A week after Tropical Storm Helene hit NC, storm survivors in Yancey and Mitchell counties talk with CPP. Their stories and a photo essay.

Out of the mud. Talking with storm survivors in Yancey and Mitchell counties. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Govus, Buncombe County communication and public engagement director, told reporters during an Oct. 3 briefing that Metropolitan Sewerage District of Buncombe County, which manages sewer systems for all of Buncombe and part of Henderson counties, is largely functioning.

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.

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.”

Helene: Resources By County by Anna MacDonald

More grim news

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.”

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.”

The post In Helene-ravaged Buncombe, even ‘gray water’ is tough to find appeared first on North Carolina Health News.

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. 

Then Hurricane Helene etched a 500-mile path of destruction through the southeastern United States, killing at least 139 people in six states and causing more than $100 billion in damages, according to preliminary estimates. 

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.”

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.” 

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.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Flood-ravaged North Carolina races to restore voting access after Helene on Oct 2, 2024.

Storm damage, power outages, water issues, food shortages and closed roads keep many Western NC school systems closed and seeking way forward.

NC school systems in storm’s wake struggle to adapt 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.

When Amanda Saint went to vote in the 2020 election, she didn’t anticipate having any problems. For years, the 36-year-old nurse had been living and voting just outside of Huntsville, Alabama. But when Saint presented her driver’s license to the poll worker, they said it didn’t match her voter registration records. 

The reason was simple: when Saint got married in 2011, she changed her name with the Social Security Administration. They listed her as “Amanda Lenore Saint,” using her middle name. But Saint’s driver’s license says her name is “Amanda Glasscock Saint,” using her maiden name. 

Such discrepancies are relatively common. According to research from the University of Maryland, roughly 12% of Americans have a non-expired driver’s license that doesn’t list both their current address and name. 

“So I go, ‘Yeah it’s my maiden name instead of my middle name, but I’m still the same person. You saw me at the primaries when I voted. I didn’t have a problem then,’” Saint said. 

But poll workers still required Saint to vote provisionally. To this day, Saint doesn’t know if her provisional ballot was accepted. 

“I felt extremely frustrated because I’m just trying to do my civic duty,” Saint said. “I do the state elections and the primaries because they are important, and to not be able to vote in the big one except with a provisional ballot which may or may not be accepted because of a technical error that I had never dealt with? I fumed about it for months afterward.” 

Most Appalachian states require voters to present some form of ID at the polls. Within the region, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia have implemented new voter ID requirements since the 2020 election, according to USA Today. But all across Appalachia, photo ID requirements of all kinds — new and old, stricter and more lenient — are deeply intertwined with a complex web of legislation, lawsuits and logistical barriers. 

The combined effect? A voting process that gets more complicated by the day. 

‘Just a form of suppression’ 

Karen Pawloski has lived in southeastern Ohio for decades. But she didn’t begin working as deputy director of the Washington County Board of Elections until January 2020 — an experience she describes as “baptism by fire.” 

Since Pawloski’s tenure began, Ohio has made significant changes to its voter ID requirements. Previously, voters could bring non-photographic documents — such as bank statements or utility bills — to the polls to prove their identities. 

“We’re trying to do as much public relations as we can and educating the voters that they do have to bring in a picture ID now,” Pawloski said. “We’re using social media, and any time I interview with the local TV station here, we try to make sure that the voters know that…Voters that come and vote every election, they’re fine. But voters that only vote during presidential years, this is something new for them.”

Ohio now has some of the country’s most stringent photo ID requirements for voters. You can’t present a student ID from a public university at the polls. Or an out-of-state driver’s license. Or an expired driver’s license or passport. Since the state made these changes in 2023, more than 8,000 Ohioans have attempted to vote and had their ballots rejected because they didn’t present an acceptable ID. 

