On Friday, September 27, I wrote my response to arrival of Hurricane Helene, now a powerful tropical storm, to Asheville, the day after I flew in from Bogota, Colombia. I am now posting an update on Monday just to let anyone know, who may be reading these posts, what is going on in Swannanoa and Asheville since we are in the national news and people may be wondering if we are all right.
On Monday morning everything is peaceful in Swannanoa and Asheville, but the effects of the storm are everywhere. First of all, my house (which had a huge falling branch miss it by 5 feet) is all right as is my son Tom’s house (which had a little water damage in the bottom floor) and Susie’s cabin in the woods and the rental house in Asheville that Todd and Susie own as well as Susie’s second floor studio in Marshall where the whole town was flooded on the ground floor of every building. So my family has escaped.
But the overall destruction and flooding in Swannanoa, Asheville and Marshall was terrible in the many of the parts of town that I care most about. Downtown Swannanoa including my pharmacy, grocery store, car repair place and barber shop all flooded in ten feet of water. Biltmore Village, with it’s lovely shops and restaurants was flooded and destroyed. The River Arts District with its artist’s studios and restaurants and French Broad river greenway and walkways only had a few rootops exposed in the flooding. And Marshall, where Susie has her studio and knows many, many people was completely submerged. I have written about Marshall with photographs often here and met many Marshall people at Rob Amberg’s birthday party in Letojanni, Sicily in October. So the loss of Marshall really hurts.
So my short answer is, my family is fine, but Asheville is suffering. At least 57 people have been killed in Buncombe County by the storm and thousands are without housing with many people without food or water. There ius no water service, no electricity in most places, no access to food without long lines and paying in cash, no cash because the ATM’s don’t work and the ones that do have an hour and a half wait in line, little gasoline, again with long lines, and almost no cellular phone service so it is very hard to contact anyone or to know what is happening. Electric power has been promised by next Friday but water, which needs to be boiled when we get it, won’t return for weeks. Asheville and all of Western North Caroline is a disaster area.
SEPTEMBER 27, FRIDAY’S REPORT
Today was the day that hurricane Helene arrived in with force in Asheville, Swannanoa and Marshall, the towns that I have been writing about. The Swannanoa river is a small river about 50 feet to 100 feet wide which in times of little rain is a very shallow stream meandering from above Black Mountain into the North Fork Reservoir which supplies most of Asheville City’s water, then goes around Asheville where it meets and joins the French Broad River which flows from south of Asheville from the continental divide, to the Mississippi river and then down to New Orleans where the mighty Mississippi flows in a huge delta into the Gulf of Mexico.
This river basin that covers most of the Eastern United States seems to have been there from the beginning of time, although geologically it is not that old.
This river system is supplied water from the humid clouds which come up from the Gulf of Mexico and and release their moisture along the way but particularly when forced over the higher and cooler Appalachian mountains, a very old mountain system, much older than the western Rocky Mountains. They have worn away and rounded down by eons of rain washing the soil from the mountains into the Mississippi river and then dropping the soil in the Mississippi delta on which New Orleans is built. Hurricanes that start as simple tropical storms off the coast of Africa, are set whirling in a counter clockwise fashion and when the conditions are right the warm surface to the Caribbean draws water filled clouds up a wide funnel that rise and whirls faster and fater until, sometimes, if forms into a well formed hurricane of trenendous whirlling power, spinning faster and faster at the center, funneling warm wet clouds higher and higher. This then is a hurricane. When it hits land and relatively cooler air the clouds release their moisture in torrential rain. So hurricanes swirling winds cause great damage and the surge of their power pushes huge waves up on shore and then the flooding caused by all of the moisture that is released causes sometime catastrophic flooding.
Hurricanes that hit the Gulf Coast often continue over land and sometimes the tropical storms they settle into causes flooding in Western North Carolina when the storm hits the mountains causing sudden downpouring rain that causes flooding. But hurricanes usually move quite slowly so that their energy is dissipated by the time they get to our mountains and by the time the tropical storms get here their energy is gone and their winds are light. The only damage they cause is flooding.
