5 Months After Hurricane Helene in Barnardsville, NC

Photo of mutual aid in early October, 2024 in Barnardsville, NC — Download This Episode

This week we’re sharing recent chat with Jazz and Badger, two residents of Barnardsville, a small village just outside of Asheville, NC. We spoke about the community, the impact of Hurricane Helene, some lessons learned from coordinating among the neighbors and how people are faring now, nearly 5 months out from the storm. You can find their website at MutualAidBarnardsville.com

To hear similar stories from after the storm you can find links to past interviews here. Also mentioned were interviews recorded by Blue Ridge Public Radio: Voices of Helene.

Articles on recovery referenced:

If you’d like to help out after recent flooding in Eastern Kentucky, there are a few links in our show notes to Hillbillies Helping Hillbillies aka EKY Mutual Aid

Recent Storm Support for EKY, ETN, SWVA + WV

Recent floods in middle Appalachia in the middle of an intense winter cold snap have left many without potable water or other basic needs. ATV donation / loan / operation request to help check on people in hollers, help clear roads, drive supplies: reach out to theferalraccoon (a t) proton (d ot) me OR MutualAidDisasterRelief ( at) gmail (do t) com.

EKY

One place you can look for where to send resources is Eastern KY Mutual Aid, found on Instagram or Facebook under the name Hillbillies Helping Hillbillies. And you can find out more by visiting the website or checking social media for Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. Some of the useful links are here for those unable to use the platforms:

EKY Mutual Aid Patreon
Volunteer form if in the region
EKY Mutual Aid Cashapp: $SoupBeansFriedTaters
EKY Mutual Aid Paypal: @EKYMutualAid

In Pikeville, KY, there’s a request for food grade 5 gallon for water filtration where municipal water isn’t running or wells are contaminated there’s a request for restaurants to save buckets for water filtration. People interested can contact Cara at 859_533_0349

DROP OFF LOCATION:
Pike Central HS
100 Winners Circle Drive Pikeville, KY 41501

Other EKY sites:

Appalachian Crisis Aid Fund
The Y’all Squad TheYallSquad.org/donate

SWVA

SAMS Lonesome Pine Mutual Aid Paypal: @SAMSVA
The Care Collective of SW VA Venmo: @carecollectiveofswva
Cumberland Mountain Mutual Aid
- Paypal: cumberlandmountainmutualaid (a t) gmail (d o t) com
- Venmo: @CMMAID
- CashApp: $CMMUTUALAID

WV

WVUMC Disaster Response Ministries WVUMC.org/donate
Bluejay Rising BluejayRising.org/donate
Spark of Love Foundation
- CashApp: $sparkoflove4thekids
- PayPal: The Spark of Love Foundation

ETN

Disaster Relief at Work https://www.drawbuckets.org/donate

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Transcription

Badger: I am Badger. They/them. I am an RN [Registered Nurse] and street medic, street medic trainer, and I volunteer with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief.

Jazz: And my name is Jazz. He/him. I live in Barnardsville and do many things related to forestry and mutual aid work. I have been working a lot with the Barnardsville Area Resilience Network or BARN, it’s kind of a new thing since the storm. And a lot of other mutual aid projects in the region.

TFSR: I wonder if you could speak about the Barnardsville area, the landscape, the infrastructure, the people, and the economy before the storm.

Badger: Yeah, sure. I didn’t mention initially that I also was very involved with the Barnardsville Area Resilience Network. I live in Barnardsville and have lived here often since 2014.

It’s a rural area, primarily an agricultural area, and I think about 2500 people. We usually think we’re very fortunate to have a lot of amazing riparian networks going throughout our area and we’re also in and on the edge of the National Forest. Some parts of Barnardsville are in the National Forest, some are on the edge.

Headed into the storm. We have this amazing topography, super mountainous, lots of riparian areas, and a small, tight-knit community. Those two things really came together in both horrible and amazing ways in the storm. Does that answer your question?

TFSR: Yeah, pretty well. So riparian, for folks that don’t know the term, is a river, right?

Badger: River and waterways.

Jazz: The riparian zone is the area, the land adjoining the river. Next to the river, there’s really a pretty fertile land.

Just [to add] a little bit about also pre-storm “economy”: Barnardsville it’s technically a town, but pretty much just has a post office, it had one restaurant, which is gone, and two gas stations. So that’s pretty much the extent, remnants in the “downtown area”. At some point, there were more businesses, but it’s pretty rural and not much of an economy. It’s pretty close to Asheville, so a lot of people commute there to work.

Badger: We do have a lot of amazing working farms, and from what I understand from folks at Big Ivy Community Center, which is really kind of the town center, energetically, in a way, not necessarily physically, that agriculture is the primary economic force in Barnardsville.

And then there is just a ton of small businesses as well. Everything, people making tempeh in their little warehouse up the road, there are several wilderness education companies, and there’s a zip-line tourist-oriented organization. So it is kind of amazing because we are really close to Asheville, and a lot of people do commute, but a really lot of people don’t commute. And there is actually a pretty strong economy, not a wealthy or affluent economy, but stable out here in Barnardsville.

TFSR: I’m imagining, because of the geography, that you have lots of pockets of folks. You’ve got people living up this branch [or another], all a little bit isolated from each other, but sharing the general topography, the general border with Pisgah National Forest. Is that the forest there?

Badger: It is, yeah. And I think that’s a very accurate description. Lots of little pockets and hollers and things like that.

TFSR: Someone described tight-knit communities: that’s where you don’t have a lot of resources, and people are sort of tied in their proximity to each other, taking responsibility for each other. In that sort of a geographic setting is kind of important to talk about, A, how the water will flow, but also B, how people get disconnected and how they connect back with each other.

So could you talk a bit about how hurricane Helene changed the area and how it’s impacted you and others in Barnardsville?

