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On SDF

Helene : Life in Southern Appalachia Seven Months After The Fall

06-19-2025 - Present Time, Present Day

09-17-2024

This was the date I first became aware that there may be trouble brewing. Part

of my volunteer work includes providing emergency weather reports over what we

call the 2M band in HAM radio. For about a week, I started to get the sense

that something was wrong with the storm. I have two places, one in the

Southern Appalachians and one on the Space Coast. I'm used to really bad

weather in both spots and as a helmsman, I've dealt with bad seas. I'm not a

sailor traditionally because I didn't grow up on the coast, I'm a rafter and

most of my water experience started on the river. Still, life afforded me the

ability to learn how to run sailboats, so I did. I have several ASA and Coast

Guard certifcations, including a European one. These kinds of hobbies,

sailing, rafting and emergency radio comms (called EMCOMMs) kinda makes one

aware of the weather.

So, it was during this time that I noticed something about what was to hit us

was different.

This day, we received over 2 inches of rain and the flooding was bad - however,

this wasn't the hurricane, it was 10 days before. I remember it because the

next day I had to go out and repair the roads. Repairing roads isn't anything

new for me. My grandfather worked in both law enforcement and transportation,

he ran a road grader as a supervisor. Dad was a forest ranger, he jumped into

fires and made roads with a bulldozer. For me, my military occupation

generally removed roads, but we also built them - so yeah, road repairs.

Nothing new.

Little did I know what this 'road work' would pay off later. I ran sluces to

drain the roads, dug out ditches and we even did some tractor work with the

neighbors. Mind you, this was 10 days before the hurricane (again). We moved

as much of the ground level water off the road and into the ditches. The creek

systems were mud red, but it is what it is ... it's a mountain gravel road.

09-24-2024

I don't want to share who I work for, but I have shared on SDF what I do for

work. That's not unknown. I'm not a secret squirrel or anything, but I'm a

META-Arpa member on here, so I have a vested interest in sharing the truth -

as best as I understand it - with the folks here on SDF. That said, what I do

and who I work for and my volunteer work gave me kinda of a heads up that

things were going to be right with the storm that was coming. Again, Appalachia

has been hit by tropical storms before, so this was 'nothing differnt' - but

official sources weren't relaying that was the case. for this one This was

going to be a big issue. To me, I thought everyone knew this - I thought my

neighbors knew this and that they were preparing. In my world, everyone was

hearing that this was the situation and that they should better prepare. I

let work know where I would be and that I would stay in touch some way.

What I didn't know was that an entire city 15 miles to my east was really aware

of this fact. Also, most of the people in Southern Appalachia didn't get the

news either. As I would find out later, hardly anyone knew what was about to

happen.

That said, I started to get our house in order just in case it was as bad as

work was saying it was going to be.

09-26-2024

Who this guy is, I don't know, but I saw him around the mountains. He runs

alot - mostly on the weekends. There are more than a handful of these guys

here. Big beards. To the unitiated, they look like normal people, but to

someone that's been in the military, I knew who they are. Most of these guys

work out of Bragg, but own a house out here in the mountains.

Again, I don't know exactly what it was, but I remember this guy filling up

LOTS of gas cans at the gas stations that late afternoon. It was fall and the

sun was setting faster. He noticed I was looking at him. He looked up at me a

nd we had a moment of understanding. He shook his head as if to say 'damn' or

something - I noded back, went home and got my own gas cans. Whatever he knew,

and given what I was told at work - I knew that it meant I needed gas. Alot of

gas. So I filled up everything I had and took it back home.

Sadly, I noticed - he and I were the only people taking the hint other than a

good old boy in a Ford truck.

09-27-2024

This day will be spoken about for years. I'm not going to go into the storm

itself since it wasn't as eventful as what happened later. Remember all that

water we had 10 days before this date? Yeah, that was the issue. In the

mountains, water has to go somewhere - even the ground water. So it did go

'somewhere' - it just wasn't where people wanted it to go.

Three Days After Helene Hit

After we organized our neighbors and worked together to get the road

're-fixed', we started to go over the damage. Some trees went down, power was

out for more than a few, but since we were directly on the main line, we had

power simply because we were situation next to the main federal communications

hub in that area - that is the only reason we had power. I had a whole house

generator installed a couple years back, and we keep a secondary gas generatro

and a third solar generator with panels. Believe it or not, a standard battery

fed radio got us most of the local news. The drinking water at our place is

well water - the well is above the water line for any river - and we have whole

house filters. This would be an issue later on as most water tables became

contaiminated.

