After Helene created a news blackout, here’s what my Asheville neighbors and I did

By Susanne Paola Antonetta, CNN

Asheville, North Carolina (CNN) — On the night Helene arrived, my husband, Bruce, and I half-slept through the pounding rain and raging wind and the alerts blasting from our smartphones: trees down and catastrophic flooding across much of Asheville.

By the morning of September 28, the alerts had silenced — but not because the worst was over. Our phones were dead.

Just a half-mile below our street, the French Broad River crested at nearly 25 feet. So much rain left it dark and rushing; it looked like boiling chocolate. The French Broad should be a foot and a half high, lazy and blue. As far as I can tell, the river has not reached this height in recorded history.

The night before Helene hit, I knew that some Swifties thought Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce had broken up. (They had not.)

The next day I wasn’t sure how much of my town still existed.

“Go to the river,” our neighbor Ron, the first person we see when we leave the house, tells us. We do.

The swollen river seems to have spread 30 or 40 feet beyond its previous bounds, now lapping at a spot just beside a railroad track. The old bank shows as a line of trees that appear to grow out of the middle of the water. Long white lines ride atop the waves. At first, I think they’re elongated whitecaps, then fence posts. They’re PVC pipes, someone tells us. An entire warehouse of plastic pipe has been swept away.

How to get information after the storm

For days all we have is radio and only our cars for listening — cars that run on now-unattainable gas and electricity. Blue Ridge Public Radio staffers are heroic, broadcasting the names of the missing and where to get supplies.

They also read the public announcements given to them by government officials and public agencies, all of which tell us, maddeningly, to go to this or that website for updates. We still have no running water.

In this world — unknown beyond what’s visible — information becomes its own economy. What’s more, it’s a gift. Our neighbor Kevin runs over the next day to tell us Charlotte has food, power and water. Many routes out of Asheville have closed due to flooding, downed trees and power lines, mudslides. He tells us what roads will get us there.

In one attempt to drive east to Charlotte, Bruce and I stop at a handwritten sign along a county road: “Road Closed, Mud Slides.” Below that is an even more scrawled, “Pray for Us?” It’s at the site of an organic farm we know well from our farmers market. The question mark is theirs.

We turn around and head back home to Asheville.

For the next few days, the river is the news, but it’s also the place to gather to hear the news, a town square. People gather at the river’s edge and share information: “I’ve heard there’s no signal except downtown at the library.” “I’ve heard don’t drink the water.” “I’ve heard the River Arts District is gone.”

We finally do, on September 29, make it to Charlotte, a seven-hour drive to go 120 miles. Our phone signal comes back on the way, and we can finally let friends and family know we’re safe.

After two nights in a Charlotte hotel, we fill our hatchback with supplies to take back to the Asheville food banks. At every stop, people who hear what we’re doing offer to contribute money and food. An older man in jeans and worn flannel offers to buy anything we can fit into our car. Our car is already full.

When we arrive at our house, an enormous white tractor trailer has washed up down the street from us, cab down and somehow still pristine.

Who is on your team?

I moved to this place along the river six months ago from coastal Washington state. Bruce and I didn’t know that many people when the storm hit. Soon after the storm, we know nearly everyone remaining, everyone who hasn’t left to shelter elsewhere.

Our community has always had an active Discord group. Through our chats, I had a sense of most of my neighbors before the storm, even if I hadn’t met them. I knew who lived where, who had various kinds of expertise.

After the storm, it quickly became OK to knock on doors or stop cars driving along the streets to ask where they’d been and what they’d seen. A prior sense of each other, and the river, along with our newer, in-person encounters, kept us tethered.

I thought of the work of author Athena Aktipis, who wrote in her book, “A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly Serious Guide to Surviving Our Wild Times,” that many of us will face a “zombie apocalypse”-level disaster in our lifetimes. She said we’d better have our “Z team” — friends and neighbors that can help — ahead of time. Our Discord group gave us a preassembled Z team.

How social media helped beforehand

While some social media has made it harder for people to communicate in real life, my neighbors used our Discord group as a trust-fall exercise before we actually needed real world help.

There’s an assumption built into online discourse — that it’s a curated group and that we understand each other in that space. But we’re already a curated group with things in common — we’re human, with the same needs for shelter, food, information, safety and connection. Our hive minds exist in the real world, attached to real bodies.

I don’t know what’s next for my husband and me and our two cats. We have power now but no water. Even the trickle of contaminated water we had a few days ago, which we could treat, is gone. We are relying on bottled water, a finite resource, for drinking and cooking. And rainwater, ironically another finite resource now, for toilets.

Our Discord channel is back, but it’s changed.

It once had channels for things like restaurant recommendations and event announcements.

Now it has channels for news about water, outages and where to volunteer. One neighbor named Alison offers on Discord to meet in person to share ways to survive without running water. Maybe this strange blend of the virtual and the preindustrial is where we’re headed now.

My neighbor Creighton Hoke tells me our Discord started because the community needed a “digital version of itself that lives next to the physical.” Maybe it’s time to consciously bring our digital people skills — that trust in our ability to speak and ask and value each other’s knowledge — back to the real world. I think I’ll meet Alison by the river.

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