Post-Helene, mental health providers help kids cope
By Emily Vespa
Weeks after the remnants of Hurricane Helene ravaged western North Carolina, tens of thousands of kids across the region still don’t know when they’ll be able to return to a sense of normalcy.
At a Chapel Hill park on a recent sunny afternoon, displaced families, many from the Asheville area, found a place to connect over the unknown.
“Life around here goes on as normal, but we are people who just experienced an extremely traumatic event that we weren’t necessarily prepared for,” said Joe Ainsworth, a school counselor for Buncombe County Schools and the organizer of the picnic for displaced families.
A sign at the picnic in Chapel Hill for western North Carolina families displaced by Hurricane Helene on Oct. 13, 2024. Credit: Emily Vespa / NC Health News
At the park, kids of all ages doted on therapy dogs and picked at pizza. With the muffled sound of basketballs thudding on nearby courts in the background, mental health providers talked with families about ways to cope with the devastation that has upended their lives.
It’s an early but important step in the long-term healing process, Ainsworth said.
“The broad implications of what displacement looks like is huge,” he said. “I think we’re still trying to figure out what that even looks like — and how we can help.”
Helping kids cope
In the aftermath of a disaster, it’s normal for kids to feel anxious or overwhelmed, said Nivee Roy, a licensed professional counselor who specializes in trauma.
“Kids are people. They’re little people, but they’re people nevertheless,” said Roy, who drove from Charlotte for the picnic. “They have feelings and emotions, and because this disaster was so monumental in its dimensions, it’s sometimes so hard to comprehend.”
Parents and guardians might see some of these behaviors in children after a disaster:
Trouble sleeping
Forgetfulness
Difficulty following directions
More meltdowns
In the first one to three months after a traumatic event, people experience short-term stress, Roy said. After that, stress becomes chronic. For Helene survivors, the early months are an important “window of intervention” to provide mental health support and help children recover long-term, she said.
“Our brain has the full capacity to heal itself,” Roy said. “We want to foster that.
“We want to introduce healthy coping skills, a safe place to connect and share those feelings, and then pick up a routine that is the new normal.”
An attendee at a picnic for displaced western North Carolina families holds a handout on coping with traumatic events as she pets a therapy dog on Oct. 13, 2024. Credit: Emily Vespa / NC Health News
It doesn’t take a mental health professional to support kids after a disaster, Robin Gurwitch, a professor in the Duke University Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and at the Center for Child and Family Health, told NC Health News in an interview.
“Sometimes, particularly as parents and caregivers, we worry: ‘Oh my gosh, what if I don’t get my child the help they need immediately?’” Gurwitch said. “You’re the help they need immediately.”
Roy joined other mental health professionals in teaching families at the picnic about ways to help each other heal. Most important, she said, is simply for parents to talk to their kids about what they’re feeling. Creating a routine can also help children grapple with the disruption in their ordinary habits.
If children have changes in behavior that worsen or persist for more than six weeks after the disaster, then it’s important to seek help from a mental health provider, experts say.
Returning to a new normal
It’s college application season for high school seniors like Jayden Thomas, who attends A.C. Reynolds High School in Asheville. Though many state schools have extended deadlines and will waive application fees for western North Carolina students, she said it’s been hard to navigate the process without having access to her guidance counselor. She also misses marching band, which she’s been in for four years.
“It’s kind of apocalyptic, almost,” said Thomas, 17, at the picnic. “I want to go home, but it’s not really the same anymore.”
Jayden Thomas, a senior at A.C. Reynolds High School, stands at a picnic in Chapel Hill for displaced western North Carolina families on Oct. 13, 2024. Credit: Emily Vespa / NC Health News
Thomas had been displaced with her family for nearly two weeks in Raleigh.
“I felt a little guilty leaving, honestly, leaving all my friends behind and wanting to help with the relief efforts, wanting to volunteer,” Thomas said. “But it just wasn’t safe for us.”
Buncombe County Schools Superintendent Rob Jackson said Thursday that the system plans to have a reopening date soon and is “working very hard for the emotional well-being of our staff and students when we return to the buildings after the challenges of the past few weeks.”
