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Local police maintain a checkpoint into one of the harder-hit sections of Asheville, N.C., grimly advising the few drivers allowed to pass to proceed cautiously—cadaver dogs are loose and may be criss-crossing Swannanoa River Road. Just a few days ago, search and rescue squads had still been hoping to find survivors. Today, they have been replaced by these recovery teams, working to locate the bodies of people still listed among the missing more than a week after Hurricane Helene stormed across North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains.
By Oct. 16, 95 storm-related deaths in North Carolina had been verified, making Helene the deadliest natural disaster in the history of the state. Helene’s toll of more than 230 deaths across six states makes Helene the second deadliest storm to hit the mainland United States in more than 50 years, behind Hurricane Katrina, which claimed at least 1,833 lives in 2005.
Fallen trees, downed power lines, undermined roadways and washed out bridges make travel unsafe. Entire sections of Asheville are without power and completely closed off, as a team from Catholic Charities USA begins an assessment visit, joined by America, on Oct. 9.
What had been up to a foot or more of mud deposited by flood waters has been reduced, at least on these damaged streets, to a thin layer of dust, kicked up into small vermillion clouds by each passing vehicle. North Carolina’s red dirt begins to cover hair and clothes and, if you are not masked up, breathing and speaking can become a little labored after a while.
Houses once sited along the usually gentle Swannanoa have been swept against poles or crushed among crazy jumbles of cars thrown together by the floodwaters. Piles of debris from flooded basements and ground floors of the houses that survived the flood are rising higher along roadways that have been reopened—friends and family are arriving to help the residents of Asheville and the nearby town of Swannanoa clean up and salvage what they can. It is not much.
The trailer and truck compound of Estes Express Lines has been obliterated. The freight carrier’s trailers are scattered wildly across the flood-swept roads and cracked pavement of commercial parking lots. Many have been torn to pieces or bent around telephone or light poles, others crashed through walls and windows of neighboring businesses for half a mile or more around the trucking company’s former site. Most of the businesses here—and the jobs they provided—are gone.
Helene’s wrath
“Welcome to my office,” Kim Burgo said earlier that morning as her passengers stepped into a giant Ford Expedition rented to manage the visit to Asheville. Now she is carefully pushing the SUV down Swannanoa River Road, passing under hanging power lines and navigating around upheaved sections of road bed. Ms. Burgo has had this drive-by perspective on storm-mangled communities many times before as vice president for disaster operations for Catholic Charities USA.
Ms. Burgo joins local colleagues from offices in Charlotte and Asheville. Even as they solemnly view the outcome of Helene’s wrath in Asheville, everyone is following the news of Hurricane Milton bearing down on Florida. C.C.U.S.A. staff who had been deployed to deal with Helene’s impact in Florida are now scrambling to find safe lodging and a sturdy garage for the relief equipment the national office had just dispatched.
With each weather update, it becomes increasingly clear that—incredibly—C.C.U.S.A. will have to simultaneously coordinate responses to two major hurricanes. “I’m working on Milton with the other side of my brain,” Ms. Burgo says, steering the SUV through Asheville.
Milton is the fifth storm in what is becoming a busy 2024 hurricane season. Just as Helene did before it, Milton swiftly gathered strength and absorbed more water as it passed over the Gulf of Mexico, then experiencing record surface heat levels.
Ms. Burgo wonders aloud if the new storm will drag media attention, and the disaster response that typically trails such coverage, away from the calamity that has turned over North Carolina’s mountain communities. Residents on the street in Asheville wonder the same thing. Would their plight now be forgotten as the headlines shifted to Milton’s threat to Tampa Bay?
With its water and sanitation systems seriously compromised, most power still out and its hospitality, arts and tourism sectors in ruins, it will take a public attention span a lot longer than that to restore what has been lost in Asheville. Ms. Burgo says Catholic Charities is up to the job. “We’re here for the long haul,” she assures, explaining that Catholic Charities offices are embedded in the communities they serve.
That is surely true of Jesse Boeckermann, the Western Region Director for Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Charlotte. He is so embedded in Asheville, he is among the thousands here who lost their homes to Helene. His swamped apartment is completely uninhabitable.
One of his first challenges right after Helene hit was finding new lodging in Charlotte for Ukrainian refugees that had been resettled in Asheville, families first dislodged by war and now by flood. He had been couch surfing for a few days, but for tonight Mr. Boeckermann has found a short respite at a local board member’s home.
He is grateful for the new digs but still looking for a better option—a place “that has the internet, that has cell phone reception, that has power and that has water,” he says. “I’m really trying to find the balance—taking care of myself so that I can take care of the people that we serve.” Two colleagues are doing the same. After showing Ms. Burgos and other C.C.U.S.A. staff the hardest hit areas of town today, he will get back to trying to find that Goldilocks housing.