But what counts as an “acceptable ID” varies greatly across Appalachia. Tennessee, Ohio, and South Carolina don’t allow student IDs from public universities. North Carolina does, but unlike Georgia or Mississippi, it doesn’t allow driver’s licenses that have been expired for more than a year — unless you’re 65 and older and your ID was unexpired on your 65th birthday. 

And several Appalachian states don’t accept driver’s licenses from other states — including Tennessee. This requirement frequently confuses voters, according to Christie Campion, a former poll worker from Knoxville. Home to the state’s flagship university, the Appalachian city of just under 200,000 is full of college kids, including thousands of out-of-state students. 

Campion remembers having to give a provisional ballot to a college student who came to vote with a Maryland driver’s license. Although she recommended the student obtain a Tennessee driver’s license, she recognized that the process of making it to the DMV is burdensome in itself. 

“It’s a whole effort to go and get the ID, and then you go to try and get the ID, and they’re like ‘Oh you brought the wrong piece of paper. You have to come back later,’” Campion said. “I think being so restrictive on what counts as ID is just an attempt at suppression.” 

Research from the University of Maryland found that younger voters, Black voters and Latino voters are much less likely to have a driver’s license with their current name and address — or any driver’s license at all. And studies show there is virtually no fraud taking place that could be prevented through photo ID requirements, said University of Kentucky law professor Josh Douglas via email. 

“Overall, studies show that both​ sides embellish the debate a little,” said Douglas, who specializes in election law and advised on Kentucky’s voter ID legislation. “ID laws don't improve integrity, but the amount of disenfranchisement is typically somewhat small — ​though again, that depends on the specifics of the ID law and how strict they are.”

Kentucky’s photo ID requirements are relatively lenient, compared to other Appalachian states, but lawmakers recently tried making things more stringent. State senators passed a bill early this year that would’ve removed university-issued ID cards as a primary document for voter identification. The bill never made it out of House committees. 

University IDs are also under scrutiny in nearby North Carolina. There, the state Republican Party and the Republican National Committee sued the State Board of Elections, seeking to prevent the use of digital university IDs from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A superior court judge initially denied their request, but just last Friday, a North Carolina appeals court blocked the use of the mobile UNC One Card. 

The North Carolina Republican Party and the RNC have also recently filed several other lawsuits, including one seeking to revoke the voter registrations of more than 225,000 North Carolinians. 

‘We want everybody to be as informed as they can’ 

North Carolina isn’t the only Appalachian state shaking things up at the last second. In late September, the Georgia State Election Board passed a controversial rule requiring all voting precincts to count ballots by hand on Election Day and ensure the tallies match machine counts. Back in Ohio, days after he suggested banning ballot drop boxes entirely, Secretary of State Frank LaRose issued a new directive in early September, limiting their use. 

Now, if someone delivers an elderly or disabled voter’s ballot to a drop box, they have to physically enter the county board of elections office and sign a form. County board of elections officials have expressed concerns that this will create longer lines on Election Day. 

But amid a flurry of proposed and enacted changes, multiple organizations working on turnout in Appalachian Ohio aren’t sharing their personal opinions regarding voter ID. They’re too busy sharing information with voters. 

“I think our biggest concern when it went into effect was this education piece, ” said Adriane Mohlenkamp, co-president of the League of Women Voters of Athens County. “We were hoping to see some statewide wide-scale education efforts, and I know there's been some efforts around education, but it has not been maybe as robust as we would’ve hoped for.”

Lack of education is a big issue when it comes to voter ID. Fifty-five percent of people living in states with photo ID requirements either think they aren’t in place or don’t know if they are, according to research from the University of Maryland. Among voters aged 18 to 29, nearly 66 percent aren’t sure if photo ID is required — a particular concern in Athens County, home to more than 21,000 students attending Ohio University. 

Over the past several months, Mohlenkamp and the rest of her team have registered plenty of college students — and voters of all ages. They’ve written letters to the editor, posted on Facebook, done interviews with local newspapers and distributed non-partisan voter information cards at libraries. 