School counselors and social workers from across the state will assist Buncombe County’s staff when schools return, Jackson said.
In the meantime, communities are organizing to provide support for students. One Asheville elementary school’s staff visited students at their homes to pass out goody bags.
“When our students can’t come to us, we go to them!” the school’s Facebook post read.
Staff from another Asheville school created a “Bookmobile” to hand out books in local neighborhoods and keep kids reading, the district posted in a different Facebook group.
Ainsworth, the school counselor, said he was overwhelmed by the generosity of volunteers as he was organizing the picnic. But the need is still extremely great, he said, especially for smaller school districts with less resources than Asheville’s.
“I think forever moving forward, western North Carolina will be pre-Helene and post-Helene, and we just have to work on defining what that post-Helene looks like,” Ainsworth said. “And hopefully, when it comes to how it’s affected our students, we can get the help that we need to help them kind of work through this and become resilient and strong moving forward.”
The National Child Traumatic Stress Network offers an app called “Help Kids Cope” with guidance for how to support children after various disasters. The app is free to download on the Google and Apple app stores.
Food bank bounces back from Helene to tackle hunger crisis in western NC
The staff of the Asheville-based Manna Foodbank tried their best to prepare for Hurricane Helene.
Workers at the nonprofit’s primary distribution site just feet from the Swannanoa River moved tens of thousands of food items onto tall shelves ahead of the storm’s arrival. The shelves, they thought, would be high enough to protect the food if the building flooded.
But after the storm’s catastrophic lurch through western North Carolina, the region’s largest and most wide-reaching food bank was almost fully submerged in rippling waves of brown water. Its stockpile of food, now more badly needed than ever, was gone.
Floodwaters engulf Manna Foodbank’s main site in Asheville.
“We weren’t even able to go in and rescue any of the top-shelf food or anything because of how severely damaged everything was,” said Micah Chrisman, director of communications for Manna. “We lost everything. Our forklifts, our warehouse, all of our computers. The whole operation, basically.”
That operation served more than 150,000 people a month in western North Carolina, which struggles with worse levels of food insecurity than other parts of the state. About 20 percent of adults in the region have limited or uncertain access to food, according to the WNC Health Network.
The area’s hunger issues arise from several economic, geographic and social factors: Poverty and unemployment are more pervasive there than in eastern and central North Carolina, and many residents are unable to afford food. The predominantly rural and mountainous terrain can make a trip to the nearest grocery store challenging for people without transportation.
“We definitely had an issue with food insecurity already, especially in rural communities where some of these families that I’ve met and talked with have to drive over 30 minutes in any direction just to get food of any kind,” Chrisman said. “There were a lot of food deserts that already existed here. People might have been able to get junk food from a gas station, but they didn’t have access to actual groceries.”
Helene, he said, has “only exacerbated the need” for nourishment. In the days after the deadly storm, western North Carolina went from being one of the most food-insecure parts of the state to being, arguably, one of the hardest places to find food in the nation.
Wiped out
Fortunately, Manna moved its fleet of trucks to higher ground before Helene barreled through the area. The vehicles were undamaged, which allowed the food bank to quickly establish a pop-up distribution site with supplies donated by Feeding America, a nonprofit national network of more than 200 food banks, and the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
“All of our inventory was completely wiped out at the start of this, and so we had to replenish the supplies,” Chrisman said. “Since then, some incredible efforts have come together where grocery chains and different places that are coming back online are able to give us some of their food resources that are still safe to consume.”
Overturned vehicles near the site of Manna Foodbank’s destroyed facility in Asheville. Credit: Manna Foodbank
Several of the families who have relied on Manna for meals in recent weeks did not struggle for food before the storm, Chrisman said. Some may have had refrigerators loaded with food that went bad after days without power. Others might have been forced to flee their flooded homes and were unable to find food elsewhere.
“There are people from the hardest-hit communities who are coming to us in need of food assistance that maybe would not normally need assistance because they might have been laid off from their job because the business was flooded,” Chrisman said.
