Neighbors as Lifelines: The Power of Mutual Aid in Asheville

Last year, researchers at Tulane University ranked Asheville, North Carolina, as one of the most “climate-resilient cities” in the United States – municipalities whose geographies, economies, and preparedness appeared to offer some refuge from wildfires, rising temperatures and torrential storms. Now, Asheville is reeling from the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which has unleashed catastrophic flooding across the region. Despite its status as a would-be “climate haven,” Asheville received enough rainfall in just a few days to fill Lake Tahoe, leaving bridges washed out, homes destroyed, and many people still unaccounted for. Preliminary studies suggest that human-caused warming significantly amplified the storm's impact. One analysis found that the extreme rainfall in Georgia and the Carolinas was made up to 20 times more likely by human-caused climate change, while another indicated that the storm was 20 percent wetter than it would have been otherwise. This disaster has swept away the myth of “climate havens” while highlighting a fundamental reality: in an era of crisis and catastrophe, we need each other to survive. This week, I spoke to several Asheville-based activists and organizers about the struggles they’re facing, and how mutual aid is enabling collective survival in storm-ravaged communities.

Precious Kindness

At least 133 people have been killed by Helene, with hundreds more unaccounted for. At least 57 people are confirmed dead in Buncombe County, where Asheville is located. Asheville resident Heather Laine Talley told me via text how she, her partner, and her seven-year-old daughter narrowly escaped the flood. “We are alive and grateful,” she said. Heather’s home was located near the Swannanoa River. The river, which is “typically too shallow to even kayak … rose to levels that felt oceanic.” Heather’s family scrambled for higher ground, scaling a slope behind their home. They found shelter from the storm when a neighbor they had never met opened their door and offered them refuge. “The kindnesses shown to me over the last 48 hours are the most precious I have ever known,” she said.

“Most houses on our street were lifted from the foundation and are entirely gone,” Heather said. “Our house is still standing, but there is no way to access it except by hiking in. Multiple neighbors are missing in the flood water.” 

“From what we experienced, there is no power throughout much of the city,” she explained. “Power poles are cracked into two. Transformers are shattered in roadways. There is no running water. Some people have found spotty cell phone access at specific locations.”

While major roadways were initially impassable, Heather and her family managed to evacuate by car on Monday. They are now staying with family in Gastonia, North Carolina. She is still in touch with friends and coworkers on the ground in Asheville. “One of our colleagues has no road access and is hiking out with a newborn and his three-year-old,” she said. “Other local friends are partnering with the National Guard and other emergency service workers to distribute water, diapers, and food, all while surviving this storm.” Collective survival has become a makeshift community project. “Families are piled together pooling resources and creating incredible webs of collaboration and support,” Heather said. “Everyone needs help.” 

Heather hopes that, amid a chaotic 24-hour news cycle, the public will not simply scroll past the story of Helene’s aftermath. “Please do not turn away from this crisis,” she said. “We need you. I have been in North Carolina for 26 years. It is home.”

“We Salvaged Everything We Could”

Beth Trigg is an Asheville resident whose home was not destroyed by the storm. “My house is at the edge of the area that became a river, at the edge of the real serious flooding of the Swannanoa River.” Beth’s house is situated at the top of a hill, which prevented her house from flooding. Beth was paying attention to the news, knowing that flash floods and other hazards might arise during the storm. She invited some of her neighbors, whose homes were built at lower elevations, to come stay with her. “At 1:00 am, we started getting these serious flood warnings. The emergency warnings were escalating.” At 5:00 am, Beth received a message that people in her area should evacuate. Knowing that her home was further above ground than most, and worried about dangerous road conditions, she chose to stay. “I had my two elderly parents who have health needs, my seven-year-old, my cat, and three other cats and two neighbors. I was like, ‘I think our best choice is to stay,’ which I actually am not sure of now. I really don't know,” she said.