Badger: Yeah, honestly, it’s hard to talk about still. It’s been such a devastating shift in our landscape. But like most river areas in Western North Carolina, our rivers flooded. We have lots of little streams emptying into our rivers. So there are some parts of Barnardsville, basically two main roads, where an extraordinary number of houses just went down the stream or down the river, and people not only lost their houses, but they lost their land. The land is just riverbed now, and the county won’t allow people to rebuild on it.

So for such a tiny town, we have a pretty enormous [homeless] campground situation happening at our community center, and then a lot of smaller compounds, basically large family units, friends, and family units that are camping together, often around one house that is serving as a hub. And those things were not necessarily the case before the storm. People’s houses are just gone. And then, of course, a lot of people had trees fall on their houses and things like that. So that’s been an extraordinary amount of repair work. And some of those houses aren’t salvageable either.

TFSR: Somebody quoted early on after the storm something around 2000 landslides around the wider region, not just Barnardsville, but I’m sure that that also impacted pushing down or just moving or totally destroying people’s houses as well, right?

Badger: We had four landslides, and the amazing thing is none of them destroyed houses. They sometimes came within 20 feet of a house, but we were really lucky in that regard. Not as lucky in other regards.

TFSR: This is going to be a multi-part [question]. I imagine that a lot of people are on well water. But can you talk about water access, water tables, electricity, internet, cell service, or roads, those sorts of infrastructure? What happened during this?

Jazz: You’re talking about the immediate aftermath of the storm?

TFSR: Yeah, yeah. Just to get sort of a sense for listeners.

Jazz: Pretty immediately after the storm there was this realization of the scale of devastation in the area. So on an infrastructure level with the roads, one of our major roads, Dillingham, was completely just overtaken by the river. There was a river there where a road used to be. Bridges going to some other major areas, a Hominy branch, those bridges which were on public roads were wiped out. But then there was also a huge amount of private bridges that people had over their streams or across the Ivy River to get to their houses that were wiped out.

No electricity across the region, especially here. And with that, no cell service or internet or any of that. Driving through after the storm, there were power lines down everywhere. The air was thick with the smell of propane, kerosene. So there was a complete destruction of a lot of public infrastructure.

Badger: You asked about wells… Definitely, anybody in the little riparian areas that we were talking about, those flat areas around the river, had wells that were submerged, which meant that they were considered contaminated at that point.

A lot of people live up a bit from the rivers. So I think a strength of our community is that not everybody had access to water, but collectively we had a lot of access to good, clean water. And even before we had any water supplies or anything being delivered, we were working out our systems.

We had people donating buckets, and other people taking buckets or containers or whatever we could find, and filling them up at their springs or whatever they had, and then bringing them back down to the post office, where other people could come and pick them up and have water for themselves. So we weren’t dealing with some of the water issues that some of the other areas were. Although we have a lot of water issues.

Jazz: People had wells that weren’t contaminated. Once they were able to get a generator, or if they already had one, they would pretty quickly get water. And there are lots of springs and even some artesian wells in the area, so pretty quickly we realized that one of the things that we had that a lot of other places didn’t have, was access to water. And so something we worked on a lot was trying to get water out.

TFSR: I know that in Asheville, where I’m based, that was one of the big ongoing problems. Being on the municipal water system and having the connection to the reservoir broken and the filtration system down. Getting water into people’s houses for flushing, let alone potable water, was a huge issue. That’s pretty awesome that y’all were able to get a hub set up around the post office.

Badger: You know, nobody could flush either, but we are out in the woods, so we didn’t hear too much about that being a concern. I think people just took care of what they had to take care of out in the woods. Which does make life easier, because that’s harder to do in the city.

Jazz: And it’s also really case specific too. There’s an elderly woman that lived on my street, and that was like every day bringing her a bucket of water or two for flushing and stuff. So yeah, there was a need out here, but we had the water, it was just finding the cracks and the people that needed it.

TFSR: When I talked to Janet from ROAR [Rural Organizing And Resilience] in Madison County, one of the things that resonated in that conversation was having pre-existing relationships between people that could be the foundation or basis for building, strengthening, and expanding out mutual-aid among folks. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about before Helene hit, what the mutual aid in the network looked like, some of the shifts that [were] made after the storm, and some of the challenges that you faced early on in the days after Helene.

Jazz: Before the storm, there was a lot of organizing happening in Barnardsville that wouldn’t classify itself as “mutual aid”. And as Badger was talking about, the Big Ivy Community Center was, and still is a major hub of community resources, with a food pantry and an actual thrift store where things were 50 cents and not Goodwill, or they’re $10. There was a clinic that would come by, one of those portable clinics.

A lot of folks in this area, a lot of the old timers, and even a lot of the more recent folks that have moved to this area had pretty tight networks of just taking care of each other. There’s an email listserv where people put out asks and offers and things of that nature. And then there’s just a lot of old connections in this area that focus on resiliency and community support. [About] some of it maybe people would say, “We’re doing mutual aid,” but for the most part, it was just folks taking care of each other.

Badger: Yeah, kind of country people style, more like nobody had a name for it, just you need a ride to town, you pop that in the listserv, you’re probably going to find a ride to town. Or if you have bigger needs, then you talk to the folks at Big Ivy Community Center, they’re going to work with you and try to figure out how to get you taken care of.

And there are long-standing friendships and community, I guess, is the only way, the best way to put it. It’s not like a bedroom community suburb, where everybody goes to town to socialize or whatever. A lot of people in Barnardsville really spend an extraordinary amount of their time in Barnardsville: hanging out in Barnardsville, going to parties in Barnardsville. A lot of people work in Barnardsville. Which is unusual these days for such a tiny town, especially near a big urban center. But all those years of those hangouts or parties or whatever people have done really strengthened us for this particular storm.