Many people in the area, he added, have been “humbled by this whole ordeal of having no running water for all this time and not having access to food.”
Chrisman said some of the food bank’s employees and volunteers “lost their homes and everything else” to the hurricane. Undeterred by their own hardship, they have continued working throughout the crisis.
“They’re still showing up every day helping deliver food or distribute food to families in need,” he said.
Manna has leased a shuttered FedEx facility near the Asheville Regional Airport to serve as its new center of operations. The food bank has also been rebuilding its stockpile with donated goods.
“As the word’s gotten out, people have been sending orders from Amazon and Instacart or driving up with bags of groceries because they had extra and just wanted to give to the people who need it most,” Chrisman said.
Road to recovery
Other efforts are being made to address food insecurity in Helene’s wake.
Last week, Gov. Roy Cooper’s office said FEMA and other “federal partners” had delivered 9.7 million liters of water and 7.7 million meals “to support both responders and people living in the affected communities.” Writing in a news release on Sunday, the White House said FEMA “continues to send commodity shipments and voluntary organizations are supporting feeding operations with bulk food and water deliveries coming via truck and aircraft.”
“Mobile feeding operations are reaching survivors in heavily impacted areas, including three mass feeding sites in Buncombe, McDowell and Watauga counties,” the release said, adding that the “massive operation” is being bolstered by The Salvation Army, which has deployed mobile kitchens to the area.
William Ray, director of N.C. Emergency Management, said his agency is assisting with “feeding operations in concert with our local partners.”
“This is a historic disaster, the magnitude of which we have never experienced before in our state,” Ray said during a recent news conference. “The road to recovery will be long, but North Carolinians are strong and resilient, and together we will recover.”
At the same conference, Kody Kinsley, secretary of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, said more than 10,000 cases of baby formula had been delivered to the region. The department, he said, had also increased the flexibility of its Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, allowing recipients to buy hot food, which is ordinarily not covered, from participating vendors through Nov. 3.
On Oct. 6, NCDHHS reissued 70 percent of the previous month’s SNAP benefits to help people in the disaster area replace food that had been lost or was no longer safe to eat. More than 227,000 beneficiaries across a 23-county swathe of western North Carolina automatically received the reimbursement, totaling $24 million in benefits.
Beginning Tuesday, storm victims who are not currently enrolled in SNAP can pre-register for a one-time stipend to buy food through the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or D-SNAP. The program is open to people who “suffered losses/damages related to Hurricane Helene,” according to NCDHHS.
Pre-registration can be completed online through the state’s ePass service. Registration will be available by phone and in-person at designated offices in the affected counties beginning Friday.
“Much is underway, and there will be much more to do,” Kinsley said. “We all remain committed to the health and well-being of everyone in the region, in mind and body, for the long haul.”
Apply for Disaster-SNAP
Online pre-registration begins Tuesday, Oct 15.
Beginning Friday, Oct. 18, residents can apply by phone by calling the D-SNAP Virtual Call Center at 1-844-453-1117 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays, and from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday and Sunday.
To manage call volumes, individuals are asked to call on their assigned day based on the first letter of their last name:
10/18: A-G
10/19: H-M
10/20: N-S
10/21: T-Z
10/22-24: Open to all
Local residents can also apply in person in their home counties.
Applying for FEMA aid in NC after Tropical Storm Helene
What to know when getting ready to apply to FEMA for assistance after Tropical Storm Helene hit North Carolina.
Applying for FEMA aid in NC after Tropical Storm Helene is a story from Carolina Public Press, an award-winning independent newsroom. Our breakthrough journalism shines a light on the critical overlooked and under-reported issues facing North Carolina’s 10.4 million residents. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
Out of the mud. Talking with storm survivors in Yancey and Mitchell counties.
A week after Tropical Storm Helene hit NC, storm survivors in Yancey and Mitchell counties talk with CPP. Their stories and a photo essay.
Disruption from port strike will hamper Western NC recovery
Even though longshoremen agreed to end port strike after three days, the flow of supplies has been affected, will slow down Helene recovery.
