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A year ago this Saturday, Lansing farmer Ann Rose arrived in New Orleans. She had paddled 81 days, starting in the New River near her farm in western North Carolina and ending in the Gulf of Mexico. It was blustery on the dock while she debriefed with documentarian and fellow North Carolinian Haley Mellon. The date was Sept. 27, 2024 — the day Hurricane Helene flooded Lansing.
“I didn't realize it had hit home,” said Rose, who lives off the grid. “Within that hour of me finishing [the trip], [Helene] had knocked out the cell phone towers at home.”
She found out when she tried to call her mom. Mellon planned to film the interaction, but when Rose went to call, her phone couldn’t connect. Rose’s cell carrier, Carolina West, had been knocked out of commission by the storm.
Her mom was fine; she lives in Ohio. But Lansing was another story.
“I was back in the hotel the next day before I realized that Lansing had been gutted by Helene,” Rose said.
It’s easy to forget a year later just how scrambled communication systems were during and after Helene. Sarah Padyk lives in Durham. Her father sent her a video from Sylva — a small town outside of Waynesville — around 11:30 a.m. on the Friday Helene flooded the town.
“It was flooding I had never seen before in my lifetime, since I was born in raised in Sylva,” Padyk said.
After that, she didn’t hear from her parents for 24 hours. When they finally did get a signal, it was only along a small section of highway near town.
“It was like a 15-second phone call,” Padyk said. “It was just, ‘Hey, I love you. We're okay. Dogs are OK. Don’t know when we’re going to be able to call again.’”
At any given moment after the storm, you could find a line of cars pulled over with their hazard lights blinking along that stretch of Highway 74, trying to catch a bar of service. With cell coverage down, information was scarce in a region that had already become a news desert even before the storm.
“Further from big cities, it's much harder to find locally relevant information,” said Lizzy Hazeltine, director of the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund, on Charlotte Talks earlier this week. “Especially locally relevant information that's verified and comports with what we know is a best practice to corroborate information, to make sure that it's factually correct and useful for people.”
A “decentralized network” of newspapers, radio stations and other local news outlets should exist not just to echo state and national news, but to unpack its relevance for its readers. Hazeltine said that means “helping them understand what it means that their service job hasn't come back a year after Hurricane Helene, or what it means that there are cuts to SNAP and Medicaid for them and their families.”
Journalists serve different roles before, during and after a disaster. In advance of an incoming storm, reporters are providing updates, connecting folks to local public safety communications services and sharing recommendations from local officials. During and immediately after the storm, reporters bear witness, collect and spread accurate, useful information and help dispel disinformation.
That’s especially important when the disaster is at an unprecedented scale. Helene turned towns and cities into islands, washing out roads and blowing out bridges.
“I saw oak trees bend like I've never seen [them] bend before. They were bending like palm trees,” Black Mountain Fire Chief John Coffey said. “When I asked for additional resources, the county said, ‘We can't, you're stuck on an island. We can't get to you.’”
It also turned towns into information islands. People didn’t know what was happening a mile down the road, much less across the region. When they could get a call out, they often relied on relatives outside western North Carolina to tell them what was happening in the next town over. But one source of information remained while cell coverage was down: local radio.
Radio as an emergency service
A couple weeks after Helene, Sonia Smith walked to the Big Ivy Community Center near Banardsville. The nonprofit Footprint Project had deployed trailer housing with a 50-kilowatt-hour battery bank, enough to power a home for a couple of days. Solar panels on the trailer’s roof charged the batteries, which in turn power a Starlink satellite hotspot.
Smith sat near the trailer with their laptop out.
“I did the FEMA application, and I have a small farm,” Smith said. “So, my plan is just to get the USDA form and call them.”
Before Footprint Project set up this portable microgrid, Smith would sit in the car and listen to Blue Ridge Public Radio, the local station that broadcasts from Asheville. BPR broadcast county meetings, supply drop locations, road conditions and other information Smith couldn’t access without internet.
“I can go turn my truck on and listen to the radio, because I don’t have a phone through this emergency,” Smith said about the week immediately following the flood.
During Helene, there were a number of things that local news stations got right. Blue Ridge Public Radio’s Jose Sandoval produced bilingual broadcasts that reached Spanish speakers. The station also rolled out a text-only version of its website that was more screen-reader friendly and could load faster over the limited bandwidth available.
When speaking about what reporters could have done better, I’ll speak from my own experience covering the storm. There were practices that other reporters or community members were doing that I could have implemented that would have better informed the people responding to Helene and helped stymy disinformation.
“What I saw and have learned from our partners on the ground is that they were going out in 4x4s, especially to communities that are Spanish-speaking or speak Central American indigenous languages, and they were doing door-to-door communication work,” Hazeltine said.
This scene played out all across western North Carolina. Private and public aircraft landed in people's backyards to drop supplies, entrusting community members with the distribution. A few days after the storm, Tyler Blalock flagged down a private helicopter descending over Grandfather Mountain. His friend, Rob Links, hopped out of the chopper into the courtyard of a local wedding venue, the closest open field to town. He unloaded diapers, soap, and other hygiene supplies they've picked up in Asheville. He also carried updates about road conditions and supplies across the region.
Two hours north in Ashe County, Leeth Davis ran his ATV up nearly impassable dirt roads outside Lansing.
“I mean, we put a lot of miles on this thing,” Davis said. “We're all deer hunters and just live out here. We can pretty much go wherever.”
In addition to food, water and medicine, I could have provided Davis with accurate information to drive up the mountain into the hollers that surround Lansing. Already, disinformation had taken root across the region — stories of corrosive mud, a hurricane controlled by the Democrats and FEMA trying to steal people’s property.
This and other lessons are only learned with time and experience. But with less funding, it’s harder for new organizations to keep reporters long enough to build that experience and those contacts.
“If you are an elected leader spreading disinformation, would it not be in your self-interest to clamp down on legitimate media sources?” asked Charlotte Talks host Mike Collins. He was speaking with Bret Schafer, senior fellow for media and digital disinformation at the Alliance for Securing Democracy.
“Certainly, we have seen that in other authoritarian environments,” Schafer said. “I used to live in Hungary. What was the first thing that Orbán started to do during his second term when he came in? [It] was clampdown on independent media in a different way than we traditionally think of how you would take over media. This wasn't going in, raiding places, firing all their journalists. They just starved them of revenue. They made it almost impossible for them to exist.”
Listen to more on Charlotte Talks: The importance of trusted local news during natural disasters like Hurricane Helene
