‘Voting means everything’: NC resident blasts government for incompetent Hurricane Helene response, says election matters now more than ever
Mere weeks after Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc on long-deprived residents of western North Carolina, two goals remain: survive and vote.
“Voting this year means more. It means everything,” a…
Mere weeks after Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc on long-deprived residents of western North Carolina, two goals remain: survive and vote.
“Voting this year means more. It means everything,” a longtime Asheville resident, who wishes to remain anonymous, told The Lion. “People are willing to hike, people are willing to catch rides, people are willing to do whatever they need to do to get to vote.
“There are people here who have lost everything, and the only thing they have left is their right to vote,” she continued. “We’ve had people [who] have lost their home, have camped out in tents [and] stayed long enough to vote.”
The resident, who has lived in Asheville her entire life and whose family owns a business in the area, explained why voting matters so much to her community’s future.
“We have realized that we cannot afford to be forgotten about,” she said. “The businesses, the people – the people who live here and work here – cannot afford to not have federal funding to build back. The storm did so much damage here that this will be something we deal with for years down the road.”
Though the source didn’t name names, it was clear who she thought North Carolinians were crawling over broken glass to vote for.
“A lot of people feel like one administration never really acknowledged us in the first place, so there’s not much hope that we’d be acknowledged moving forward,” she said. “Whereas we’re hoping the other administration won’t forget about us.
“We’ve actually had one of the administration’s boots on the ground here, and he said he wouldn’t forget about us.”
‘It was completely apocalyptic’
For those who aren’t intimately acquainted with the situation in North Carolina, it’s hard to comprehend the extent of damage. The source told The Lion that Asheville went to bed on a Thursday night with no major concerns about the coming storm. No one was told to evacuate.
“When we woke up Friday morning, our power was off, the water was off, we had no communication to the outside world,” she recalled. “We had no idea how bad it was.”
People were forced to drive on treacherous roads or hike on foot just to find out if loved ones had survived the hurricane.
“For the first four or five days, especially where we were, it was completely apocalyptic. It felt like we were on an island. There’s never been a time in my life where I felt like something out of a horror movie would be happening here, and it was.”
It took residents three whole days just to get news from their local radio station – which was only on air because the radio operators were trapped in their building and continued to broadcast.
While other counties managed to restore basic services, Asheville residents weren’t so fortunate. “Our water was completely out for three solid weeks,” the source told The Lion.
Residents survived by getting water from nearby rivers and creeks, or from outside donations. Though the city recently got the water running again, it’s not clean enough to be very useful.
“You pretty much cannot do anything with it besides flush toilets,” she said. “And we have not been told at all when that will be rectified, [when] we can actually have usable, drinkable water.
“They say it’s safe to shower in, but the water that’s coming out of our faucets at this very moment is brown, and it’s filled with so much chlorine that when it hits your sink, it bubbles up.”
The source said a lack of communication from the city of Asheville also has been discouraging.
“We were not informed really of anything. We were in the dark for, I would say, the first two weeks. The city of Asheville has a very high budget to keep things up and running and updated. And I’m aware that we got hit with a historical storm, but to be out of water for this long and then still not be told when it’s going to be rectified has been really disheartening [and] unsettling, because water is the one resource we have to have to live.
“It’s been gross the way they’ve handled the situation.”
And if the local government failed by an inch, the federal government did so by a mile.
‘We’re not a priority’
The federal government’s response was so sluggish it made North Carolinians feel forgotten.
“For our military to not get approvals to come in here until Oct. 6, when the storm hit [September 27], quite literally could have cost people their lives,” the source said. “There have been people that I’ve talked to here that viewed it as, ‘We’re taking care of everyone else around the world but not our own American people.’”
She doesn’t have a high opinion of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) response, either.
“[The FEMA camp has] running water, they have power, they have stable cell phone service, they have a washer and dryer. They’re living with better living services than we are. It just seems like we’re not a priority.”
In the aftermath of the hurricane, the source recalled going to various areas around Asheville – Swannanoa, Black Mountain, Hot Springs and Burnsville – without ever seeing a federal agent.
“For the first 10 days, 11 days … I don’t know if they were here and I didn’t see them, but I personally did not see anybody here. I did see local churches and local organizations hauling supplies in.”
In the end, it wasn’t either the local or federal government that got communication services up and running again.
“About 10 days in, we had Starlink dropped in here, and that was the first time in almost a week and a half that we had any communication services,” the source recalled. “From my understanding that came from Elon Musk.”
With an election looming North Carolinians know, now more than ever, that their votes will have a tremendous impact in the years to come.
“We have lost a lot of people, we’ve lost towns, we’ve lost businesses, we’ve lost secure infrastructure, we’ve lost a stable local economy for the foreseeable future,” she concluded. “[But we] aren’t lost on the privilege that we’re still alive.
“Voting this year, more than ever, is a privilege and it means more. It means everything.”