“The roads got very bad very fast and some people died in their cars, but also some people died in their houses who couldn't get out fast enough,” she explained. About an hour later, she received a text from another neighbor whose home was being threatened by flood waters. The neighbor wanted to stay put, and use buckets to bail out any water that flooded his home. “I wrote back on the group text and was like, ‘Come here now.’” Beth’s neighbor didn’t want to leave his home, but she told him it was time to abandon the structure. “This is Serenity Prayer time,” she said. “Give up. Come here now. It's not worth losing your life." When water began to rise from her neighbor’s drains, he agreed to head to her place. He arrived soon after, and within the hour, his house was underwater. The homes of the neighbors who had spent the night in Beth’s guest room were also submerged by flood waters. One of those homes was ripped from its foundations “and thrown into the trees.”

After the rain stopped, Beth and her neighbors assessed the situation. “We started with our own basic needs,” she explained. “From there we were in touch with our neighbors right away, because we already knew them.” Beth, who is 51, has known most of her neighbors since her mid-twenties. “We've all been here in this community a really long time, and all of us, we've done direct action together. We've had parties together. We've just known each other for a really long time,” she said. “So, that was very helpful, to have a kernel of people who already have those relationships.”

“Then, we began building our own systems,” Trigg said. “We had people with specific skills. My sister lives within walking distance and so she and her husband, we all agreed to just stage here and everyone brought their food here.” Beth’s sister’s home quickly became a mutual aid hub. Neighbors whose homes had not flooded, or who could still collect cans or jars from top shelves, brought their food. “We salvaged everything we could,” she said. “That's how we got through it, and it's built up since then.”

On Tuesday, Beth wrote a Facebook post, which has been shared over 59,000 times, describing some of her experiences in the aftermath of the storm. She wrote of the tremendous losses the community had experienced, saying:

I have personally spoken to people who have dug living and dead people out of a mudslide, seen their neighbors swept away by water, and seen bodies that haven't been able to be recovered. We have heard stories from Montreat, Grovemont, Beacon Village, Botany Woods - these areas are miles apart from each other and each place really different from the others.  A child told me he saw three houses slide down a slope into his neighborhood. Friends had to claw their way to safety with their seven-year-old while their neighbors died in the river below them.

After her post went viral, Beth received an influx of messages from people who wanted to help. Beth has been working to route those donations to people and groups in need. She has also fielded worried messages from people who cannot reach their loved ones. Beth and her team have visited numerous homes in search of those people. “Most of the time when we get there, they're fine,” she said. “Most of the time what we're doing is just communication. Like, ‘Your daughter doesn't know if you're safe. She's worried about whether or not you have water. Do you need water? Oh, you'd like some instant coffee. We happen to have some. Here you go.’"“We are not first responders,” she said. “We are mostly just giving people stuff that is helpful, but not life-saving, and communicating with their loved ones or telling people that their house is safe to go back to, or stuff like that.”

Beth is grateful for the outpouring of support she and her neighbors have seen, but she is also worried that the public’s attention will fade long before the crisis is over. “The need for support on the ground is going to be intense for a long time,” she said. “ We don't know how things are going to evolve. This is a long haul. Schools are closed indefinitely. They're estimating months to get city water back in Asheville. The whole region, right now, we're still in emergency mode.”

For now, Beth’s biggest priority is fortifying and expanding the area’s mutual aid infrastructure. “That's what has been a breakthrough for us. Asking, ‘Okay, who else? Who can I call who's already got their own hub?’ Then, that hub can lead us to a bigger hub.” Identifying groups that are taking action and whose relationships have positioned them to assist others is key. “We are looking at who knows each other, who’s helping each other, and listening to people about what their evolving needs are. Because those needs are going to be different tomorrow than they are today, and they're going to be different next month and next year, and we're…” she said, trailing off, and clearly exhausted. “It's going to take a very long time.”

“Get Ready”

“It's like the kind of world you maybe watch on TV or something, but you never think you might have to experience it,” mutual aid organizer Sarah Nuñez told me. As we spoke, Sarah was sitting in her car, between mutual aid runs. “We just went to deliver a drop-off for some communities, our community over in Swannanoa, North Carolina. We got home, and now we have to fill our gas tanks with gas that got dropped off yesterday.” Sarah and her co-organizers haven’t showered in a week, and were clearly sleep-deprived. “I'm literally sitting in my car talking to you because my phone's about to run out and all my external batteries are out of power.”