Other than dehydrated coffee and powdered milk, we had managed to hook up some

kind of power to our local gas staion at the base of the mountain - so we also

had booze. I don't normally drink much anymore, however, I did during Helene.

Also, when we went into our local country store, we had to use cash. Having

cash on hand was a big benefit.

Still, we were cut off from the rest of the world ... so we thought.

A couple days before, right after the winds died, I fashioned an antenna out of

a 21 foot piece of bamboo. With the help of duck tape, I ran a 50 ft. RG-8

cable out of the house and we used gutter strapping to bolt it onto the side of

shed. It looked like crap, but it worked. None of my HTs were powerful enough

to get into the repeaters - we only had two that were up - and again, this was

simply because the USFS and Feds used them - nothing else was online -

including police and highway patrol repeaters. That was it. I dusted off a

Yaesu FT-8900R that I had sitting around and used that in the house.

The radio was already loaded with all the stations I would need, so I scanned

the channels until I hit some traffic.

That radio has a unique feature that allowed me to use cross band repeat,

meaning that the radio can be set to receive on one frequency and broadcast

with offset on the other. This allowed me the option to use a HT (hand held)

at 1 to 2 miles away and still get into the tower without having to mount the

radio in my truck.

Stated, lets talk about the radio traffic because that's featured alot in

stories about the events near-post Helene.

At that f'n moment, I realized how bad it actually was ... the reports coming

in were heart wrenching. Some things happened during Helene that you wont hear

about on the news. There were alot of shootings, lootings and other bad stuff.

So, this was what I was doing now, radio stuff - it's what HAM radio does well.

When nothing else works, including your phone, you have HAM radio. (And no,

none of the GMRS repeaters were online - people can forget that fantasy).

Reports got passed over the UHF/VHF spectrum - relays were done out using HF

and people were getting information from Winlink. This is how communications

were being handled.

Looters

Regardless of politics, looters suck. I don't believe in it. Everyone suffers

equally under looters - and they mostly come out of the city during disasters.

It's a fact, and no amount of reinvention for the sake of some narrative will

change that fact. Looters are essentially bandits, and not in the Robin Hood

sense - they are just opportunistic thugs.

And that's what happened to us.

A few days into this, our local country store was hit with looters from

Asheville NC - yes that far away. The stories of looting in inner city

Asheville flooded the radio waves, a couple people got shot in one day at a

gas station - heard it myself - heard the police take the reports (remember -

they didn't have their repeaters up until a little later, so they used our

frequencies). This isn't a 'guns bad' story, mine saved my butt more than once

during Helene. So I don't care who you are or what you believe, I am grateful

we have that right in America - it came in handy during Helene. So this is a

'guns not bad in the right hands' story.

Stated, several stores got hit - these are all remote country stores. Some of

those stores had food. We knew the looters would come back, especially to the

gas station - which is more remote than the country stores. So, we did what

good neighbors do - we posted guards out there 24/7.

The most stolen supplies during Helene was either building materials, booze or

cigarettes. Generators didn't make the top three, but gas and generators, yes,

those too got stolen.

In the store I saw that got looted, they didn't even touch the food or water.

I hadn't performed guard duty in a while, but it's what I did for around five

days - I'd hang out with the store owner and while they were doing what they

needed to do with the folks coming in looking for stuf (legit wise), I gave

reports on the radio. That fall was hot, so standing outside regardless if it

was day or night sucked.

On the sixth day, I saw my first law enforcement officer. He was using the

store's parking lot for one reason - he needed to get signal. When the store's

owner tried to share about the looters, he didn't get involved. She was upset,

but I explained to her that he was federal - most likely USFS - and that

correct, it probaly wasn't his job. To me, I don't care what you believe about

law enforcement, there are some good and bad points to the whole profession -

but when day seven roled around, I was glad I didn't have to protect a store

full of twinkies since I wasn't get paid for it, and they were. Plus, for the

first time in my life, I noticed that each one I saw looked, well, helpless.

If life had been hell for us dealing with looters coming out of Asheville, I

can only imagine what they were dealing with ... again, I'm not a professional,

I only do this crap when I absolurely have to ... like in an emergency.

Once we got the gas station up, people lined up for miles. That wasn't easy

either. People were angry - very upset. I can't say what we did, but we

didn't have any incidents at that particular station. I had only one

transplant get roudy, and that last a split second. A good look from a well

equipped, capable person with no badge to lose generally does the trick.

We had to ration gas, no one got prefrence say for the owners family, and even

they were limited on gas for the family. All in all, gas distribution was

fair.

Other than looters, transplants - people who had moved to the Appalachians but

are removed from the culture - were the worst people to deal with since they

were applying imported cultural rules (trying to be pushy, acting out and

cutting in line for gas).