Disruption from port strike will hamper Western NC recovery is a story from Carolina Public Press, an award-winning independent newsroom. Our breakthrough journalism shines a light on the critical overlooked and under-reported issues facing North Carolina’s 10.4 million residents. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
In Helene-ravaged Buncombe, even ‘gray water’ is tough to find
By Anne Blythe and Will Atwater
The Asheville public water system suffered catastrophic damage from the unprecedented flooding and upheaval caused by the remnants of Hurricane Helene.
While people throughout the city and Buncombe County have been hungering for answers about when their taps might start trickling again with drinkable water, there’s been a barrage of questions, too, about where they can get nonpotable, or gray water.
In a region overwhelmed by the waters that rushed through the mountains in the past week, the commodity has been difficult to come by for safe personal and household use.
“The French Broad River, the Swannanoa River — all these rivers in our area should be treated as basically a hazmat site,” Stacey Wood, a Buncombe County spokesperson, said during an Oct. 4 storm update. “Please do not touch the water or get near the water if you do not have to. There are other resources. We will make other resources available to you if that is your circumstance.”
“We cannot stress enough that all of this water flowing through our community right now should be treated as [if] it is a hazardous material,” Wood added.
Still, toilets need flushing. Other cleanup tasks require water that’s free of mud and storm debris. And the drinkable water is too valuable a resource to send it down the drain into wastewater systems.
“We’ve actually had more difficulty in securing nonpotable water than we have had in potable water,” Lillian Govus, a Buncombe County spokesperson, said during an Oct. 3 briefing with reporters.
Avril Pinder, Buncombe County manager, told reporters during several briefings this week that 10 sites are set up across the county where tankers distribute non-drinkable water for people who bring their own containers.
A tanker filled with nonpotable water was quickly emptied at one of those distribution centers, the William W. Estes Elementary School in southern Asheville. But the county continues to hunt for sources of gray water that can be trucked in to help storm-weary residents.
No timeline on a timeline
Helene dumped record rains across an already rain-soaked 25-county mountain region in North Carolina a little more than a week ago. Most every county received at least 10 inches of rain, and at least one weather station reported a three-day accumulation of more than 31 inches.
Swift water rescues were conducted in downtown Boone in Watauga County. Much of Chimney Rock, a quaint tourist village in Rutherford County, was reduced to rubble. Storm damage has been reported from as far west as Cherokee County to Mecklenburg County.
Hurricane Helene caused widespread devastation in Western North Carolina. The dam at the WNC Nature Center on the Swannanoa River was ripped apart. Credit:Bill McMannis / Flickr Creative Commons
Buncombe, the most populous county in western North Carolina, was among the hardest hit with at least 72 dead. People still hindered by power outages and communications barriers have tuned in by car radios and gathered in community spots with internet access to listen to the county’s twice-a-day updates on Facebook that also are broadcast live on Blue Ridge Public Radio.
In an Oct. 4 afternoon briefing, Ben Woody, Asheville assistant city manager, brought photos to give a glimpse of the damage to the municipal water system. There are 1,800 miles of water pipeline, Woody said, enough that if laid out in a straight line end to end it could take you to Miami and back. Not all of it is damaged, but large chunks are.
Pipes that were once buried in the ground were exposed or gone. Roads to important plants are destroyed too.
“This event washed away probably 25 feet of earth,” Woody said, showing a photo of one site that was typically a creekbed people could walk across. It’s now carved out by floodwaters, exposing a large broken pipe.
Despite all the progress city workers and others have made on repairing the extensive damage, Woody refused to hazard an estimate on when the system might be up and working again.
“I’m not going to provide a timeline, and I’m not going to provide a timeline on when I’ll provide a timeline,” Woody responded to one reporter on the video call. “What I will tell you is we will update this community when we have information, and we’ll be here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to provide updates. And we’ll be here Tuesday and Thursday to answer questions.”
A plea echoed far and wide
That leaves people in the storm-ravaged county facing more days, and likely weeks ahead, in which they’ll be lining up for water they can drink and use for cooking from pallets that have been trucked or flown into the region.