Sarah has lived in Asheville since 1997. “I have a beautiful half acre of land and an herb farm and a mutual aid project called Aflorar Herb Collective that I have been running on site here for three years,” she told me. Sarah spoke lovingly of her relationship to the land. “The mountains here, I mean, it's like paradise. The Blue Ridge Mountains are some of the oldest mountains in the world. The rhododendrons and the laurels just sit and they hold our mountains, our trees, our rivers. It is sacred land,” she explained. 

Sarah was out of town when the storm hit the area. She lost contact for 24 hours with the person who was looking after her dog and her farm, due to service outages. Unsure of what she would face when she returned, Sarah stocked up on supplies. “I was in Salt Lake City and I wasn't going to come home empty-handed, so I went to the local military supply store and stocked up with anything I could think of to get,” she said. Upon arriving in North Carolina, Sarah connected with Nicole Townsend, a fellow organizer, and the two stocked up further on bulk supplies. “We got all the supplies, we made little kits with cookies, crackers, water, and stuff that we could get packed in little ziplocks, and we hit the streets on foot and in our cars, and then started meeting up with community.”

Relying on a hand-crank radio for updates about storm fatalities and other news, Sarah’s small crew has worked to assist people who government aid efforts have not reached. “FEMA and the government resources really haven't hit the ground in some of these communities,” Sarah explained. Many people in the rural mountain communities around Asheville are stranded, due to a lack of gasoline for their cars, and unable to seek assistance. Organizers from Atlanta, who Sarah and Nicole have relationships with, have brought gas that has allowed their team to make supply runs to some of their isolated neighbors. 

In Asheville, collective survival is presently maintained by a patchwork of communal care. “There's small little hubs, small little resource hubs set up and some larger resource hubs,” Sarah said. The hub Sarah and Nicole are co-organizing on Sarah’s land serves as many as 100 people, but these organizers are also helping to create additional hubs. “With that drop we just made a little bit ago to Swannanoa, we helped them set up one of the first hubs for that particular community. It was an apartment complex that opened up their little picnic area.”Just prior to our conversation, the organizers made a supply run that exhausted their resources, but they said the organization Southerners on New Ground would be bringing more supplies soon. “There's so many groups on the ground,” Nicole Townsend told me. “BeLoved [Asheville] is a large organization that's been moving since day one. They're able to get big trucks in and  set up at different spots. They have been trained in disaster relief for a really long time.”

For smaller mutual aid groups, tight-knit relationships and a culture of problem-solving enabled organizers to move fast and tackle the needs of people who might otherwise be left behind. “We kind of get it,” Nicole said. “I was talking to [organizers with] Peace Gardens and Hood Huggers the other day and they were saying it's like they've already been doing this work for a while, so they can just plug in and move stuff out.”

“We've been organizing together, some of us, for two decades,” Sarah explained. “We've been through a lot. We've been through immigration raids, we've been through trying to move city and county policy. We've been doing inside, outside and against the state work for a while.”Nicole described the work of everyday people, rescuing and providing for one another. “We've seen eighty-year-old men put on their overalls and hop on their tractors and get people from their homes and rebuild their driveways so that they could actually figure out how to leave,” she said. In an era of catastrophe, no one is exempt from disaster. “Get your bug out bag ready,” Sarah said. “Get ready. Have everything you need to survive without water, power, or internet for at least a week. Get that ready because it could save your life or your community's lives.” 

Nicole also stressed the importance of strengthening relationships and solidarity networks, which can quickly become avenues of survival for our communities. “There is a pretty tight community across the mountains,” she said. “People have literally just been knocking on doors saying, ‘I got you, what do you need?’” Mapping out the web of relationships and experience in the Asheville area has facilitated the creation of resource hubs. “Knowing that so-and-so lives on this street or so-and-so is a community leader here, let's make their house a hub for this apartment complex or this trailer park,” Nicole explained.