For the most part, having been through more than a few national level

disasters, both in an official capacity and as a civilian, I know how to

'dress' and 'equip' myself properly so as to project that I know what I'm

doing, but not to threaten others. This is still Appalachia, and when

Appalachian people are equipped to deal with non-sense during an emergency, on

a subliminal level, I think most Americans understand our culture enough that

they don't push the crap they normally would try to pull off in say, New York,

New Jersey or California. Trying to push around well armed Appalachian people

during a crisis - with no law enforcement around - is not advantageous.

So yeah, transplants, they suck (not all, my neighbor from New York was great),

but they stayed in line and we only had a few, very quick, incidents with them

when parsing supplies to people from the store, gas station or cafe.

In case you were wondering, immigrants, regardless of their legal status, did

very well and helped us alot with road, supplies and other issues.

I think we all took turns for a while guarding the country store and the gas

station - again, no law enforcement really.

Like I said, any law or fire we saw were tired beyond what I had seen since I

left the military - they clearly had some form of PTSD; most people did after

Helene.

And remember that military guy? Yeah, he was kind enough to let me 'climb' up

to his mountain and use starlink to check into work. We became frieds - he

still will not tell me what he does at Bragg, and I don't ask. I put in my

PTO, ordered a starlink and got my own starlink delivered at the base of a

mountain that fed-ex could reach so I could get back to work - my two weeks of

hell was over, but it was not over for the rest of Southern Appalachia.

Two weeks later

The power is back on for us - it's in and out, but it's on. We had about four

hours on and off a few days after Helene, but that was just so people could get

cell phones charged and calls out. Power was rationed. But during week two,

it was on solid for us (kinda, a times I still had to put us on generator

power). I think during this time, we got a chance to see what was going on in

Lake Lure, Unicoi, Burnsville, Marshall, Swannanoa and Asheville - it was bad.

The radio reports to the N2GE repeater were bad enough during Helene, this was

super bad. We spent a night at a refugee center in Swannanoa hosted by a

German guy who opened up his shop to World Kitchen. Great people. However,

it literally looked like an earthquake combined with a Zombie movie. If you

drove your truck two or three feet one way getting in there, you put it in a

9 to 15 foot hole.

At some point, we got into Asheville. Some places still had no power, and

there was no water there for a long time. The entire two homeless communities

I remember there are gone - in my mind, that will never make the official toll

and it'll probably get discounted as a conspiracy theory on Wikipedia or

Snopes; but I know personally there are whole communties of undocumented

people who are now gone. Don't care what someone says, I was there and knew

some of those folks for years.

Nothing of those communties in the River Arts distric and under those two

bridges, remain.

One Month Later

FEMA is a mixed bag for some folks - it just is, bipartisan politics doesn't

mater, it either worked for you or it didn't work for you. I personally was

not able to get people help, it just was how it was. Now, during this month

post storm, I have spent time with FEMA contractors - to be fair, they did good

work getting showers and washing areas up with the Corps of Engineers. That

was cool. However, I personally known neighbors and friends who really got s

crewed over by them, and I know people that got alot of help out of them.

This is the reality of FEMA post-Helene.

FEMA is neither bad nor good. They are not the great saviors like folks on the

left side of life like to believe, and they aren't the great evil that folks on

the right like to believe. They just are - it's a government system, so it

functions like one. Expect delays ...

FEMA's mission really isn't emergency management, it's continuity of government

during and after a disaster. Their disaster mission is simply secondary.

However, they were in Asheville doing stuff for Helene.

Power still wasn't on for parts of Asheville. Water is still bad for city

folks. Water is worse than they make it because (See Beetree Weapon Waste

Dump) of some other factors that never made the news. Some people in Asheville

are driving far out of their way to get a shower at our shack in the woods

(it's not really a shack, but it's not the Hilton either). People had brought

out PILES of clothes to our house to be washed - which pissed off Mrs. DMaD,

but we let them wash them anyway. Internet is still bad in Asheville at this

time, so friends are even coming out to use our starlink as well.

Alot of our friends on city water had to come out just to fill their jugs

simply because the water was undrinkable and dangerous. (A fact Asheville

admitted during Helene, and denied later when they needed tourist to come back

- figure that one out.) Asheville politicians and officials are masters at

gas lighting - simply the greatest by far. I have nothing good to say about

how that town handled a crisis at that level. So for the one month after,

Asheville was still bad and looked like an occupied war town the month after

when we visited.

Still, trees are getting removed at this point, and roads are starting to open.

