By Eduardo Medina and Richard Fausset
Erica Scott, a wedding photographer, spent much of her life in California, but moved to Asheville, North Carolina, 16 years ago with a sense that she was leaving behind the perpetual threat of natural disasters. With its cool mountain climate and a setting hundreds of miles from the ocean, the city seemed like a refuge from some of the worries that come with a warming planet.
“I had always felt like we were safe from climate change in this region; we talked about that a lot in town,” said Scott, 55. “But now this makes me question that maybe there’s nowhere that’s safe.”
Parts of Asheville, a fast-growing and culture-rich gem of the Blue Ridge Mountains, were wrecked by water and mud after Hurricane Helene roared up from the Florida coast Friday, triggering catastrophic flooding across a broad swath of the Southeast.
Western North Carolina saw some of the worst of it, with Gov. Roy Cooper calling it “one of the worst storms in modern history” for the region. On Monday, the city and many of the surrounding towns had no running water; power and cell service remain scarce.
Asheville, set along the French Broad River, has a long history of flooding, most notably in 1916, when a pair of powerful summer storms engorged rivers and killed scores of people. Another river, the Swannanoa, flows nearby.
But the threat posed by water had receded from the minds of many locals as the city flourished in recent years as a haven for artists, chefs, brewmasters, entrepreneurs and retirees. There was even a sense that the threat was somewhat under control: A 2016 article on the city’s website was titled “100 years after the Flood of 1916, the City of Asheville is ready for the next one.”
Hurricane Helene proved that Asheville, about 500 miles from where the storm made landfall in Florida, was no refuge from the heavier rains that experts say are becoming more frequent as air and ocean temperatures rise.
The realization came hard.
“When I was a dance educator in the public schools, we had tornado drills every month, but we never talked about hurricane drills or hurricane preparedness,” said Barrie Barton, 64, a public-speaking coach who runs the local TEDx conference series and grew up in Asheville. “It caught a lot of us off guard.”
The Blue Ridge Mountains around Asheville have historically been an inspiration for the wealthy and the creative: In the late 19th century, George W. Vanderbilt II, scion of the industrialist Vanderbilt clan, commissioned the 250-room Biltmore Estate outside of town, and it continues to be a top tourist draw. In the mid-20th century, the now-defunct Black Mountain College, a few miles east of Asheville, attracted pioneering artists such as Merce Cunningham, Cy Twombly and Willem de Kooning.
The mountains also attracted subsequent generations who helped fuel Asheville’s current golden period. But the mountains were not the only draw. Some new age adherents believe that Asheville, like Sedona, Arizona, is in a powerful “energy vortex,” an idea that brought waves of spiritual seekers starting around the early 1990s.
Water also played a role. In the mid-1980s, artists and craftspeople began moving into the big, cheap warehouses in what became known as the River Arts District, along the French Broad River. They served as a catalyst for what would become a booming arts scene. Meanwhile, craft brewers found that the clean mountain water around Asheville was a great base for beer.
Soon the beer scene had exploded. With 42 breweries, according to the Brewers Association, Asheville began referring to itself as “Beer City USA.” Inventive chefs came, too, helping the city earn the attention of the culinary press.
At a certain point, the energy that the new agers sensed seemed to manifest itself more tangibly. New hotels went up. A diverse array of busking musicians crowded the downtown streets. A city of 53,000 in 1980 boomed to more than 94,000 residents by 2020, according to the Census Bureau.
Housing costs soared, and officials fretted over the effects of gentrification. A recent city report found that 36% of Asheville households were “housing cost burdened,” meaning that they spent 30% or more of their income on housing. Officials estimate that they will need to build 14,000 new homes by 2050 to keep up with projected growth.
Helene suspended all of this motion in a freeze-frame. On Monday, the River Arts District was a ruined mess of mud, its streets impassible, its breweries and galleries shuttered. Some residents wandered around a city that local boosters trumpet as “foodtopia,” asking where they might find a hot meal. Others gathered around spots where they might pick up a faint internet connection, hoping to use it to contact loved ones.
There were problems specific to the mountains. A number of people said they were unable to dispose of their expired food because bears often eat out of trash cans. There was no trash pickup because of the road conditions.
Much of downtown Asheville and other areas on higher ground did not appear to suffer as much physical damage, but even there, the city felt paralyzed. A sign outside of Malaprop’s, Asheville’s beloved downtown bookstore, read: “Closed. This is Katie. Be safe. I will try and contact you when I am able.”
Nearly all residents were without running water. At the Battery Park Apartments, home to many disabled and older people, several residents had been taking car trips to nearby creeks to get water for their bathrooms.
“It’s dire,” said Judy Cuellar, 73, a retired nurse who lives in the building. “The creek water is probably contaminated itself. But we have no other way to flush toilets.”
The frustration was palpable. On Monday afternoon, Carolyn Ryden, 60, was sitting on a bench next to a public library, trying to get an internet connection.
“I’ve been kind of panicking about water, and I know it’s going to be a long time until we get water,” Ryden said, noting how she had waited in a long line at Publix on Monday morning to get a case of water. The granola bars at the store, she said, were mostly gone.
Ryden, who owns a gift shop in downtown Asheville called Delighted, moved from Los Angeles to Asheville in 2020 after hearing from friends about its progressive and art-loving vibe.
“My other friends moved from Brooklyn, and we called it a climate refuge here because it doesn’t get too hot, it doesn’t get too cold,” she said.
But there was also a sense that the community, defined in many ways by the juxtaposition of liberal freethinkers and more traditional mountain folk, was now uniting in a time of crisis.
Over the weekend, a woman passed out free chocolates, cyclists pedaled up hills to deliver water, and neighbors teamed up to cut away fallen trees and clear roads. On Sunday, as people gathered outside a hotel with Wi-Fi, a man drove up to the crowd and asked if anyone needed a ride.
How long that spirit might last, given the scope of the trouble, is not clear.
David Shoham, 53, works at a university in Tennessee about an hour’s drive from Asheville, but said that he had chosen to live in the mountainous city because of its “communitarian spirit.” The calamitous effects of the storm, he said, have only highlighted that aspect of Asheville.
“If this goes on another week, though,” he warned, “it might start to crumble.”
Kim Roney, a member of the Asheville City Council, said that Helene was bound to overpower even the best-laid plans, particularly because another storm had pounded the area with rainfall earlier in the week. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime storm; this isn’t something you prepare for,” Roney said. “What we are prepared for is the response now that it’s here.”
State and federal officials, including President Joe Biden, promised on Monday that they were doing everything they could to get the lights back on, get the taps flowing and deliver food.
But they could not promise to restore the sense of invulnerability once felt by people such as Scott.
“This was a sacred, safe place,” she said. “And it’s been breeched, too.”
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