Getting around the area has been a challenge because of “so many mudslides,” and “roads that were very steep to begin with, that weren’t paved, have been washed out,” Mr. Boeckermann reports. “The number of trees down, thousands…is just amazing.” Relief teams with emergency water and food supplies have taken to using pack mules to reach mountainside communities that even sturdy four-by-fours cannot reach now.
Traffic lights are out across the city; many roads are closed. It is no easy task to reach the Biltmore and River Arts districts where flooding had been the worst. Damaged and demolished businesses here will be closed for a long time. Some may never reopen.
“It’s a devastating loss,” Brent Starck says, surveying the near complete destruction at Foundy Street. The complex had been one of Asheville’s premier retail and entertainment attractions and an art collective that showcased the work of hundreds of local artists and craftspeople. Mr. Starck is one of the developers of Foundy Street and helped open one of its anchor sites, Foundation Woodworks.
Foundy Street is part of what made Asheville Asheville. But on Sept. 27, the French Broad River swept everything away—including a winery, a brew pub and Marquee Asheville, a vast artists’ retail warehouse—businesses that helped create an arts and entertainment scene that drew visitors to western North Carolina from around the country.
“There’s a lot of people’s livelihoods that depended on this place, and we absolutely need some government assistance to get it back up and running,” Mr. Starck says. He cannot even guess today how long it will take to do that or if it is even possible as workers in Bobcat loaders circle around him pushing mounds of flood debris together.
In era of climate change, no safe havens
Many of the city’s newest residents had moved to North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains region precisely because they viewed the Asheville area as a climate-change haven, a region safe from the extreme weather events that menace coastal communities. Helene’s devastation is offering a hard lesson: No community or U.S. region can consider itself safe from the extreme weather events that global warming is seeding and supercharging.
Longtime residents have seen hurricanes reach North Carolina before, but in the past those storms exhausted themselves along the coast. Sometimes they reached as far as Charlotte, but they never made it up into the mountains, Mr. Boeckermann says. “This time it climbed the mountain.”
Across the region, 20 to 30 inches of rain fell over 48 hours. There is nothing to compare it to in the Asheville historical record, Mr. Boeckermann says.
But Helene’s unprecedented wallop was not a surprise to climate researchers, who have long predicted that fiercer storms carrying heavier loads of rainwater will become the norm because of the impact of climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service warned in August that summer 2024’s uniquely hot atmospheric and oceanic conditions “set the stage for an extremely active hurricane season that could rank among the busiest on record.”
The service urged “everyone to know their risk; prepare for threats like damaging winds, storm surge and inland flooding from heavy rainfall; and to have a plan if asked to evacuate.”
That proved impossible for many people in the North Carolina mountains. As the steep terrain propelled all that water downhill, rain-swollen streams and rivers overflowed banks in mountain foothills. When evacuation advisories began coming in, many found themselves simply cut off from an escape. What Helene is teaching Catholic Charities is that in the era of climate change, none of its regional offices can consider themselves immune to a weather catastrophe. And disaster response teams will not have to adapt just to the escalating ferocity of hurricanes. All kinds of weather patterns appear to be affected.
“There used to be a wildfire season,” Ms. Burgo says. Now “wildfire season has changed. There used to be a tornado season. Now we’re seeing tornadoes as early as February, and they go clear until December.” There is no longer a quiet time on the calendar for professional and institutional respite from disaster, she says.
Ms. Burgo has been working with the Catholic Charities offices around the country to better prepare them for the unpredictable future that is coming fast upon them. “The time to be involved in a disaster is before it happens,” she says, “so that you can be ready, you can be prepared. And then when the disaster hits, that’s when you launch your plan.”
Kerry Alys Robinson, president and C.E.O. of Catholic Charities USA, reports that the national humanitarian provider is “100 percent” readying itself for the changing climatescape. The agency has ramped up disaster-preparedness training, and it is reinforcing the resource-sharing capacity of regional networks. That will allow offices to share staff power and equipment much as regional utilities rush in to share resources from outside an affected area in the aftermath of a major storm.
“There is no community that is immune from a climate-related disaster, and that is why every agency needs to designate personnel who will be trained in disaster preparedness and relief,” Ms. Robinson says. “We never know when.”
Ms. Robinson points to C.C.U.S.A.’s regional disaster academies as one critical institutional adaptation to changing conditions. “That brings local agencies in a region of the United States together,” she says. “They get to know each other; they get trained together, and then we are able to deploy trained personnel from agencies that are not impacted by a calamity to the agency that is affected.” That institutional capacity building has proved “enormously helpful to the people who are rebuilding their lives and recovering from the disaster.”
“You prepare for the worst and you hope for the best,” Ms. Robinson says, “but I think the fact that we are Catholic Charities also adds a faith dimension to this, which is [that] we are called to help our brothers and sisters in their hour of need. … And I love that that is part of what we do and who we are.”
