Editor’s note: Laurel Kays is the Assistant Director of the Fire Learning Network (FLN) and lives in central North Carolina. In this blog, Laurel reflects upon the lasting impacts of Hurricane Helene, recovery systems, and the hope she finds in the stewardship and connection of FLN members.
This weekend will mark one year since Hurricane Helene raged through the Southern Appalachians, leaving over two hundred dead, billions of dollars in damage, and miles upon miles of damaged or washed-out roads, including a five month closure of Interstate 40 across the Tennessee-North Carolina border.
The history of how Interstate 40 came to run through the Pigeon River Gorge is surprisingly interesting. The highway is narrow, winding, often full of semi-trucks, and in my opinion dangerous on the best of days. Following Helene’s damage it was closed for 5 months. It will be 2028 before the North Carolina operates with the full four lanes of traffic. Source: NC DOT
These sorts of disasters change a place and its people, creeping into every facet of life big and small. The busy and economically critical fall tourist season ground to a halt, impacting businesses across the Southern Appalachians, even in areas left unscathed by the hurricane. People mourned loved ones, some of whose bodies have yet to be recovered. Friends living in the area shared that a midnight thunderstorm pushed them to near panic even months after Helene.
Image: Flooding in Asheville, North Carolina after Helene. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Fire is No Exception to Hurricane Impacts
Putting fire on the ground after hurricanes is always complicated, even more so in the complex topography of the Appalachians. In the areas hit worst by Helene, entire mountainsides of forest blew down. Creeks and streams that once held as firebreaks were crisscrossed by downed logs or even clogged by debris the storm drove down from higher elevations. Roads were washed out, bridges gone.
This all was even more critical given that Helene hit the region at the onset of the fall fire season. After the hurricane, conditions turned to drought and fires began to start. While larger downed trees were generally not yet available to burn, the impact of damaged firebreaks and closed roads presented profound challenges for those responding.
Spring only continued to pile on problems. The spring fire season was active, and some fire managers reported that larger fuels downed by Helene were becoming available to burn earlier than expected. Along with access issues, and staff already tired from hurricane response, fall fire season, and recovery efforts, this hampered efforts to begin restoring prescribed fire to stands where it was possible.
Recovery and Community Are Complex
There were some bright spots, at least to my eyes sitting a few hours east in Raleigh. People pulled together as they so often do. Immediately after the storm existing networks, including the Southern Blue Ridge FLN, ensured people had been checked on and safely accounted for even before cell service was fully restored. Fire practitioners broke out chainsaws to clear their neighborhood roads. Though the spring fire season included the Table Rock Fire (look for a video showcasing that story soon from the Fire Networks), years of partnership and planning enabled its collaborative management. At the Southern Blue Ridge FLN meeting in May, presenters expressed over and over how good it was to be together, how their relationships made recovery progress possible.
The impacts of Helene are primarily the story of those who live there and experienced the storm firsthand. I want to be clear about that. But like many who do not live there, the people and places impacted by Helene are precious to me.
They were at one point home – I had my first paid job in conservation as an intern in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and my first full-time job in fire in a Western North Carolina town called Waynesville. My sister also lives in Waynesville, and has for well over a decade.
The places heavily impacted by Helene are also places where I camped and hiked and biked with my family as a child. Places where my met-in-forestry-school parents gave me “pop dendro quizzes!” and taught me the Latin name of the plant they named me for, Kalmia latifolia. They are where I found important parts of myself living and hiking alone with my perfectly insane little dog. I love these places and their people. They are a part of me in a very real way.
Building Place-Based and People-Based Recovery
Disasters and the way they are perceived are funny things. There are so many disasters, with headlines all reachable at our fingertips. And with each there is an inevitable flurry of breaking news – stories about lives lost, homes gone, and what it will cost to reach some semblance of normalcy. Those stories eventually slow to a trickle, replaced by long-form investigative coverage of the inevitable ways our systems fail to help people, especially those most in need.
The country and world move on. It’s understandable to a degree – human brains simply cannot hold the stories of every cataclysm and the accompanying pain of so many people. But often this attention is also the way we can bend broken systems to temporarily care about our suffering. News coverage and the resulting pressure from the public, politicians, and advocacy organizations can provide housing or aid money that would otherwise have quietly been denied.
And so, when public attention shifts to the next emergency and the system stops bending, it’s easy to blame that shifting attention. Why don’t people care? Why don’t they remember how we’re struggling? Some of that is fair – it is fair to ask partners and friends to remember these things. Fair to expect extra flexibility and check-ins commensurate to the relationship.
But the real problem is our systems. It should not take widespread news coverage and angry calls from governors to house people who lost a home to the river. We could have systems that are built to show up and say “what do you need” rather than ones that require endless phone holds and documents that have gone up in flames or drowned underwater to get help.
I happen to love and be personally connected to the places impacted by Helene. The way the region is struggling is present in my mind because of that. But there are so many people also living through “once in a lifetime” disasters in places where I have no personal connection, where I am one of the people who has just moved on with the news cycle.
This is why systems change matters so much, why I am so proud to support the people who make up the Fire Learning Network. There will be more Helenes, more unprecedented disasters. Maybe someday it will even be my turn to watch surreal coverage of my city burned to the ground or flooded by a hurricane.
The way we practice hope knowing this reality is with each other, in relationships and pulling together not only to respond to incidents but to change our fundamental systems. The people I am privileged to work with not only do their best to help their neighbor who lost a home, but to build a world where that neighbor gets the help they need to recover without having to beg, borrow, and steal.
I am so grateful for everyone doing this work. I am grateful to be some small part of it. And knowing it is happening is some comfort in the face of seeing the struggles of a place I love dearly.