Soldiers with 875th Engineering Company, 505th Engineer Battalion and 630th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion, 113th Sustainment Brigade deliver water and food to West Buncombe Elementary School for aerial pick up on October 1, 2024. Credit:U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Denné Allen
Firefighters from New York have come in to help build community reception centers, also known as disaster reception centers, which are pods where people can come and take showers or perhaps wash clothes.
Others have been hauling nonpotable water from creeks, streams, pools and other sources to their homes to flush toilets or use for other household tasks.
The county manager cautioned the community again on Friday afternoon about water, soil and wells that might be polluted from the storm. The county had been in touch with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA.
“We reached out to the EPA for guidance,” Pinder said during the Oct. 4 afternoon storm update. “They are aware of potential issues, and they are working to evaluate health concerns.”
In the interim, Pinder urged residents to “please exercise an abundance of caution.”
“This is not the time to do stream cleanups unless you are part of an official agency or organization,” Pinder said. “We know a number of materials were swept into the rivers from industrial facilities, houses, farms and more, and we all want to restore our community back to its natural beauty as quickly as possible, but please hold off until we have assurance from the experts that it’s safe to do so.”
Some people in Buncombe County use private or shared wells, but they, too, have been hampered by the storm flooding.
“No one should consume water from private or shared water wells that have been flooded — that means well heads covered with water — until the well has been tested for bacteria, fecal chloroform and inorganic chemicals, including volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, pesticides, herbicide, petroleum-based products and nitrates or nitrites,” Pinder said earlier in the week. “These wells should be considered contaminated until tested.”
The county manager also urged people to not assume that it was safe to consume water from wells that had not been flooded.
“The recommendation would be to boil any water before consumption, even if the well was not flooded, until tests can be completed,” Pinder said.
Thirty-seven of the 40 pump stations were working, either on full power or backup power sources, by Thursday, Govus said. “Our sewage district has been operational throughout this entire disaster,” she added.
But without municipal water flowing into households such things as flushing toilets, washing clothes and other once mundane tasks have been temporarily halted in many homes.
“The team is still looking for nonpotable [water],” Pinder said Thursday, “If anyone out there has a nonpotable source of water, please call the [Emergency Operations Center]. Finding nonpotable water has been harder than I thought.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has a team of 500 workers on the ground in North Carolina who have played a critical role in the recovery response. They have supplemented the private supplies of water Asheville city officials secured with mass feeding and hydration operations.
North Carolina National Guard soldiers ready supplies for distribution in response to Tropical Storm Helene, at the Asheville Regional Airport on Oct. 2, 2024.
MaryAnn Tierney, a regional FEMA administrator, told reporters during an Oct. 3 briefing that FEMA also has been working with county and state officials at the state Emergency Management operations center in Raleigh to get more gray water to the region, although there wasn’t a timeline for when that would materialize.
“That’s something that we’ve been discussing with the county,” Tierney said. “This is also being discussed in Raleigh … a way to distribute in bulk, nonpotable water so people can do things like clean their plates and flush their toilets.”
For certain tasks such as washing dishes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends boiling nonpotable water first. The CDC also recommends rinsing dishes in a separate container with water treated with household bleach.
Avoiding disease
As local, federal and state officials scramble to provide potable and nonpotable water to western North Carolina residents, it’s important for people to follow safety procedures when dealing with water, said Rachel Noble, a researcher at the UNC Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences. Noble said that even if people have running water in their homes, they should follow state-issued guidelines and boil water before drinking it.
“The last thing that western North Carolina needs right now is a sanitation issue,” she said. Noble recounted what happened a few months ago in war-ravaged Gaza in the Middle East to illustrate what could go wrong if water in western North Carolina isn’t properly treated.
“There was actually a Vibrio outbreak in Gaza because people started getting diarrhea from drinking poorly treated water,” Noble said. “You have a situation where the hurricane is causing problems, but you don’t want diarrhea and communicable disease as a layer on top of this. What that means is that you want all members of the community to abide by these drinking water guidelines so that community level sanitation stays effective.”
The “damage and economic loss” in the southern Appalachian region caused by Helene already is estimated to be at least $225 billion, according to a news release from AccuWeather Global Weather Center.