According to Ms. Robinson, by Oct. 18, C.C.U.S.A. had disbursed or was preparing to disburse almost $5 million raised so far to respond to Helene and Milton. She emphasizes that 100 percent of the donations coming in through the national office will be distributed among Catholic Charities offices in the hardest hit communities.
A deluge of disinformation
Helene is also teaching lessons about the pernicious impact of misinformation. The circulation of rumors and bad information is a phenomenon that has long accompanied natural disasters, but, like the storms themselves, the problem has become supercharged in our social media-addled era. A digital inundation of conspiracy-spinning has accompanied Helene.
Among the tallest of tales being told: that the storm itself had been geoengineered by unnamed actors to suppress votes in red states or to drive North Carolinians off the land so its lithium riches could be extracted; that officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were diverting resource from disaster relief to support new immigrants or were blocking or seizing aid deliveries or withholding assistance from “Republican” states; that FEMA was limiting assistance to $750.
The latest rumor, that North Carolina officials are hiding the bodies of victims to suppress the death toll, compelled a local fire chief to respond on his Facebook account: “As we still navigate the process of search and recovery, we beg that people do not share misleading, inflated, or sensationalized information from uninformed sources…. From the actual responders from hour one, the boots on the ground, the ones who have been involved in rescuing and recovering our people, nobody is ‘hiding numbers.’”
It goes without saying that none of these claims, several of which were amplified by G.O.P. presidential candidate Donald Trump at campaign rallies, are true, but the anxiety and anger they provoke among people desperate for help are real. On Oct. 14, FEMA officials ordered “operational adjustments” that pulled agents away from door-to-door outreach because of threats to its staff, and one man in Rutherford County was arrested on Oct. 12 because of threats against FEMA workers.
Local and state officials have been forced to issue public statements aimed at refuting the spiraling conspiracies. On Oct. 6, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper complained, ironically enough in a post on X, that “impacted areas have been the target of a relentless vortex of disinformation, dialed up by bad actors and platforms like X.”
The susceptibility to disinformation is understandable under the extreme circumstances. People in the region are scared and traumatized by what they have seen or experienced. “Be careful out there,” one Asheville resident says, joining a survey of the ruin along the French Broad River. “People are living outside their bodies.”
Mr. Boeckermann says his strategy has been to simply to hear people out when they share, in anxiety and worry, the rumors or stories they have picked up. He then gently redirects them to the resources they need while advising as gently as he can that the reports they are hearing or reading on social media or through email and text messages are almost always completely not true.
‘Book learning’ to the real world in disaster response
Gerard Carter, the director of Catholic Charities for the Diocese of Charlotte, is one of the first beneficiaries, if one could so be described, of C.C.U.S.A.’s new emphasis on disaster preparation and response. Mr. Carter is coordinating the local response to Helene. But he is not on his own. He reports that “five or six different Catholic Charities [offices] from around the country…are sending up supplies as we speak.”
And he is grateful to have the national office on standby to assist. “We’ve gone to all the [disaster prep] trainings,” he says. “We have all the book knowledge.” But it has been 25 years since Charlotte faced a disaster like Helene. The national expertise has been critically important, he says, especially as Charlotte Catholic Charities confronts the long-term challenges ahead.
A little over a week after the storm, his staff is preparing to begin case management of the crisis, individualized assistance to help Helene’s victims through the federal and state paperwork labyrinth for the disaster relief they may be eligible for and job and housing assistance they will need. That transition, he says, “would be exceptionally difficult if Catholic Charities USA didn’t have the professional preparation and skills” to assist his local office.
Adding a large-scale disaster response to its catalog of capabilities is not as hard a stretch as it might seem, Ms. Burgo says. Catholic Charities offices are known for their work in providing housing and nutrition support, managing refugee resettlement and coordinating care for immigrants and young people.
“All those services that a Catholic Charities agency has can translate into disaster work,” Ms. Burgo points out. Local offices just need the training to learn how to “scale up” during an emergency and “pivot to a disaster response.”
Big natural disasters like Helene garner all the headlines but they come once or twice a year, Ms. Burgo says. C.C.U.S.A. also responds to scores of smaller-scale natural and human-made disasters—anything from tornadoes and hurricanes to industrial disasters and school shootings. Her office is currently managing “115 open disasters,” Ms. Burgo says.
They may not be to the scale of a major storm, “but to the people that they happen to, [they are] an absolute catastrophe, so it doesn’t matter the size—what matters is the attention that you give them to help them feel like they’re going to get through this; they’re going to make progress and they’re going to be okay at the other end of it.”
Find out how to help at Catholic Charities USA.
To file a disaster claim, visit FEMA’s disasterassistance.gov.
Chief Correspondent Kevin Clarke joined a team from Catholic Charities USA assessing needs in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene on Oct. 9. Read ‘Once the flood waters recede, Catholic Charities will still be there’: Rebuilding after Hurricane Helene.’