And on Ohio University’s campus, students are running their own initiatives to get their peers to the polls. In his capacity as the Student Senate’s Governmental Affairs Commissioner, sophomore Donald Theisen and his senators have spent hours passing out registration forms, preparing slideshows and participating in election-related events, including a recent debate watch party. Theisen wouldn't share his personal opinions on changes to Ohio election law. But he’s feeling pretty optimistic about Election Day. 

“My job is to represent everybody on the campus regardless of how they may feel — whether they may lean left or right, whether they support or disavow the most recent changes to the law,” Theisen said. “Our job is to get everybody engaged in the process, trying to get it so that everybody can be registered and vote as easily as possible. We want everybody to be as informed as they can, and I think that the turnout at OU is gonna be pretty good.” 

The post Across Appalachia, Photo ID Requirements Complicate Voting appeared first on 100 Days in Appalachia.

Dozens of people were killed across multiple states this week as Hurricane Helene swept across parts of the Southeastern United States, bringing heavy rains and a 15-foot storm surge.

Coastal towns and cities in Florida were devastated when the Category 4 hurricane made landfall, but communities inland bore a similar brunt as the storm carved a path through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee.

“Turn around, don’t drown,” North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper urged drivers in a press conference. 

At least 42 people have died from the storm. As of Friday, Florida reported seven deaths. Georgia, meanwhile, reported 15, and South Carolina, 17. In both of the latter states, most of the known fatalities were from falling trees and debris. North Carolina reported two deaths, including a car crash that killed a 4-year-old girl after a road flooded. 

Atlanta received 11.12 inches of rain in 48 hours, breaking its previous record of 9.59 inches in the same time period from 1886, according to Bill Murphey, Georgia’s state climatologist. More than 1 million Georgia residents also lost power in the storm, particularly in southern and eastern parts of the state. 

In western North Carolina, officials sounded alarms and went door-to-door evacuating residents south of the Lake Lure Dam in Rutherford County after the National Weather Service warned that a dam failure was “imminent.” Emergency crews also conducted more than 50 swift water rescues across the region, with one sheriff’s department warning it could not respond to all of the 911 calls due to flooded roads. The North Carolina Department of Transportation warned on social media that “all roads in Western NC should be considered closed” due to flooding from Helene.

In Tennessee, more than 50 people were stranded on the roof of a hospital due to heavy flooding and had to be rescued by helicopter. Residents of Cocke County in Tennessee were also asked to evacuate after reports that a separate dam could fail, although officials later said the dam failure had been a false alarm. In South Carolina, the National Weather Service said the storm was “one of the most significant weather events… in the modern era.”

The hurricane’s widespread flooding was worsened by climate change, scientists told Grist. Hurricane Helene was an unusually large storm with an expansive reach. After forming in the Caribbean, it traveled over extremely warm ocean waters in the Gulf of Mexico that enabled the storm to intensify more quickly than it may have otherwise. In fact, Helene went from a relatively weak tropical storm to a Category 4 in just two days. Warmer air also holds more moisture, supercharging the storm’s water content and leading to more rapid rainfall and intense flooding. 

“When that enhanced moisture comes up and hits terrain like the Appalachian Mountains,” said University of Hawaiʻi meteorology professor Steve Businger, “it results in very, very high rainfall rates, exceptionally high rainfall rates and that unfortunately results in a lot of flash flooding.”

Shel Winkley, a meteorologist at the scientific group Climate Central, said research has shown that the Gulf’s current extra-warm ocean temperatures were ​​made up to 500 times more likely with climate change. “One of the things that we’re seeing with these big storms, especially as they seem to become more frequent, is that they’re no longer natural disasters, but that they’re unnatural disasters,” Winkley said. “It’s not just a normal weather system anymore.” 

Hurricanes are naturally occuring, of course, but the conditions that led to Helene’s severity — its rapid intensification and heavy rainfall — were partially driven by warmer ocean and atmospheric temperatures from the burning of fossil fuels. “There is a fingerprint of climate change in that process,” Winkley said. 