“Helene brought historic devastation and has tragically changed lives forever,” Jon Porter, AccuWeather chief meteorologist, said in a video distributed by AccuWeather. “The level of human suffering, the rising death toll and the tremendous damage to people’s homes and businesses, as well as to critical infrastructure, from telecommunications to roads and highways and water supplies, has been overwhelming.”
Gov. Roy Cooper (left) takes a tour of Ashe, Watauga, and Avery counties where he met with victims of Hurricane Helene, along with community and business leaders to discuss relief and recovery efforts on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. Credit: Paul Barker / NC Governor’s Office
Porter added that there would be no quick fix for the massive destruction of the region caused by the storm.
“While recovery operations have already started, it will be a long process given the widespread destruction of homes, businesses and infrastructure,’ Porter said. “Previous disasters suggest that even 10 years after such a damaging storm, rebuilding and recovery efforts may still be ongoing in some places.”
Porter also cautioned about public health issues that might arise from a protracted recovery.
“The long-term impacts from flooding could also contribute to health conditions due to exposure to mold, mildew, contaminated floodwaters and other hazards,” Porter said. “Tragically, in the coming decade, there may be thousands of excess deaths indirectly caused by the storm or stress from experiencing the devastating impacts.”
Flood-ravaged North Carolina races to restore voting access after Helene
There are battleground states, and then there’s North Carolina. Former President Donald Trump won the state by 1.3 percent in 2020, his lowest margin of victory in any state, and polls now show Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris within just 2 percentage points of each other there. It also has more electoral votes than several of the other swing states that will decide the November election, including Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
“Kamala Harris wins North Carolina, she is the next president of the United States,” Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, said at an event in New York City last week.
In western North Carolina, moisture-laden Helene collided with a cold front that was already dropping rain on the Appalachian Mountains. Hundreds of roads in the region are now impassable or have been wiped off the map by flooding and landslides, communication systems are down, and hundreds of people are still missing. As the North Carolina Department of Transportation put it, “All roads in Western North Carolina should be considered closed.” With just weeks until November 5, thousands of people displaced, mail service shut down or restricted in many ZIP codes, and many roadways shuttered, officials are now rushing to figure out how to handle voting in the midst of disaster.
“This storm is like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetimes in western North Carolina,” Karen Brinson Bell, one of North Carolina’s top election officials, told reporters on Tuesday. “The destruction is unprecedented and this level of uncertainty this close to Election Day is daunting.”
Delivery of absentee ballots in North Carolina had already been delayed by three weeks by former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s last-minute lawsuit to take his name off of millions of already-printed ballots. The state’s election process is already in full swing: the deadline for voter registration in North Carolina is October 11, the early voting period in the state begins on October 17, and early voting ends on November 2. “We will take the measures necessary to ensure there is voting,” Brinson Bell said. But there are innumerable issues to solve first, and state officials still don’t have a full assessment of the damage Helene caused.
“There’s a cascading series of problems,” said Gerry Cohen, a member of the elections board for Wake County, the state’s most populous county, which includes Raleigh.
At the moment, the central logistical problem is that the U.S. Postal Service has suspended service across much of western North Carolina. Even before the storm, more than 190,000 North Carolinians had requested mail-in ballots this election. The agency does not yet have an estimate of when mail will be restored — damage is so severe in some ZIP codes that it may be weeks or even months before local roads are passable. The issue is compounded by the fact that in rural areas, some postal workers use their own vehicles to deliver mail. Neither the state nor the Postal Service knows how many of those cars were destroyed by the storm.
“At this time, we are still assessing damage and impacts,” a spokesperson for the Postal Service told Grist. “As we continue our work on this, we will continue to communicate with local boards of election in impacted areas to ensure the ongoing transport and delivery of election mail as soon as it is safe to do so.”
Residents of Asheville, North Carolina, gather at a fire station to access WiFi and check emergency information after Hurricane Helene. The storm caused record flooding throughout western North Carolina.