TFSR: So with communications down, with electricity down, can you talk about how you saw or what you’ve heard of people finding themselves? Either as the storm is happening, checking in on each other, or figuring out what the next steps are after the rain stopped and the waters dispersed.

Jazz: I can hop in on that with my little story of directly after the storm and with communication on that front. After the rain stopped, we thought it was pretty bad on the property where we live, we weren’t near the river, but a lot of trees had come down, and I remember, we had to cut ourselves out of our driveway using saws. A lot of trees had come down.

We drove down our road to the main Barnardsville highway to check in on folks and immediately ran into a couple of friends who were kind of: “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” pretty much. They said there was going to be a mutual aid meeting the next day, at noon across from the post office. And since all communication was down, at least all of our communication, we drove around and we saw the devastation, and everyone was out, or a lot of people were just out and walking along the road, and just looking.

We drove, and we just spread the word about the meeting. Word of mouth out of our truck, that the next day, at noon, we were going to be across from the post office having a meeting. That was my experience with that. That was, I guess, Friday, right after the rains had passed and the sun had come out, and so that’s how the first meeting got started. It was completely word of mouth, people just walking around or driving around. And everyone went and met up there the next day, there were probably about 50 people or so that first day, Saturday.

Badger: I’d say basically say the same. I was out driving around checking on friends and also just checking on strangers. You know, it’s a small town, and so I actually heard about the meeting from someone I’d never met before, who was also driving around in there trying to check in on their friends. And we just rolled down our windows and started chatting.

Then we started having daily town meetings at noon every single day. And at that point in time, that was the only news source, the only communication source that really existed. Even the fire department for the first bunch of days, couldn’t radio out well. They said they would occasionally get a little patchy communication, but radio comms were pretty much down for them too.

And so everybody came to these community meetings for the first week or two, start time is really fuzzy there, so it’s hard to know. Once Big Ivy Community Center opened back up, then things started to get a little more dispersed. But that was it, and we shared news of the World: we were all in our cars listening to the radio and the Buncombe County updates. And then we would share whatever anybody knew about: where people could get gas and just anything. People were missing persons, medical needs. So we had a medic area startup, and we were doing home visits on elders who were cut off and shut in and there was no easy way to get to them. So we had teams going out to check on folks. And we had pretty complex systems to get people’s prescriptions refilled. We had folks, runners, going to Charlotte every day or every couple of days to do that.

So it was really, really complex, and at the same time really, really simple, because it just boiled down to daily meetings and checking on folks in town and hearing who else needed checking on, and going and checking on them.

Jazz: After that first meeting on Saturday, we decided that the next day we were going to just go to the post office again at noon. Have these meetings every day at noon, and we’re going to cook a meal and start just setting something up. Then it just accelerated at this really rapid pace, and we formed into different committees. There was the medical committee, water, food, search and rescue, and wellness checks. People would break off to those groups after the meeting if they had a need in that area or if they had an offering. And so it was this spontaneous growth and organizing that people were able to jump into.

Badger: One of the most amazing things to me about that time was our repair crew. People were coming in and just saying: “I’ve got three trees down in my house, and I’ve got two kids” and 10 people would just go tearing off to that person’s house. Get trees off, get them bucked up, and get a tarp over the roof so that they can function at least a little bit.

We have a lot of arborists in Barnardsville, which is wild. I kept joking that was an actual percentage of our population, but it really might be. We have an extraordinary number of arborists, which we really needed after the storm because trees on roofs are dangerous to try to cut down. That was another one of our strengths, and it was just so amazing to see all that. So we were able to get a lot of people stabilized in their homes. I mean, still none of the things they would usually have and still with a hole in their roof, but at least dry and tarped and safe.

TFSR: A couple of things occur to me. It’s okay if you feel it’s your story to tell, but I’ve heard stories of people with access to tools actually repairing infrastructure like roads in the Barnardsville area. Is that a thing that you’re aware of and you could speak to or should I just move on?

Badger: Yeah, I love that story, actually, and I feel it’s fine to share it. It was in a major national magazine. Somebody who has a road-building business is based in Barnardsville, and a lot of his employees are based in Barnardsville. So after the storm, they couldn’t get in contact with each other by phone or anything. The owner was cut off and stranded, like a lot of folks. So all of his employees just hopped on their equipment and started repairing the roads. And we all thought that the state had sent them or whatever. It was a while before we realized they were just out and in their boss’s equipment repairing the roads. And our roads got repaired so fast because of them.

Finally, the owner caught up with them, figured out what was going on, got on board. After they finished Barnardsville, they went to Swannanoa, where they desperately needed some road repairs. And then I heard they were up in Burnsville, so they did amazing work. They weren’t fancy paved roads, but you could get a four-wheel drive truck over them, whereas before, people were just totally cut off, and there was no way to get any kind of vehicle other than ATVs or your own two feet in and out. So that was amazing,

Jazz: Even on a smaller level too. A friend of mine had just a small excavator, and as soon as he got our road fixed, he also went out and cleared other people’s driveways and did some basic grading. He didn’t have all the equipment of those big road builders but was just on a driveway-by-driveway basis. And I know more people than just him were doing that as well. They just had their small piece of equipment, and we’re going and fixing people’s roads and driveways.

Badger: There’s another story that I really loved that I want to share. On the Barnardsville side of Pensacola. Pensacola is this little community that is in Burnsville but is right between Barnardsville and Burnsville on back, back, back country roads. They were totally cut off, and the storm hit them incredibly hard. We heard really tragic stories coming out of there.

So we were hearing from the fire department that they were cut off and this amazingly huge spontaneous crew of local guys on their ATVs with chainsaws [helped them out]. Barnardsville has a lot of newcomers who are more back-to-the-lander types, and they were up there with their chainsaws on their dirt bikes, and they just all went up together and cleared the road. It took them two days, but they just went hard until they had all those trees cleared so that you could at least get ATVs up into Pensacola. And the same thing was happening on the Burnsville side. So eventually, right about the same time, everybody got into them, but that was just such a cool story of people who never met, just hopping in and cooperating to get to folks who needed help.