We got some help from the military. While the military was great, we had some

unmarked non-state agencies doing some shady stuff. That's not for this post,

you can find those videos on Youtube. Avoid the fake videos with the grifters.

Grifters were a HUGE issue during Helene.

Things are getting somewhere, but it's still hell - and it will be for months

to come, maybe a year, maybe two.

Politics of Helene

One aspect that led me from being Center-Left in my political beliefs to

straight Center/Indy was the way politics was injected into this entire issue.

Neither president did a good job, no agency did a great job and quite honestly,

I wasn't really impressed with any civic institutions. When HAM radio became

the major communication tool, and that is ran by a bunch of hobbyists, it shows

the cracks in the whole system.

The fingerpointing that went on between both the left and right was EXTREME.

To the point it was literally absurd. Now, most of these people commenting on

the issue in this fashion were either from Asheville proper, or they were

completely outside of the region with no exposure to the situation.

For me, what I saw was this, churches worked with an openly Trans couple to

distribute food - personally witnessed this and these aren't churches that are

liberal, these are Pentacostal. So, saw that - it went well. I also saw

diehard anti-immigration type folks working along side 'illegals' because

the situation was that bad. I saw a Republican activist and a die-hard

memember of the Buncombe Democratic Party working together, often joking each

other. That is what I saw.

I also saw people I KNOW who worked with Everytown, literally wearing pistols

during Helene. I also saw diehard 2nd Amendment absolutists telling the

tactical prepper crowd to leave the ARs at home, unless they were going into a

looted area or a high crime situation. In some situations, ARs were warranted,

but I didn't feel the need to have one. Keept it simple.

Speaking of tactical preppers, they were wearing full kit with ballistic

helmets, multiple mags and whatever counts as an LBE these days. I heard more

than one horror story about these types of folks being complete jack asses at

distribution sites. In one case, the deputies had to be called.

No one got arrested, but they did tell those guys to go home.

Also saw an armed Yoga instructor ... figure that one out.

That's how it worked on the ground, it really wasn't black and white.

People were doing what they need to do to survive ... that was all.

The only people on the ground that actually injected race & politics into the

issue were the Asheville politicians and a couple NGOs... and that was expected.

So let all that sink in.

Present Time, Present Day

So, by now, most people will have seen ads to 'visit' Asheville or 'come to

Western North Carolina', we are 'open'. These ads try to tell you everything

is OK here. For a while, saying something to the contrary got you either

called a 'damn commie' or a 'right wing extremist/nazi', depending on who your

obvious truth offended. The actuality is that we are not 'fine', we are

getting there, but everything is 'not that ok' - yet.

Peter Santello recently toured the area as in, like,the last two weeks or less

- he did an extensive tour of Western North Carolina - one of our old neighbors

is in the video if you catch it. However, if you would like to know more about

what life is like here seven months later, I suggest you view the video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6wmG7QqaOk

Inside the Forgotten Aftermath of Hurricane Helene - Western North Carolina

The video is about an hour long (and more), but it's worth the trouble. This

will dispell any illusions cast on the reader by the Asheville Tourism Board

lives there now' crowd. Both sides are wrong - but both sides are correct.

Techically, yes, you can still visit us, but I wouldn't waste your PTO or

vacation time unless you really want to come (and help). However, alot of

places are still messed up and it's going to take a long, long, long time to

fix any of this (as you can see in the video).

So yeah, skip Asheville this year, maybe for two or three years - I still get

amazed where I hear people are still moving to the area only to find out what

it looks like when they get here. By then, it's too late. They've signed the

lease and got their deposit in with some apartment, realty group or home owner.

Based on that fact alone, it doesn't surprise me now that hardly anyone bad

attention to the warning signs leading up to Helene.

I literally heard a guy say "I just moved here, I didn't know how bad it was."

That was this past weekend at the time this gem was posted. So again, nothing

surprises me at this point - don't think the realty company that sold/gave him

a lease on the house bothered to fill him in on how bad it is here.

For an event that has been overly politicized by both sides, the fact remains

that unless they were here, they have should nothing to add other than 'that

sucks, hope you guys get through this mess'.

Recently, we've been installing digipeaters (solar with back up) all through

out the mountains. We are just filling in the holes 'just in case'. While

things do suck at the moment, it's not terrible - it's just alot of work.

The goal in setting up these repeaters is to make Winlink suck less, assist

So, I thought I'd share with my fellow SDF'ers (those nefarious characters -

thanks NPR) why I haven't been online for several months.

Just had some stuff going on ... :D

Thanks for reading this, appreciate your time.

DMad

Questions : just email me at sdf.org