, this umbrella of capitalism that just functions for that purpose, and it doesn’t function for virtually anything else.
TFSR: For listeners who don’t know, ex-President Donald Trump came to Asheville like a month ago. For the residents, it was a very short notice thing. Folks maybe knew a few days beforehand. And he spoke at the civic center that Chris, the medical professional from our last episode, was using as an emergency shelter. Right in the middle of downtown next to the highway, that’s where Trump appeared.
Yousef: Right. And yeah, it wasn’t necessarily a phone call: “Get everything ready overnight.” They obviously had the either funds or advanced notice. But we also now a week and a half into disaster over here, and me driving through areas that were super impacted in Burnsville and even Barnardsville and beyond and finding out that these resources or the governmental aspect of things was mainly just fixing roads. Well, I know there was more than that. But for me, living in a crises, I was like, “What’s the most important, essential thing right now? Is it fixing a road that still functions?” Not all of them were functioning, there’s a tremendous amount of work happening. But at the same time, we could divide this energy and this equipment to a road that’s out in the country that doesn’t function at all where people are still in need of medical assistance and supplies and food that we are taking ATVs to.
TFRS: Yeah, for sure that’s a logistical choice that they’re making, like repairing a major highway that’s still functional but it’s a little bit messed up versus that isolated community.
Yousef: Exactly. Like the community members are risking themselves because they must, to take ATVs and their bikes to provide for the people who cannot leave their homes—they’re stranded, they’re elderly people who need their heart medication, and so on and so forth. Yes, there were some community members who were evacuated by helicopter and stuff like that. But there are still people who can’t leave, and we need to provide for these people. These roads are extremely unsafe, or these roads are even gone. Some are driving heavy-duty trucks through water to get to these folks. So that is something that I felt the urge to mention. Where are these resources, how to direct these resources to a better use and help the community stand on its feet? And then let us rebuild roads, rebuild homes, and so on and so forth. Let us find the ones that we’ve lost.
And in that regard, I just remembered one thing that was shocking, and I laughed so hard. Out of pain, I laughed so hard. City employees came to check on my neighbor. She was super great. I was in the house, and the city workers, the Buncombe County workers, came to check on the neighbor, and they were shouting a lot, “Is anybody in the house?” And they were knocking loudly as well. That’s another thing that was also terrifying [to me]. But I came out because I knew that my neighbor was out, and I was working on her vehicle, fixing her vehicle, so I know that they were out [of the house]. So I went outside to talk to them, and I said, “Oh, is everything alright?” And they said, “Yeah, we are just checking if they are at the house and if they are fine, if they have any requests” and stuff like that. I said, “No, they are doing well. She is fine. She just got out of the house to do some errands and she’ll be right back.” And I just carried on, and I said, “Oh, and this house behind us is fine, and this neighbor to our left is fine,” and all of that stuff. And then the response was shocking from them: “Oh, we are just checking on government housing buildings. We’re not checking on everybody. We are just checking on government housing facilities.” For me it was like, “well ok, great, but why can’t you just, while you’re in the neighborhood, go check on other folks as well who might be lost, who weren’t maybe reported missing because they do not have family and they are living by themselves.” And it was shocking for me, that, “oh, we just have one mission. We are doing it, and we are leaving. And that’s it.” That was shocking for me as a person that thought this system goes broader than just what they have on a list.
TFSR: Yeah. Well, Yousef, I may end the interview there, if you don’t mind. I think we covered a lot, and I think that you had some really good things to say.
Yousef: Thank you. We have a run tomorrow to Pensacola, a small town near Burnsville, I believe, if I’m not mistaken. But that area is definitely damaged pretty good. A lot of flooding happened there, and the roads were washed away either completely or more than 75% washed down to the river. And we are tomorrow taking an ATV and medical supplies to the folks who are living on that stretch of road.