TFSR: I guess I was going to observe that in the few emergencies that I’ve been through in my life, thinking of the last two, after the storm hit this region and then COVID, time passes differently. You get an interruption of your normal patterns, your day-to-day operations, your work a day life. The economy stops in a lot of ways or shifts or breaks down. And people hopefully get what they need, but they get it in different ways and different ways of exchange.

It’s interesting to hear stories of people coming together and having the time, the energy, and the impulse to have a meeting at noon. If you try to organize a meeting right now, and it’s not a paid at-work thing, and [you want to] get people to attend a thing, kids are at school adults are working or unable to get out of their houses. But with this sort of interruption, it’s weird how it creates this opportunity, maybe, for people to come and pull together in ways that day-to-day they wouldn’t be experiencing because they’re so trapped in those patterns. Not to say that I want more emergencies, but just saying it’s curious. People talk about it after it’s gone sometimes as this weird dream-like period. I don’t know if you have any observations on that or also simultaneous to that.

Another thing that’s kind of weird and dream-like is when authority, in some ways, kind of melts back because it doesn’t have the infrastructure. The city government doesn’t operate the same way it did. Police don’t operate in the same way that they have. People take it upon themselves to go and do these functions out of those meetings that normally would come down to some sort of paid government authority. I don’t know if that feels like it’s a function of small community life, where the government is a little less in everyone’s day-to-day, or if that’s the nature of emergency and people banding together?

Jazz: Yeah, the dream-like nature… You know, what’s funny, a few months or a year before the storm hit, I was reading the book that’s really hot right now in this area, called “A Paradise Built in Hell”. For those not familiar with it, it goes through these different disasters throughout history, and how humans’ natural response to that is mutual aid and cooperation. And it’s almost like a paradise, for lack of a better word.

I remember reading that and being like: “Yeah, this is, pretty much my philosophy as an anarchist. That when left to our own devices, and when the constraints of capital and the state are washed away, people are good, and they help each other out. And things can be really beautiful.” And when the disaster reached us, it was something that felt really affirming, of just seeing that happen in real life, people coming together when they didn’t have this job that they had to go to every day.

There was almost more freedom in certain ways and for certain people. And what people did with that freedom, in the face of this disaster, was band together and help each other out and build something beautiful, together. It showed how much more resilient, responsive, and adaptive community networks are compared to the state. Especially in those first couple of weeks.

Badger: I would agree with all that. Yeah, definitely the time thing was bizarre. Nobody could remember whether something was yesterday or an hour ago or a week ago. We’re all still trying to track time together and failing.

I think a cool thing about Appalachia, but I do think it ultimately applies everywhere, is we always have a little less infrastructure. We’re always a little more on our own, and I think that that helped in a situation like this. And I think a cool thing about Barnardsville, I really noticed, and a lot of us were talking about, that for the first two weeks, we were all in full shock, and that puts everybody in a certain kind of mode where we’re just addressing the disaster. Nobody has time to even think about feelings, or, you know, even our personal needs, a lot of the time. Actual needs, like food or whatever. We’re just really focused on emergently helping everybody that needs help.

And then a cool thing that happened in our town is that a lot of people with a long history of strong organizing came together, and we just started to create systems really, really quickly. Because a thing I’ve seen when I’ve helped with other disasters and happened here too, is after two or three weeks, as the shock wears off and the feelings come up, things can start to get a little tricky or emotional. I was jokingly calling it “conflict o’clock” during the disaster. It’s that time when people are starting to have some stuff come up.

And when we have a pre-existing strong community, and we have tight bonds, and we’ve worked together to create really, really good systems, we had structures in place that we needed to support us when things started to get harder. Because in that dream-like state it’s easier in a way, you’re just on another planet or something. And as we got more grounded, it got harder. Somehow, while we were in shock, we had created all these amazing structures. We’re like, “Okay, all right, we have these meetings. We have structures for talking about things. We’re getting through it.” And we’re still getting through it, we’re still in it. It’s not like this is over, at least not for our town, I think not for most small towns throughout the region. And it’s still going okay, and that doesn’t always happen. So yay team, yay tight communities, and yay Appalachia!

Jazz: I think there was also a simplicity that came with the fallout from not having the internet or cell service, and with how hard our community here in Barnardsville was hit. It was hit hard all over in a lot of places, but we were here and we couldn’t really communicate with many other folks, and we knew that we could go to the old fire station, where eventually we kind of set up the hub at noon every day and plug into something that was pressing and urgent.

The rhythm and the actual physical presence and physical communication of that system, there was something grounding about that, as far as organizing goes. Which, so much of it is just over the phone and trying to meet up at some place that’s far away. But we were just here, and we could go to the place and then do a thing. There was a simplicity and a beauty to that.

Badger: I remember Jazz and I talking about that because we have a lot of friends in Marshall and in Asheville, but here we are. We’re in Barnardsville. I’ve been in the area for a long time. I have a lot of friends in Barnardsville too. But it was a thing to realize: “Okay, we’re going to be organizing with folks who aren’t necessarily who we’re always doing this with, but we’re in this place at this moment in time.”

And not only does this just happen to be the place we are and we’re actually literally kind of stuck, but also it just felt really right to be in the place that we were in the world, and connect with the people who were right here with us, and not be just commuting to have community life or whatever. It’s just so interesting to be forced to be place-based and to embrace that and have that go so beautifully, and it really did. I’m so grateful for the community here. It’s been extraordinary.

