A Hurricane Survivor Studies the Response in North Carolina

When Hurricane Helene struck Merry Fitzpatrick’s hometown of Asheville, N.C., at the end of September, her life was upended.

Fitzpatrick, a researcher at the Feinstein International Center, spent the following days hauling drinking water in buckets, cooking on a camp stove, helping relatives and neighbors clear out flooded stores and workshops, and trying to find out what was going on.

This reality was totally new—but also strangely familiar to Fitzpatrick. She was a full-time humanitarian worker for 20 years, responding to disasters in countries such as Sudan. At the Feinstein International Center, which is housed at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, she studies the impact of humanitarian disasters, among other topics.

“As I went through this experience, I was applying a lot of different concepts and practices in my mind and evaluating authorities’ actions by my understanding of international humanitarian response,” Fitzpatrick said. 

Now Fitzpatrick is using a $10,000 Tufts Springboard grant to interview a broad range of about 200 of her fellow locals from all walks of life—some in the city of Asheville, others in more remote rural communities and small towns that were hit hard—about their experiences during and after the storm, in the hopes of informing both international and domestic responses to future disasters. She’ll also interview up to 100 local government officials or community organizations who had to make decisions and improvise in the face of an unprecedented situation.

“I want to document what’s happening, partly for research and partly for historical purposes—and I want to capture this as people are experiencing it,” Fitzpatrick said.

Here, she talks with Tufts Now about what inspired her research and what she hopes to discover.

What was it like to get hit by that hurricane?

The storm as we think of it started on Wednesday afternoon with a really heavy downpour. It rained through Thursday and caused flooding before Helene hit that Friday morning. That’s when wind started blowing and whistling around my house. I called my brother and he said he was lying in bed, hearing the trees fall around him. Between wind over 100 mph and ground saturated with water, trees were falling everywhere, across roads, on houses, on power lines, on everything. Mountain sides slid into valleys; rivers and creeks rose to levels they had never before reached.

After the wind died down and the rain stopped, suddenly the sun came out and everybody came out of their houses to see what the damage was. Everybody's out with their chainsaws. And neighbors you never spoke to, you are talking to. We're checking on each other, trying to figure out what's going on.

That first day and Saturday, was just shock. The river was higher than we’d ever seen it. There's a lot of outlying communities next to rivers or large creeks, and you're wondering, are they still there? The cell towers were down, so there was no communication. And we couldn't see the news. We had to try to find out everything firsthand. 

The water stopped. No electricity. There was no gasoline—there was no power to pump the gas. Most stores weren’t open, and everything was cash only at the few that were. And all the highways out of Asheville were cut. So for days, there was no way to get assistance in except on these small, winding roads, which were also largely blocked. 

My mom’s an antique dealer, and her booth was in a mall next to the Swannanoa River. The mountain came down on the back of it, and the river came in the front. Everything in there was lifted and churned about. Everything was this stench of mud and destruction.

Sunday was just grief, sadness at what's lost. And then Monday you're starting to say, OK, this is our new reality, and trying to work things out. By then, the authorities had cleared one of the highways into the city and help started to trickle in. 

How did you cope?

At first, everyone just shared what they had on-hand. Neighbors brought out their chainsaws and buckets and shovels to help each other. Eventually, there were these distribution points for food and water, and even blankets and cleaning supplies, but the buses weren't running, so you couldn’t easily get assistance if you didn’t have a car.

At first it was a scramble for water. I have some rain barrels, so I could use that water for washing and flushing and shared it with my neighbors. But people from all over the region were also using their own funds and equipment to bring what help they could. I met one guy from Chambersburg, Va., who volunteered to fill his tanker with water and drive the back mountain roads to get down here. He even brought buckets. So anyone could go there and fill up their buckets with water for free. I put some bleach in that, and that's what I was drinking at first. 

Then after five or six days, the churches were distributing water, and the government centers started up. I have a friend in a town about an hour away, and once a week I was going there to fill up my buckets with drinking water and get a shower. My shoulders have really developed from carrying those buckets. 

One of the priorities was connecting the gas stations to power. A lot of people are depending on gas for generators and medical equipment. You'd hear from somebody that such-and-such gas station is open. So you'd rush down there, and there's this huge line, and then you get up to the front and there's no gas. It's all run out.