But hurricane Helene moved very swiftly so that when it reached Western Carolina the winds were still very strong. The rains started here on Wednesday and by Wednesday evening water was leaking into the lower floor of my son Tom’s house in North Asheville. Tom heard about this from a friend who checked on Tom’s house and Tom, who with Kathy, his wife, was visiting their daughter Hannah in Memphis, 8 hours by car away, asked Susie to spend the night here after picking me up at the airport to see what she could do to keep damage from being done to the lower floor of his house.
So last night after picking me up, Susie and I spent the night in Tom’s house. There was some wetness in on lower room but it didn’t seem too serious, but after a night of very heavy rain and trees thrashing in the high winds, in the morning the water coming into the lower floor seemed serious and we spent the morning pushing the water out the door of the lower floor onto his patio. But by 3 p.m. the water coming in was slowing down as the fast moving storm left our area and the sun came out.
When we thought we had things under control we tried to call Tom to tell him not to worry. But we could not reach him by phone. During the night the electricity had gone off and the house was dark. This meant that the Internet no longer worked and for some reason our cellular phone connection was also erratic and weak. All of a sudden we had lost contact with Tom and the rest of the world, we didn’t know what was going on in Asheville and no way to find out. So after 3 p.m. we drove to town hoping for a better phone connection. What we found was that all of Asheville was without electricity and on almost every street huge trees, their roots loosened by flooding, had blown over in the high winds, blocking the streets, knocking out power lines and often smashing into houses or crushing cars. In fact, it was very difficult to make our way into Asheville as we were turned back in street after street by fallen trees. The stoplights were off, traffic was very tentative and light while people walked around surveying the damage. We did finally manage to contact Tom and then slowly found our way back to his house. But late afternoon the breezes were light and the sun was out.
In Europe the power lines are often buried in the ground and are unaffected by high winds. But in the United States power companies find it cheaper to string power lines on poles along roads and when trees topple on the lines then power company quickly repairs the damage. This means that in our area we often have local power outages when a tree falls on a line but almost always within hours the damage is repaired and power is restored. It is something that we are used to. But in the case of a huge storm when powerlines are down everywhere it often takes days or weeks before power is restored. After riding around Asheville and seeing the power lines down everywhere we realized that the power in Tom’s house, and in my house in Swannanoa, and in Susie’s house in Madison County were unlikely to have power restored for days. The damage is too extensive.
Now that the sun is out and everything looks comparatively normal, life won’t return to normal. I am reminded of how fragile in a way our dependence on electricity and electrical devices is. For the last month and at every step of the trip from Bogata I could talk to Susie on Facetime and be in her presence. I marveled at this, I marveled at being able to read news from a huge number of sources on Apple News, of being able to listen to all kinds of music, to draw from my bank account at any ATM, to carry 1000 ebooks with me. I had the whole world in my pocket.
Today, because of a deluge of rain and swirling winds, right here in Asheville, I lost contact with the world including my bank whose ATM’s don’t function without electricity. I couldn’t phone my son because cellular had been knocked out. Suddenly I was clueless and helpless.
And it wasn’t just me. When we drove around town every store, all without power, was closed. Only one grocerty store, Harris Teeter, was open and it had a line of several hundred people outside waiting to get in, probably because it was so hard to process payments. Asheville, a tourist town, usually crowded on a weekend was empty. Life has come to a standstill and from the looks of things will be that way for at least a week. Gas stations can’t pump gas, stores can’t supply food, restaurants can’t serve meals, the phones won’t work.
Suddenly the miracle of thinking that I have the world in my pocket is hollow. I have nothing in my pockets. Tonight when it gets dark we will start to use candles. We have food enough in Tom’s refrigerator, but the frozen food will soon thaw and rot and the rest won’t last long. The only lucky thing is that it is not icy winter or hot summer. We are not going to freeze or swelter. We have filled the bathtub with water so that we can flush the toilets if the water system, without electricity breaks down, which is likely. But we have suddenly woken up to how fragile our virtual, digital way of life, based on electricity, is.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 