Finding a role in the webwork of collective survival has driven home the importance of each organizer’s knowledge and relationships. “There are moments as an organizer where you feel like, ‘Oh, maybe I'm not doing enough.’ But then you realize, ‘Oh yeah, I actually know a hundred addresses,’ or, ‘I have phone numbers for people in various parts of the region,’ – this is generations of relationship building which has allowed neighbors and organizations to move supplies and do wellness checks to the capacity that it has been happening,” Nicole said. “I think that the folks on the ground are outpacing the local, the state, and the federal government when it comes to making sure people are alive and making sure folks have clean water.”

There are, however, limits to what that local spirit of solidarity can overcome. “Winter is approaching in our mountains,” Nicole noted. “It's going to be hard. There are people that we may not find for months. We know our smaller, more rural mountain towns are not getting the attention that Asheville or Hendersonville are getting. And so we need people to keep their eyes on our rural communities.”

Support from outside of North Carolina has been crucial to mutual aid efforts on the ground. “There's been an outpouring of people who can't physically get to the region who have said, give me the link or tell me the supplies you need,” Nicole said. “We've had the anarchist punk queers from across the country say, ‘We're going to get some friends together and raise $100 and Venmo you,’ or, ‘We have a nana in Durham who can get some Ensure and some wipes.’” Nicole believes that people outside the region understand how special the area is, and appreciate its deep history in justice movements. “They love this region the way this region has loved the social justice movement for generations,” she said.

However, like Heather and Beth, Sarah and Nicole worry that the damage from Helene will drift from public view. “Don't forget about us,” Sarah said. “We have so much to rebuild. There's so much devastation.” Sarah described the emotional toll the storm damage has taken. “We're riding around town and your heart drops to your stomach. The places that you used to eat, the places you would gather with your friends, homes that you love, they're gone,” she said. Continued financial support for local groups is crucial, she said, “and maybe even in a few weeks volunteering [in-person] could be helpful.” While organizers are not yet prepared to host an influx of out-of-town activists, Sarah feels such support could be valuable, in time. Once this early, urgent phase of the crisis has passed and “our parasympathetic systems get to a place of calm,” Sarah emphasized that organizers will need support to shore up their “emotional, spiritual, mental health.”

“When natural disasters happen, they get 15 minutes of news rotation and then folks forget about us,” Nicole said. Nicole also mentioned the negative attitudes that some liberal Democrats hold about the South, and people in the South who are impacted by natural disasters. “I'm sitting with that narrative right now because I'm witnessing the resilience of thousands of people who are literally caring for each other and giving each other deep, intimate love in ways that are so unique to the South,” she said. “We know how the rest of the country views us as a region. And this was a moment when we rose to the occasion. We know no one's coming to save us. We’ve got to save ourselves.”

“Don't forget about any community that suffers this kind of devastation. Folks who have a special skill when it comes to construction or building an ecovillage, whatever it is, when we call, pick up the phone and throw down with us,” Nicole said.

Sarah also asked that people consider donating to small mutual aid collectives. “We deeply appreciate the big name organizations and our local government, but there's some small collectives that are moving some real shit. For some of them, $100 could transform their whole operation.”Sarah also looked to the future, questioning what we could do to prepare for the next disaster. “How do we ensure we're being more diligent about preparing for more natural disasters that will come,” she asked. “We know that those who are in decision-making positions do not care about climate change. They're arguing with each other and not taking real steps to protect our environment. We've seen a heightening of these disasters. So, what does it mean to fortify our climate justice framework?” Sarah talked about the need to build a stronger movement, one that isn’t rooted in “white, middle-class values,” but rather, “working class, BIPOC values.” As we wrapped up our conversation, Sarah checked her messages and absorbed another wave of bad news. “Generations are going to feel the impact of this,” she said quietly.

Author’s Note: If you would like to strengthen your own solidarity networks, I recommend checking out the following resources:

• Mapping Community Ecosystems of Collective Care by Shannon Perez-Darby and Andrea J. Ritchie (PDF toolkit)
• Podmapping for Mutual Aid by Rebel Sidney Black (short document)
• Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade (book)
• Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba (book)

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