TFSR: I remember hearing reports after the fact of tornadoes in Burnsville. We sometimes get tornadoes in the mountains, they dissipate pretty quickly, sometimes just because of the geography. But was that another thing that you all faced there? Or was that pretty geographically specific?

Badger: We did. We had tornadoes. Martin’s Creek had really bad tornadoes. My friends had a ton of trees fall on their house and at the noontime-meeting people went and got all those trees off their house. But they had eight trees fall on their teeny, tiny, little house, which is still standing. But if you drive up Martin’s Creek, it’s like a tornado came through. It was clear cut in an hour. It’s wild.

Jazz: Yeah, it’s hard to say, what is what. It was just catastrophic wind events and definitely things when you look at them, were like, “Yeah, looks like a tornado came through.” On the land that I live on there weren’t these wide swaths of trees that got taken down, but it was dozens of trees that were just falling throughout the forest. So definitely a lot of tornadoes and catastrophic wind events.

TFSR: I am aware that the story is going to be different, but it’s going to be kind of similar in a lot of different communities around western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, of people banding together, people finding themselves with certain skill sets and certain tools in front of them and making do after they get isolated from everyone else, with this big shock of the aftermath of the storm.

And then, as roads got repaired, as little bits of electricity or communication infrastructure started getting restored, people are traveling a little bit further and making connections. And what I’ve seen was this amazing blossoming of communication between similar communities, maybe having their own flavor of recovery immediately after the storm, but also their own specific needs to their communities. A sort of communication give and take through these networks of various mutual aid groups or events in different communities. Like Mutual Aid Disaster Relief has had a hub in Asheville, and there are folks on the Pigeon River that set up to do mutual aid there. There’s been food and shelter being provided to some degree. ROAR has a store, they just moved to a new spot a month and a half ago.

Can you talk a little bit about what your experience was of networking once you were able to make the connections outside of your community to other folks with a similar mindset, and any observations that you have about helping coordinate some of the arborists in your areas to go, as you said, to Swannanoa or somewhere else like that? How did that inter-communal communication happen? What did that look like?

Jazz: The first funny thing that struck me was, just a few days after the storm hit, someone realized, or someone had found out that there was Wi-Fi available at the West Asheville library. And there was this funny little exchange that I started making, where we were bringing in truckloads of spring water into Asheville to access the internet. It was just something like: “Oh, we’re trading the internet for water,” which felt kind of funny and apocalyptic in a weird, dismal future way. That’s not really an inter-hub connection.

But as the roads were opening up and the networks were opening up, a lot of it was still physical because maybe we couldn’t call right away. So we were driving out to maybe the ROAR hub, or into Asheville with just some supplies and just being like: “Do you need any of this?” Just talking and trying to figure out what was missing where, and trying to see who had it. So a lot of it was in person at first, and then a complicated spreadsheet system emerged, of text threads and such, once we were able to get access to phones and all of that. There was a lot of cooperation, definitely, between the hubs and cooperations between lots of disparate organizing, kinds of organizing. It wasn’t just contained to our niche mutual aid scene, but coordinating with lots of different hubs, church groups, and community centers. Everyone was just trying to work together to get resources where they needed to go.

Badger: I think another interesting thing about all that goes back to the pre-existing community networks. Because a lot of that early support could really only happen with people who we already knew who they were and where to find them and how to connect with them.

People are often in touch on texting apps or people are on social media. They’re connecting through that. And with a lot of those looser connections, there was just no way to be in touch with any of those people who you only knew in that way. It’s knowing people IRL [in real life], once we had a little bit of minimal cell service with emergency cell towers, then we could SMS, text people, but of course, we had to already have their phone number. I feel like the number one thing people can do to prep for storms is build real and deep community networks because that’s how our hubs started. People already knew each other and were able to connect and start making things happen.

Jazz: Yeah, and how those relationships were able to weave the networks together. I remember going to the medic station outside of the Double Crown in Asheville, and really knowing the people who were holding it down there. So it was going to town and being like: “Alright good. You’re here, what’s up,” and being able to connect. And same thing with the ROAR hub. So that not only linked our own hubs together because we had those relationships, but we were able to network across the region and locally too.

I think there were a lot of relationships, or I know a lot of relationships were made just within proximity because we couldn’t really use the internet or the phones and so [we were] making these really quick and really deep organizing relationships with just people around Barnardsville. That was really beautiful and exciting.

Badger: Another cool thing is that there were other hubs that were outside of our area, that were providing deep support to us. There was a hub, it may have been in Greensboro, but kind of the North Carolina triangle area, which is Raleigh, Durham, and then there was Greensboro, which is really close to them. They were all working really, really hard to just drive one little car-load at a time to us, food and water and medical supplies and to get out the word to other people to do that. So people who we will never even meet, coming from we’ll never know where were bringing in box trucks of supplies. Bringing them to Greensboro, where people could get to, and then they were finding the back roads to try to get to us, and bringing us supplies. I know for Barnardsville that all those little car-loads of supplies in the early days were feeding our town.

But that was the same thing. We already knew a lot of those folks, we had connections around the Southeast, and those connections really saved us. And we weren’t the only ones. A lot of people have connections around the Southeast, so we’re sending out word to all of our folks, our neighbors are sending out word to all of their folks, and what with everybody doing that, eventually we end up with tons of supplies in Barnardsville.

In those early days, as soon as people were able to get to us, we started to have enough. In those first few days, it was a little scary. We were down to a few cans of food and a lot of hungry families. So yeah, it’s the same thing. That’s my new soapbox. Community has always been my soapbox, but now I’m like: “You can spend your whole life prepping, and it’s just going to potentially go down the river in an hour, so prep those friendships instead.”

Jazz: Then there was another kind of community connection that was I think unique to disaster situations. Folks were rolling through our hub who were coming up from Florida, who had been through a lot of hurricanes, or coming down from West Virginia, and had been through the floods up there.

