When morning breaks in the temperate rainforest surrounding Asheville, North Carolina, the vivid colors are captivating. Seeing the arboreal spectrum of deep green and orange bathed in golden light is enough to make me forget that I’m in a disaster zone—until I drive past a collapsed bridge, uprooted trees or a chest-high pile of debris on the side of the road. Amid the gorgeous autumn woods, the signs of destruction are a reminder of the work left to do, while the people who have raised their families and built neighborhoods together are a reminder of why we do the work.
When I visited western North Carolina to document stories of the communities we served during our response to Hurricane Helene, nearly everyone I spoke with described the people of Asheville and the surrounding areas of Buncombe County as resilient. International Medical Corps’ response to Helene, spanning from Florida to Tennessee, was our largest humanitarian action in the United States since the outbreak of COVID-19—and we were in good company.
“Our community is so engaged,” says Dr. Erika Czerwinski, who provided mental health services as an International Medical Corps volunteer during our response to Helene. “People are so hands-on here that I’m not worried about Asheville. We’re a grass-rootsy, pot-lucky, connected community, and we’ll continue to be that way.”
“This community has been just unbelievable,” says Katherine Whittaker, who lost her home when Hurricane Helene flooded her neighborhood. “Everyone wanted to get on the front lines, with the first responders saying, ‘We’re not going to sit back and watch you do this. We want to get down there and help you. This is our home.’”
For Katherine, the damage was immense—but so was the inspiration she drew from seeing the response to the disaster. When I spoke with her at one of the shelters where our teams provided care, she was scheduled for discharge that day. It had been exhausting for the lifelong resident of Buncombe County. During her stay at the shelter, she learned she would need an oxygen tank to breathe for the rest of her life. Despite this, Katherine was determined to speak with me in an on-camera interview.
“Everybody pulling together to try to bring this community back up to where it should be—it’s just been tremendous,” she says, with remarkable strength in her voice. “You wake up one day in the hospital and see the news about the outpouring of resources, coming down here. It was very reassuring.”
And, for many people in the Asheville area, the good news was a much-needed change.
When Helene hit North Carolina, it obliterated infrastructure, testing the resilience of the state’s people and built environment. In Asheville, one of the most populated cities in Helene’s destructive path, power was unavailable citywide for days. Potable water was unavailable until November 19—more than 50 days after the storm hit. Hundreds in North Carolina are still without power or regular internet access.
Everyone Has a Plan Until a Hurricane Crashes Into Your Town
Dr. Jennifer Mullendore is the Medical Director for Buncombe County Health and Human Services. We spoke about Helene and the future of Buncombe County in the hotel that was serving as the emergency operations center for the Helene response. After a long day in a string of long days, Dr. Mullendore was probably ready to go home and be with her family, but she met with me anyway, a show of the goodwill and dedication that kept the county’s response running despite its challenges.
“Helene was more devastating than anything any of us alive have ever seen in this area,” Mullendore explains. “And while we have preparedness plans—this was so much more than we had ever planned for. And we didn’t have the resources we needed locally to respond in the full capacity that needed to be.”
Even the resources and plans that were in place, Helene made unworkable.
“Some of the shelter locations that we had planned on using were no longer considered safe,” Mullendore says. “So, on the fly, we had to set up shelters in different locations, and some people had to move from one shelter to another to another, just because the level of flooding was so dramatic.”
The enormous stress that this kind of instability inflicts on a person can be near-debilitating—for people who lost their homes to Helene, and especially for people who were already living on the streets or in transitional housing.
With the devastation, however, came fuller access to aid.
“People who were already living in a vulnerable state—struggling to get enough food, to get their diabetic medication, to get into a substance or rehab program—suddenly had access to more resources in the midst of this crisis,” says Czerwinski. “International Medical Corps and other NGOs were right here, so people had even more support.” Dr. Czerwinski’s ability to see the silver lining of this dark cloud is evidence of the kind of shrewd optimism—a focus on what you can control and how you can respond when things are beyond your control—that can help drive efforts to rebuild.
The Community Without Imagination Has No Wings
When I spoke with Dr. William Scott Bennet at one of the shelters where our volunteers were providing care, he told me that some people were in such a dysregulated, low mood that they felt they deserved their burdens, if not worse. Very few people with that mindset are willing to put in the work necessary to recover mentally, reconnect with their community and rebuild their lives.
Curtis Barnes, a Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Consultant with International Medical Corps, coordinated our behavioral health response. He tells me that to reach someone experiencing that level of crisis, you must first deal with the psychological distress. Czerwinski calls the process “down-regulation.”
Czerwinski describes one woman who, before Helene, had been admitted into a rehab facility in a neighboring state. The woman was despondent, and “thought that she would lose her place at the rehab facility,” Czerwinski explains. “So, this woman starts going down a ‘spiral of worry.’ We needed to stabilize her mood enough so she could realize that she could still get to the rehab facility. After that, another organization was able to get her transportation services, so she could get to rehab and receive the treatment she needed.
“If International Medical Corps hadn’t been there,” Czerwinski says, “She wouldn’t have had the medical stabilization to down-regulate her system enough to then think clearly about the resource that was already set up for her.”
People need humanitarian aid after a disaster, of course. But they also deserve services that help them make the most of that humanitarian aid—to move them from relief to self-reliance.
“I think that we need to reflect on what happened and recognize that the world is changing,” says Mullendore, looking as if she is articulating something she has understood for a while, but may only now be saying for the first time. “This kind of disaster may become more common. So, we need to be real about how we look at where we build, and where people are able to live and how we set up our communities, to be more resilient in this changing world. I think we’re still coming to grips with that. We can’t go back to how things were before.”
It’s an important thought, even if it is difficult, and the implications are daunting. But the spirit of people in Asheville and the responders who showed up to help during the most difficult time of their lives shows that they have the grit and resilience to recover, rebuild and ready themselves for the next emergency. This really is the point of humanitarian disaster response: that even though the incredible power of nature is indifferent to humanity, we are a force of nature in our own right, and we are up to the challenge.
Learn more about our response to Helene and donate to support our response.