Climate disaster is coming to Asheville

Asheville, North Carolina, a city known for hiking, bachelorette parties and craft beer, was once touted as a place safe from climate disaster — a “climate haven,” although scientists shun that term. Although this wasn't the main reason my family moved there a year ago, it definitely made us feel confident in our choice.

Before Asheville, we lived in Northern California, a region ravaged by wildfires, and in Dallas, Texas, which — in addition to the increasingly hostile politics of the statewide GOP — has been hit in recent years by back-to-back winter storms that left many people without power for weeks, Heat or water. We immediately loved Asheville and bought a small, tree-shaded house in Biltmore Forest, a small community of about 1,500 people south of Asheville.

Last Friday morning, my twelve-year-old daughter and I sat together in my bedroom and watched the trees around us fall like dominoes as the rain poured down. Across the street, the wind tossed a row of pine trees southward like toothpicks. A huge white oak tree, uprooted by the storm, fell across the porch and I screamed. The roots looked completely bare, the soil was permanently changed.

When we emerged, bleary-eyed as if from a shipwreck, the yard was a heap of branches, leaves and twigs with berries and acorns still hanging from them. Our front door was blocked by tangled branches. Typically, October in Asheville is full of “leaf peepers,” the tourists who come for the red, orange and gold. What else would they or anyone else be left to see?

Although Asheville was five hundred miles from where Hurricane Helene made landfall, the area quickly became the epicenter of a regional crisis. In many parts of the area, residents watched as the floodwaters washed away their cars and houses. Mudslides buried entire highways. The rubble is devastating. According to latest estimates, about two thousand people are still missing in Buncombe County, which includes Asheville and the surrounding area, and more than seventy are presumed dead.

The damage radius is far-reaching. Asheville is an important service hub for people in Western North Carolina. Roads in the east and west of the city have become impassable with water, mud and debris, making it difficult for people to get and go. The United States Postal Service processes all mail to the more rural parts of the state through Greenville, an hour south of Asheville. Mission Hospital, the largest hospital in Asheville, briefly ran out of food and lacked water for doctors to wash their hands.

Here in Biltmore Forest, the story of Hurricane Helene is told through the trees. The community is just three square miles but is home to tens of thousands of trees, a legacy of the 125,000-acre Biltmore Estate for which the tiny community is named. Construction of the estate began in 1889. George Washington Vanderbilt II, its founder, commissioned Frederick Law Olmsted, the creator of Central Park, to design many of its gardens. Vanderbilt's vision was that the Biltmore Estate would be a sustainable agricultural utopia. Some local historians claim it was the first large-scale managed forest.

After Vanderbilt's death following an appendectomy at age fifty-one, much of Biltmore was sold to the United States to create Pisgah National Forest, one of the first national parks east of the Mississippi. Approximately fifteen hundred acres were sold to create Biltmore Forest. If there was a place that offered respite from extreme weather conditions or even a sense that people had strayed far from the beauty of nature, this was it. One of the founders, Hiden Ramsey, described the church as being for people of “moderate means.” (Now the average income in Biltmore Forest is over $150,000 – not quite Vanderbilt money, but higher than Asheville as a whole.) “Not a tree was felled and not a bush was disturbed until the atmosphere in the community subsided “The situation was set and the entire development plan was worked out down to the smallest detail,” Ramsey continued. Residents are not allowed to remove a tree without permission from the city, and even then the tree usually must be replaced. The narrow streets are in the shade, which means the average temperature remains a good ten degrees cooler than in much of the city of Asheville. Bears, deer and wild turkeys roam freely and feed on the bounty provided by the lush foliage.

The trees we loved so much became our enemies after the storm. We had to wriggle and climb through them to get out of the house. Our neighbors rallied and joined the initial effort to ensure people were safe and unharmed. My husband and I teamed up with City Manager Jonathan Kanipe to locate an elderly, very independent neighbor who lived in a homemade stone and wood cabin with her small dog. When we found her, she wasn't exactly thrilled about the company. She came with us and then decided to go home and wait out the reconstruction project alone.