Melissa Sue Gerrits / Getty Images
Under state law, it is up to each voter to request a new ballot to the temporary address where they are staying. Voters must mail these ballots back in time for them to reach election offices by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day. The state used to have a three-day grace period for late-arriving ballots, but it ended that policy last year. The Elections Board is currently assessing whether it will ask the state to reinstate it. There’s also no way of tracking where the absentee ballots that counties already sent out ended up, or whether the delivery of those ballots was affected by the storm. “Who knows where they are,” Cohen said.
And then there’s the matter of in-person voting, which faces further logistical hurdles. Brinson Bell said that while there have been no reports of voting equipment or ballots destroyed by Helene, 12 county election offices in western North Carolina are currently closed due to flooding and other storm-related impacts. “There may be polling places affected by mudslides, there may be polling places inaccessible because of damaged roads, there may be polling places with trees that have fallen on them,” Brinson Bell said. There’s no saying, yet, how many of the people who will staff these polling places have been displaced, hurt, or killed by the storm.
Every county in North Carolina must offer at least 13 days of in-person early voting, and right now the state requires counties to open this process on October 17. Cohen said that many counties will struggle to meet that deadline, in particular smaller ones.
“The smaller counties just had one early voting location, and it’s normally at the board of elections office, which is usually downtown,” he said. “Because of the way these mountain towns were laid out in the 1700s or 1800s, they’re near rivers and creeks, so they’re prone to flooding.”
Cohen said he’s heard that the North Carolina legislature, which will convene next week, is considering some flexibility for early voting in affected counties, as well as resources to help these counties establish new voting sites and train up replacement poll workers. He believes the state can still manage a robust election if it provides proper support for local election boards — in other words, he said, “appropriate money.”
But the challenge that eclipses all other voting accessibility issues is the simple fact that people who have been affected by a historic and deadly flood event typically aren’t thinking about where they will cast their ballots — they’re focusing on locating their loved ones, mucking out their houses, finding new housing, filing insurance claims, and dozens of other priorities that trump voting.
The State Board of Elections in North Carolina has a website where residents can check their voter registration status, register a new permanent or temporary address, and monitor the progress of their mail-in ballot. But even if people wanted to find out where or how to vote, hundreds of thousands of customers in the state are currently without power, WiFi, and cell service.
For years, political scientists who study the effects of climate change on political turnout have warned about the inevitability of an event like Helene subverting a national election. “Hurricane season in the U.S. — between June and November every year — usually coincides with election season,” a recent report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or IDEA, said. “The chances of hurricanes disrupting U.S. elections are ever-present and will increase as hurricanes become more common and intense due to climate change.”
Residents of Marshall, North Carolina, search for missing items from a nearby mechanics shop in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The flooding from the storm has destroyed polling places across the western part of the state.
Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Prior to Helene, four elections were significantly disrupted by hurricanes in the 21st century: Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Hurricane Michael in 2018, and Hurricane Ian in 2022. The report by IDEA found that voter turnout can dip precipitously during these events.
“The biggest challenge that we see is not just technology failure, but a decrease in public confidence,” Vasu Mohan, a senior advisor at IDEA who has analyzed how disasters affect elections in dozens of countries, told Grist. “If you’re not prepared, then making last minute accommodations is extremely difficult.” However, Mohan’s research shows that it’s possible to conduct elections fairly after displacement events if communities are given the resources they need.
“I am very, very worried about how [the storm] will affect voting,” said Abby Werner, a pediatrician who lives in Charlotte, which did not sustain severe damage from the storm. Werner and her partner are Democrats, and make a point of voting in person. She fears the storm will suppress voter turnout. “In a series of worries it is an additional wave,” she said.
Brinson Bell’s office will likely face a flurry of lawsuits due to its handling of post-storm voting — it is already navigating a lawsuit, filed by Republican groups prior to the storm, over its handling of hundreds of thousands of voter registrations. But she said the COVID-19 pandemic and prior storms prepared the state for worst-case scenarios. “We held an incredibly successful election with record turnout during the COVID pandemic,” she said. “We’ve battled through hurricanes and tropical storms and still held safe and secure elections. And we will do everything in our power to do so again.”
