Climate Catastrophe Comes to Asheville

Asheville, North Carolina, a town known for hiking, bachelorette parties, and craft beer, was once touted as a place that would be safe from climate disaster—a " climate haven ," though scientists eschew that term. Although that was not the main reason that my family moved there a year ago, it certainly made us feel secure in our choice.

Before Asheville, we lived in Northern California, a region besieged by wildfires, and Dallas, Texas, which—in addition to the increasingly hostile politics of the statewide G.O.P.—was struck in recent years by back-to-back winter storms, leaving many without power, heat, or water for weeks. We loved Asheville immediately and bought a small tree-shaded house in Biltmore Forest, a small township of about fifteen hundred people in southern Asheville.

Last Friday morning, my twelve-year-old daughter and I huddled in my bedroom and watched trees fall like dominoes around us as the rain poured. Across the street, the wind tossed a series of pines to the south like so many toothpicks. A giant white oak, uprooted by the storm, fell across the front porch, and I screamed. The roots looked stark naked, the ground permanently altered.

When we emerged, bleary-eyed as if from a shipwreck, the yard was a pile of limbs, leaves, and twigs with still-clinging berries and acorns. Our front door was barred by tangled branches. Normally, October in Asheville is busy with "leaf peepers," the tourists who come for the red, orange, and gold. What would be left for them, or anyone, to see?

Even though Asheville was five hundred miles from where Hurricane Helene made landfall, the area quickly became the epicenter of a regional crisis. In much of the area, residents watched floodwater wash away their cars and homes. Mudslides buried entire highways. The wreckage is devastating. At last estimate, in Buncombe County, which contains Asheville and the surrounding area, some two thousand people are still missing, and more than seventy are confirmed dead.

The radius of the harm reverberates widely. Asheville is a major hub of services for people living in western North Carolina. Roads to the east and west of the city have been rendered impassable by water, mud, and debris, so it is hard for people to come and go. The United States Postal Service processes all mail to the more rural parts of the state through Greenville, an hour south from Asheville. Mission Hospital, which is Asheville's largest hospital, briefly ran out of food and lacked water for doctors to wash their hands.

Here in Biltmore Forest, the story of Hurricane Helene is being told through the trees. The township is only three square miles but contains tens of thousands of trees, an inheritance from the hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand-acre Biltmore Estate, from which the tiny township gets its name. Construction began on the estate in 1889. George Washington Vanderbilt II, its founder, hired 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 agrarian utopia. Some local historians claim it as the first large-scale managed forest.

Following Vanderbilt's death, after an appendectomy, at the age of 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; about fifteen hundred acres were sold off to create Biltmore Forest. If any place provided a respite from extreme weather or even the sense that humans had strayed far from nature's beauty, it was here. One of the founders, Hiden Ramsey, described the township as being for those of "moderate means." (Now the median income in Biltmore Forest is over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars—not quite Vanderbilt money, but higher than that of Asheville as a whole.) "Not a tree was felled nor a bush disturbed until the atmosphere of the community had been determined and the whole plan of development had been worked out in the minutest detail," Ramsey continued. Residents cannot remove a tree without permission from the city, and, even then, the tree typically must be replaced. The narrow roads are shaded, keeping the average temperature a good ten degrees cooler than much of urban Asheville. Bears, deer, and wild turkeys roam free, feeding themselves on the plenty provided by ample foliage.

The trees we loved so much became our enemy after the storm. We had to wriggle and climb through them to leave the house. Our neighbors gathered and joined initial efforts to insure that people were safe and uninjured. My husband and I teamed up with the town manager, Jonathan Kanipe, to locate an elderly, fiercely independent neighbor who lived with her small dog in a homemade cabin of stone and lumber. When we found her, she wasn't thrilled to have company. She came with us, and then decided to go home and wait out the project of rebuilding alone.

I returned to talk to Kanipe in his small office while he fielded phone calls and tried to figure out where to move all the debris. Kanipe, a tall and soft-spoken man, has been the town manager for more than ten years. He estimated that the town had lost around five thousand trees, which amounted to around sixty cubic acres or one football field, fifty-six feet high. In the first seventy-two hours of the storm, he and the local police chief, Chris Beddingfield, among others, conducted at least forty welfare checks, requests that mostly came from people outside of town who were seeking information on their relatives. They slept, barely, in their offices.

Many people who move to the region, Kanipe said, name avoiding the effects of climate change as a main draw. But this storm seemed to prove the opposite. "There's no doubt that we can no longer accurately estimate the impact of climate change wherever we are," he said. One reason for the loss of so many trees, including hundred-year-old oak trees that were completely uprooted, surrounding soil and all, Kanipe explained, was the substantial rainfall in the days preceding Hurricane Helene's landfall. (A large proportion of the trees that fall in storms are evergreens, which are much easier to cut and move.) But, he added, he had not accounted for how the wind would increase. "If you'd asked me the day before the worst possible scenario," he said, "this is a hundred times worse. It's overwhelming."

Biltmore Forest still lacks cell service, potable water, and power. School has been indefinitely suspended. As a result, denizens rely upon the oldest form of communication: the town square. From daylight until dusk, residents walk around the narrow streets, now brighter owing to the loss of tree canopy. They talk about the other disasters that have befallen Asheville: the 1993 blizzard and the tropical storms Irene and Frances (in 2011 and 2004, respectively), the latter of which caused the Swannanoa River, which flows through the working-class town of Swannanoa, to rise to around twenty feet. But none have been quite as bad as Hurricane Helene. This time, the river rose in some places to more than forty feet, subsuming residences and businesses. Many people in Swannanoa have lost their homes completely.

Of course, the town-square method is prone to its own form of misinformation. On Sunday, Biltmore Forest officials sent a text blitz to residents to dispel rumors. "Rumors about people looting homes in BF are untrue," they wrote. "The PD is responding to calls and have found no instances of looting." The town borrowed a handful of officers from the Raleigh area, which was less dramatically affected than western North Carolina, and largely put them to work doing welfare checks and acting as additional nighttime police. I asked Beddingfield, the local police chief, about the rumors as he swigged a Monster Energy drink. He said that most of the concerns were about people from "outside the neighborhood."

In other parts of Asheville, many had more pressing concerns brought about by an existing lack of resources and infrastructure. A bookstore in West Asheville posted on Facebook about the "ongoing crisis created by infrastructural collapse and the profound failure of capitalism to value and sustain life." The staff began holding an open community meeting every afternoon during which individuals handwrote updates to hang in the store windows: on water and food distribution, on available Wi-Fi, on roads that were closed. One person wrote, "EMS has discontinued wellness checks," though, like a lot of chatter in 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's home to more working-class residents, those who would be heading to places like Biltmore Forest to saw, haul, and leaf-blow. Men, women, and children gathered, sitting on the stoop outside of a treatment center for those with substance-use disorder, some of whom were overdue for their dose. A pickup truck stopped, with takeout food wrapped in black bags stacked in the back. A man waiting outside commented that the storm "made people humble."

In the immediate aftermath of the storm, no one could come or go from Biltmore Forest because 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 gigantic oak trees. A neighbor with a chainsaw helped to cut us free. He told his kindergarten-age son to count the rings in the tree, explaining that each one was a year. "Eighty!" the boy exclaimed.