And they were just like, “Yeah, we know what it’s like.” Rolling in with a truck that had a griddle and everything to cook breakfast biscuits and stuff. And they were just like, “Yeah, we’ve been through hurricanes. North Carolina folks have come down to us and we’re coming up to you now.” This network of people that have been through these kinds of disasters before, and just know what’s up and want to help out. That was really cool. Folks that I never met, might not never see again. Just kind of connected through the storm waters and the floods.

TFSR: After the storm, I passed through Roanoke, and they were doing fundraisers and they had a warehouse space of goods for driving down also. It’s really interesting and really cool, the sort of networks that get created for mutual aid and the folks that get drawn in.

While there was a lot of national media attention first spell and political figures from both major parties visited the region to profit off the devastation or to sling mud at each other, the media spotlight moved on to other news. Like the elections and the inevitable next natural disasters, wherever those may be, California or elsewhere. Can you talk a bit about the federal and state aid that you saw come in, where it went, where it didn’t, and what remains needed at that level?

Badger: I feel like I’m in some ways less tuned into that because we’ve focused so much on other ways of getting aid to people in our town. But definitely, FEMA was here, and I have heard some folks got support from them financially, but really the bulk of support here has not come from the state. I mean, eventually state came in and rebuilt the roads properly, with whatever pavement and restructuring needed to happen. And certainly, the fire department and Big Ivy Community Center are always supported by a lot of state funds. But that’s a little different than your question.

The Big Ivy Community Center got a massive grant that they were able to distribute to people who needed to rebuild their homes, and that came from a private donor. What we’ve been able to rebuild so far, I feel has mostly been sourced through community and by community.

Jazz: Our first meeting on Saturday was kind of the first and last day I saw people from the state in Barnardsville for a good while. There was a swift water rescue team there that was going out from the Fish and Wildlife Department. And I just saw them that one day I didn’t really see them again. And I mean Badger correct me if I’m misremembering, time is weird, but I feel like it was a week or two weeks before really seeing anyone from the Red Cross or FEMA or the state, except there were cops around intermittently. Besides for that, there wasn’t much as far as the state being there, whether federal or local, providing support at all.

Then I remember at a certain point, maybe it was two weeks in, the tone shifted in a big way when the National Guard came and here was just kind of an influx of state power that was helpful in some ways, and also just gummed up the works in a lot of other ways. It kind of became a more militarized zone there for a minute. But I’d agree that really, especially in those first two weeks and after that, it was either our mutual aid networks or the Big Ivy Community Center or local churches that were doing the heavy lifting for supporting folks.

I would also agree that where it seemed like the state was able to expend a lot of money and energy and time was larger infrastructure repairs, as far as the power and repairing the water lines in the city and doing the road work. Even though a lot of that road work had been done already, some of the bigger sinkholes and stuff that destroyed pieces of major roads, they were coming in and fixing that.

Badger: Yeah. I forgot about [getting back] power. That was nice. [laughs]

Jazz: It’s hard to crack tracing it of who [did the electricity repair]. Because these linemen were coming from all over the country and crews coming from all over. Was it the state, was it North Carolina that was coordinating that, or FEMA, that’s an area of things that I’m not so sure about.

Badger: Yeah. And I guess I feel like this is a good moment to give a shout-out to our fire department. Any dangerous search and rescue that was happening during the storm that was all them. And they, as it turns out, had not had swift water rescue training, so they were just winging it, and did an amazing job. And that was hard for them.

As a nurse I was out in the field a lot, checking on elders who were cut off. And anytime we found anybody who needed extracting because extraction was difficult, we didn’t have roads, [we would] just cruise on by, let the fire department know. We were all just out on side-by-sides and ATVs and dirt bikes and whatever. So we would just pop in, they would take their ATVs out and go get them [the people who needed help] and get them wherever they need to go. And they were just amazing team players. So I don’t want to discount any of the very real and strong efforts that were from more state-supported agencies like the fire department. But in terms of bigger-level stuff, I feel like our town threw down hard for two weeks and really got a lot of things stabilized and it did take a long time before outside help started to roll in.

Jazz: The fire department did set up a distribution hub as well.

Badger: That’s right. Thank you for mentioning that.

Jazz: Yeah, totally. They were thrown down as part of this tight-knit community fabric in Barnardsville.

TFSR: That makes a lot of sense to me, as trained individuals who are doing the job because they know they’re going to be putting themselves into dangerous situations to help people. That makes a lot of sense. As opposed to the other agencies that are more a long-term response: “All right, this thing has already happened. How do we rebuild?” or what have you, after this?

The reason that I ask about that is because I’m sure that some people sent in crews and were doing work of their own accord, donated labor. But with some of the infrastructure, rebuilding roads or what have you, in a lot of cases small companies, independent contractors, would put in a request for repayment, for means, for materials, for time with the government. Say, roads get washed out, they rebuild roads that aren’t just private roads. They would be applying for money after the fact. And I had heard anecdotal reports or not even just anecdotal, there was some local news saying months after the fact that money hadn’t been distributed to those small companies that were coming out to do some of that infrastructure repair. This means that local people, or whatever people, weren’t getting paid for the work that they had done around that.

I mean folks in the community are doing it because it’s their community. But once capitalism starts rolling again, people need money to pay for goods and services. And also because in the last month, or last two weeks FEMA had stopped paying a lot of people’s housing vouchers. People who had been made homeless, if their houses had been affirmed to be unlivable or uninhabitable, they might have gotten vouchers. And in some cases, FEMA was withdrawing those vouchers, so people were being kicked out of hotels. At least in Asheville.

So those two things [combined with] the reports about what kind of state funding goes to coastal communities after there’s a hurricane, where people have the big, fancy beach houses versus the amount of money that was distributed to mountain communities for recovery after the storm. Those are sort of the things that were in my head. But if you can’t speak to those things, I could just leave it there and put some links in the show notes for folks to read more.