I returned to speak with Kanipe in his small office as he took phone calls and tried to figure out where to put all the rubble. Kanipe, a tall, soft-spoken man, has been city manager for more than a decade. He estimated that the city had lost about five thousand trees, equivalent to about 60 cubic acres or a football field 56 feet high. In the first seventy-two hours of the storm, he and local police chief Chris Beddingfield, among others, conducted at least forty welfare checks, requests that largely came from people outside the city seeking information about their relatives. They hardly slept in their offices.

Many people moving to the region cite avoiding the effects of climate change as a key attraction, according to Kanipe. But this storm seemed to prove otherwise. “There is no doubt that we can no longer accurately estimate the impacts of climate change, no matter where we are,” he said. One reason for the loss of so many trees, including hundred-year-old oaks that were completely uprooted, including the surrounding soil, Kanipe explained, was the heavy rains in the days leading up to landfall by Hurricane Helene. (A large portion of the trees that fall during storms are evergreens, which are much easier to cut down and move.) But he added he didn't anticipate how the wind would increase. “If you had asked me the day before about the worst-case scenario,” he said, “it would be a hundred times worse. It’s overwhelming.”

Biltmore Forest still lacks cell service, drinking water and electricity. School operations were suspended indefinitely. Therefore, citizens rely on the oldest form of communication: the town square. From daylight to dusk, residents stroll through the narrow streets, now brighter thanks to the loss of treetops. They talk about the other disasters that have struck Asheville: the blizzard of 1993 and Tropical Storms Irene and Frances (2011 and 2004, respectively), the latter of which caused the Swannanoa River to flow through the working-class town of Swannanoa. to reach about twenty feet. But none were as bad as Hurricane Helene. This time the river rose to more than twelve meters in some places and flooded homes and businesses. Many people in Swannanoa have completely lost their homes.

Of course, the Town Square method is susceptible to its own form of misinformation. On Sunday, Biltmore Forest officials sent a text message to residents to dispel rumors. “Rumors about people looting houses in BF are untrue,” they wrote. “Police respond to calls and have not identified any instances of looting.” The city borrowed a handful of officers from the Raleigh area, which was less affected than western North Carolina, and used them primarily for welfare checks and as additional night police . I asked Beddingfield, the local police chief, about the rumors while he drank a Monster energy drink. He said most of the concerns involve people from “outside the neighborhood.”

In other parts of Asheville, many had more pressing concerns due to the existing lack of resources and infrastructure. A bookstore in West Asheville posted on Facebook about the “ongoing crisis caused by the collapse of infrastructure and the profound failure of capitalism to value and sustain life.” Employees began holding an open community meeting every afternoon where individuals hand-wrote news that they posted in shop windows: about water and food distribution, about available Wi-Fi, and about closed roads. One person wrote, “EMS has stopped health checks,” although, like many rumors around town, it's hard to verify.

My family went to deliver diapers to a group of a few dozen people gathered in a parking lot in Weaverville, a town north of Asheville that is home to more working-class residents who work for sawing and hauling to places like Biltmore Forest would drive and fall leaves. Men, women and children gathered and sat on the steps outside a treatment center for people with substance use disorders, some of whom were overdue for their doses. A pickup truck pulled up, takeout groceries packed in black bags piled in the back. A man waiting outside remarked that the storm had “humbled people.”

In the immediate aftermath of the storm, no one was able to leave or leave the Biltmore Forest as all roads were blocked by fallen trees, but like most people, I was preoccupied with my own lack of freedom. Our driveway was blocked by two huge oak trees. A neighbor helped cut us free with a chainsaw. He told his kindergarten-aged son to count the rings in the tree, explaining that each one was a year. “Eighty!” shouted the boy. ♦