The restaurants still couldn't open because there was no water. But some of them had gas, so they were just cooking food and giving it to people. They weren’t charging, partly because of permit issues. Anybody could just walk up and have a free hot meal. I did that once. I had been helping somebody clear out their workshop that had been flooded, and I was too tired to try to try to cook something on my camp stove. So I stopped and I got a hot meal. I was so grateful for the gift of that meal—it felt like a sort of social healing.

When the grocery stores did open, they didn't have much inventory—the main warehouse supplying our largest local grocery chain had been flooded. Once, before the stores started opening, I saw a full parking lot in front of a grocery store, but it turned out the store was still closed—it was just because people could get a connection there to text. I took the opportunity to contact some family that hadn’t heard from me in days.

At some point, officials started doing daily briefings on the radio. But some people didn’t have a radio. Or their only radio was in their car and they didn't have gas for the car. And when you did hear the briefings, at first they wouldn't give the full information. They would tell you to go to some website. And it's like, I'm listening to you on the radio because I have no other means of communication. So that was frustrating, but they caught on and quit doing that. After a week or so, little neighborhoods might set up a Starlink if someone happened to have one, and they're like, OK, we have water to share, we have food, and we have information. We have internet. So you could go there and you could send and receive texts at least.

What was your big takeaway from the experience?

What you saw all over was people getting together and helping each other, sharing what they had—information, food, water, helping people cut up trees, helping people with whatever they needed.

We have this main street, Patton Ave., with three lanes of traffic in each direction and lots of stoplights. Usually it’s a madhouse—it’s NASCAR going up and down with people cutting you off. But when the power was out, traffic lights didn’t work. People were driving slow. They would stop and cooperate. So many people were saying, “It’s easier to drive down Patton Avenue now without the traffic lights.”

Whole neighborhoods were coming together. A lot of people have said that if it weren't for the destruction, this has been an amazing experience because of how people have bonded together, how people have cooperated.

North Carolina is a battleground state in the election. It really is 50-50, and we’re all mixed in here, Democrats and Republicans. But for four or five days, we had no information from the outside and we didn't even think about the election. It was just this spirit of people helping people. It was seeing people again as just people and what their needs are, and sharing the pain and the losses that we've had. And in our own state government, the Republicans and the Democrats were working together just to meet the needs.

How do things stand now in the Asheville area?

Most areas have water and power now, though we still can’t drink the water. Most of the major roads are open except for the ones connecting us north and west. Those probably won’t open until March or even September of next year. Two interstate highways cut; bridges over big valleys and sections of the road are gone. So that cuts us off somewhat.

We had a curfew of 7:30 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. to reduce the burden on cops, because of potential looting and manning roadblocks for damaged bridges and roads. That curfew has been reduced now to 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.

The schools opened just this week on a two-hour delay to accommodate detours the school busees have to take. Some of the buildings are damaged, and the county water system is so damaged that they're actually drilling some wells at some of the schools. 

Sections of the city are devastated; some neighborhoods are just gone. The city's economy is going to take years to recover. Some things like my mom's business will never recover. 

What do you hope to learn from the study?

I want to learn about people’s individual experiences here where we have so many resources, in comparison to very poor countries where I normally work. How did they stay alive as the waters rose? How did they physically cope and get their needs met afterward? Where did they get their water, their food, their information? What were their needs that they didn't expect? What were some things they did to help others? And emotionally, how did they deal with those first stages of the disaster and the shock of it? How did they move into accepting the new reality and recovering and figuring out where to go from here?

I also want to look at how the local government shifted from normally maintaining the population to suddenly trying to rescue them and keep them alive without our normal infrastructure. One thing I noticed was that nobody was asking people, “What do you need?” There were just assumptions. The things the government and volunteers were supplying—what did they base that on? Who did they leave out?

For both individual and government response: What are the parallels and contrasts to a disaster like those in Sudan or Congo? What can we learn from the way people cope with disasters in poor countries, where they are more used to their governments and infrastructure being overwhelmed than we are? What can we learn from local response that could inform and support international response? 

The appetite for information and communication—we don't take that into nearly enough consideration in the international responses.

On the other hand, I think the international side of emergency response is better at learning from the population what they want and need, which maybe the domestic side can learn from. Ultimately, I want to better inform domestic efforts as we're getting more and more of these massive disasters that take a very complicated, coordinated response. 

Finally, documenting what’s happening here can not only inform disaster plans going forward, but it can also be something historic that the students can read and understand. In the history of Asheville, it's going to be before the storm and after the storm. This is going to change the culture we had, and it’s important to understand the impact of the flood, and how people drew together and responded.