Badger: Yeah, I think I don’t have good insight into that, just because I feel like we went about things in a bit of a different way. Maybe because people don’t have multi-million dollar houses out here. I mean, there are a couple, but mostly not. So maybe they used to come out here and we’re not tuned in, therefore… I mean, FEMA did come out.

Jazz: I can speak to some of those things on an anecdotal level, from maybe not as much as state contracts or federal contracts for small businesses but I work on a small tree crew, and [we were] doing a lot of taking trees off people’s houses and things of that nature. In the very early days, people were all like: “Money. What’s money? Doesn’t matter.” And then, as you said, as the constraints of capitalism came in, that changes a little bit for everyone. There are a lot of situations where we were billing people, but just when insurance or FEMA was able to cover it, and that process is slow or not really happening. Where people have work that needs to get done, or work that got done, but the insurance or FEMA, one arm of it is an ineffectual insurance agency, it’s not really following through to support people in that way. So that’s definitely, a challenge.

And then there are a lot of situations where people lost their housing, but they didn’t own the home, they were renting. And there are all these caveats, where people don’t meet the requirements for whatever aid is being offered out there. Anecdotally, to a lot of people who maybe did own their homes, but they didn’t have flood insurance because they weren’t technically in a flood plain, what FEMA is offering them is really inadequate. And I definitely have heard that a lot from quite a few folks in this area.

TFSR: So now that we’re four months out from the storm you’ve mentioned that with devastation, the shape of the town has changed because of the way that the waterways ran through it. And the temperatures have changed. Around the time of the storm, it was actually unseasonably warm. Even though we’ve had some wildfires a little bit South of you, the temperatures have been in the single digits, teens and 20s, a lot [Fahrenheit].

What are some of the issues that people are continuing to deal with as effects of the storm, and how is the local support effort going?

Badger: I can speak to that. We have a lot of people in Barnardsville still living in tents and living in campers that aren’t connected to any infrastructure. Our long-term recovery is challenging in terms of taking care of all of the folks who have been displaced, and it has been particularly challenging through the winter. Big Ivy Community Center has a lot of folks camping there, and they’ve gotten them little portable propane heaters. And then Barnardsville Area Resilience Network that Jazz and I are plugged into, we worked closely with the community center to create an additional network of folks that are going around, checking on folks.

I connected with the county in January to try to get all the displaced folks in Barnardsville counted in the point-in-time homeless count last month, which was actually this last week. And of course, we didn’t get to everybody. Barnardsville is just sort of off the map in a lot of ways, from the perspective of the county, at least when it comes to thinking about unhoused folks and displaced folks. The more they realize that we have a lot of displaced folks in our community, the more resources they can get to our community partners that are helping make sure that everybody is fed and warm and at least people have their most basic needs met.

But it’s [been a] long [time], and I don’t know really what we’re going to do. I know we keep trying to get people tiny homes. We were getting people hot tents, which was great. Hot tents are canvas tents that can have a wood stove. But then there was an issue with the hot tents going up in flames because people were really cranking their wood stoves in the cold, so that’s not so good. The little sheds and tiny homes that are getting distributed seem to be our best short-term solution, and maybe that’s our long-term solution. But it’s a big, big thing in our community right now, trying to hold everybody close who has lost so much and get people back into at least some sort of housing. And we’re not there yet at all.

I would say most people have campers, but definitely not everybody. And the campers are not really a reasonable long-term solution, because we don’t have a way to connect those campers to any kind of infrastructure. So people are just in them without plumbing or a really appropriate heat source or electricity other than hopefully a generator, but not always. We did have a few different crews bringing solar panels out to our area, and that’s been really helpful. But again, that’s not the solution to the problem, but it has been helpful. Yeah, I wish I had more of an idea of what our solution is, but I think it’s just going to be long and slow and, frankly, pretty gloomy.

Jazz: Going off that, there is a big transition right now in our reality and our thinking, that the big cold really emphasized, which is we have lots of stuff here in Barnardsville as far as socks and clothing, or canned food, just material things that got donated. And in the early days it was essential to get that out to people.

But we’re really moving into, and we are in an infrastructural crisis, with all the people that have lost their housing. Where are they going to be, just figuring out these bigger infrastructural issues that we’re facing. With that, or almost like the next stage of that, as I see it, is these systems issues because a lot of the problems that our community is facing existed long before the storm, as far as not having access to adequate housing or food or heat, and realizing that this rush to return to normal and get things back to normal – the normal is sub-standard. It is not working and does not support so many people in our community. And in a way, the efforts of the state are just to maintain that normalcy but [in order] to really address the issues that the storm caused and amplified is changing our systems.

We expanded a firewood program at ROAR, here in Barnardsville, we’re distributing free firewood to folks, and the amount of wood that we’ve delivered, or that people have picked up from the community center. Because we’ve been stocking wood there, just far outpaces any year that we’ve done it in the past. But people have always needed it in the past, and they’re going to keep needing it in the future. I think it’s just the realization of the scale of the disaster, but also just the scale of what our community has needed and always needs. The storm really brought that home, I think. As we’re in this phase that’s not the immediate “crisis o’clock”, looking into the deep, dark, big future… How do we support infrastructure for folks In the immediate [future] but also [how do we] look at systems and ways that we relate to and support each other in a way that’s different than just to return to normal?

TFSR: I guess with something you and I were messaging about before, Jazz, and to touch on something that Badger had said, Appalachia is in the common mythos, at least since the ‘60s, but before that too, this marginal but also kind of in the center of the country, or at a time area that is forgotten. To borrow a term from Ruth Wilson Gilmore [Appalachia] is experiencing “organized abandonment”, like a lot of rural areas around the country. That’s sort of sustaining it at a place where it’s just enough to be able to extract from without keeping it in a position where it’s actually in danger of making a change on its own.

I guess any question that I would have had about normalcy, isn’t maybe what I should be asking about. But considering living around here and hearing people talk about “Oh, there was this big storm in the early ‘90s. There was this hurricane that came through the early 2000s,” people still are living with the devastation and destruction of those past things, and have learned to live with them and adapted their living around that. So I wonder, moving forward as we see more climate chaos, as we see more events like this happening again, to point back y’all had mentioned pre-existing community ties and organizing experiences being two things that really helped to set the stage for some successes in responding to this crisis.

Are there any other observations, any things that you hope to work on and have as a part of the social fabric for the next time that this happens? Or any sort of lessons you want to share with other folks and listening audiences who are going to be affected by similar things?

Badger: We’ve all been talking about that a lot out here, and I think you’re saying, or, I don’t know, maybe it’s not quite what you’re saying, but I think “organized abandonment” is a great way to describe the experience of a lot of folks in Appalachia. I think when generations have lived through that, then developing ways to sustain ourselves in whatever may come down the pike, is just a normal part of the culture. Then, as we all talk about going forward, I think what we’re talking about is doing more of what we’d already been doing and more of what we’re doing right now. Which is kind of cool. We’re not starting from ground zero, we’re not like, “Wow, we sure should get out and meet those neighbors.” We knew the neighbors, and we need to keep reaching out to folks we don’t know. We need to have more ways to connect.

I feel like those are happening, and I think everybody is both a little more and a little less of a prepper than we used to be because we’ve all seen what can happen to everything you own. I think we’ve all seen things that we could have done differently, whether in terms of developing skill sets, strengthening networks, and being strategic about what kinds of supplies we do keep on hand, where we keep them, and how we coordinate things like that as a community. I think those are the kinds of things that we’re all talking about doing.

There’s a lot of supplies in Barnardsville these days, and we have some cool strategies in place for how to store them, what to store, what to give away, what we felt was critical to have on hand in the early days after the disaster. The reality is the next disaster could be something totally different, and our material plans might end up being totally useless, but our community plans, I think, are always useful: How we connect, how we rescue each other, how we extract each other, and how we take care of each other, both now and certainly when there’s a disaster happening. That was sort of a long-winded answer, but it’s on my mind all the time.

TFSR: It was a long-winded question. I think it was a good answer,

Jazz: Yeah, if I could just jump off that for a second too. I totally agree with Badger that really the most resilient resource that we have is each other in our community and building those connections. And so no matter what the next disaster is, we’re building those.

What really hit home for me with this is how important it is to organize and build connections outside of our social milieus and our little circles that we have. Those are so important, and we should tend to them. Also, I might not go to church, but I want to organize with this church and get supplies out to people, or our organization. The structure of BARN is really different than the community center, but we’re all part of this community, working together. Just to get to know all of our neighbors and to realize that we all do need each other, not only when these disasters strike, but all the time. I think that’s the tragedy of normalcy, or of just returning to capitalism, that isolation from each other and the polarization that comes out of that. Because when the storm washed all of that away, along with everything else, it left us with each other, and an opportunity to connect and to grow together.

TFSR: How can folks learn more about BARN or get involved if they’re in the area or support it if they have a little extra money they can send? Do you take donations? Do you have any sort of online presence, or is it just on the ground? And if not online, are there any other groups you want to shout out that people could check out?

Badger: We have a website. Do you know what our website is?

Jazz: Oh, I thought you were gonna know. I think it’s: MutualAidBarnardsville.com.

Badger: I think that’s what it is. That’s okay to find that too, usually. And I think on that website, there are listed some avenues for donations. I wouldn’t say we’re super actively accepting any kind of donations right now, but if somebody was bound and determined to donate to us, they should be in touch, because we are continuing to try to serve our community as best we can.

And if somebody was like, “I live in Barnardsville, I was here this whole time, I wanted to connect, and I didn’t know,” they could just reach out on the website. There’s an email list down the website, and that email is monitored. Go ahead, be in touch. We don’t have our hub anymore, sadly, but we’re still here, and we’re all pretty connected to Big Ivy Community Center, which is just sort of a bigger hub for the whole community. And, yeah, be in touch. Let us know if you’re here.

TFSR: Awesome. Well, Badger and Jazz, thanks so much for the conversation and for sharing your stories, and I’m glad to be in the community with you.

Jazz: Yeah, thanks so much for having us on. It was a cathartic session to talk about all this.

Badger: It’s so good to be able to talk about it and tell our stories. I don’t think we get to do that all that often, because we’ve all been through it and, you know, we all know the story.

TFSR: Just a side note, but it seemed like someone from Blue Ridge Public Radio was compiling people’s stories. If I can find that all, if that’s up on the internet, then I’ll link that in here too, because oral histories I think are really powerful, as you said, for the teller as well as for the listener.

Badger: The Blue Ridge Public Radio person spent a lot of time in Barnardsville. A lot, being maybe two or three days, I think. They actually collected a lot of stories from our town too. So that would be a really cool link to pop on for folks.

Jazz: I know. I still remember just sitting in the truck taking notes from the broadcast so that we could share it at our community meetings.

TFSR: Yeah, the local National Public Radio really showed up. I know that Asheville FM was off-air. Didn’t have the internet at the studios, and didn’t have electricity for a long time at their West Asheville studios. But Blueridge Public Radio was broadcasting all the safety information and official meetings and whatever. Big ups to them for that. That sort of information about where you go to get potable water. What times is this Food Pantry open or whatever. If you don’t have internet, radio is an amazing tool for getting that into people’s cars.

All right, well, I’ll let y’all go and we’ll keep in touch.

Jazz: All right, sounds good.

Badger: Thanks, Bursts!

The Final Straw Radio Podcast