“This summer was record warm globally and there was a record amount of water vapor in the global atmosphere,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, or UCLA. Both factors contributed to what the Southeastern U.S. experienced this week. “This is one of the more significant flood events in the U.S. in recent memory.”  

Initial estimates for the storm’s damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure range between $15 billion and $26 billion, the New York Times reported. Businger said he expects the enormous loss to fuel more conversations about the precarity of the existing property insurance system. “The cost to society is becoming extravagant,” he said.

Scientists noted that the fact that the storm’s winds increased by 55 miles per hour in the 24 hours before it made landfall also made it deadlier.

“It was so strong and moving so fast it just didn’t have time to weaken very much before it made it far inland,” Swain said. Rapid intensification is particularly dangerous, he said, because people often make decisions on how to prepare for storms and whether or not to evacuate based on how bad they appear to be initially. 

“It was one of the faster intensifying storms on record,” Swain said. “This is not a fluke. We should expect to see more rapidly intensifying hurricanes in a warming climate.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline After battering coastal towns, Hurricane Helene causes deadly flooding across five states on Sep 27, 2024.

Controlled burns, collaborative efforts between agencies, ecosystem restoration and less fire-prone developments are all key strategies.

Beating blazes before they spark. Strategies to limit fire hazards in NC coastal ecosystems. 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 2017, when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security declared the electoral system “critical infrastructure,” state and local election officials around the country were forced to take cybersecurity much more seriously. And it wasn’t long before physical threats and misinformation also became a greater concern. 

In North Carolina, state board of elections director Karen Brinson Bell said the DHS’s designation “didn’t take anything off her plate.” Instead, the responsibilities of election officials like her only grew, especially in battleground states like North Carolina.

In the lead up to this year’s election, Brinson Bell said “everything is a concern” when it comes to election security. Like her counterparts across the region, she’s especially focused on cybersecurity, preventing physical threats and battling misinformation around the elections process, while communicating to voters that the electoral system in North Carolina is actually safe and secure. 

“We had to become much more adept at telling our story, being accessible to the public, helping them understand what is really a complex, methodical, multilayer process in all that we do,” Brinson Bell said. “And it’s not soundbite friendly.”

Other states in the region like Pennsylvania, which was at the center of the 2020 election denial campaign and is considered a “must-win” for both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential race, are also confronting the same concerns as North Carolina. 

Earlier this year, Pennsylvania launched a task force focused on election threats like misinformation related to the adoption of new voting systems and no-excuse mail-in voting.  

“In recent years, we’ve seen bad-faith actors attempt to exploit these changes by spreading lies and baseless conspiracy theories, and attempting to delegitimize our safe, secure and accurate elections,” said Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt in a February news release. “This task force has been working together to develop and coordinate plans to combat this dangerous misinformation and continue providing all eligible voters with accurate, trusted election information.”

2020 Hindsight

Many election officials didn’t have a plan for handling the 2020 presidential election fallout, Brinson Bell said. From protests fueled by misinformation and lawsuits seeking to overturn the results, states like Georgia and Pennsylvania were mired in controversy, and North Carolina was “just on the bubble” of facing the same issues. 

“For North Carolina, we have to think about, what can we learn from those states?” Brinson Bell said. “It’s unfortunate what they went through, but it’s unfortunate if we don’t learn from it.” 

In North Carolina, according to one recent poll, nearly 50% of those who responded said they won’t believe the results of the election.  

One major focus for Brinson Bell is making sure that voters understand the election process and how it actually operates — even promoting physical transparency at the county level, like urging election staff to use clear plastic tubs with labels to store ballots instead of recycled cardboard boxes. 

“That’s not election jargon,” Brinson Bell said, “but it’s something clear to the public.” 

Now, Georgia, another battleground state in the region, is mired in controversy surrounding its state election board, which recently approved new rules that critics believe will “sow confusion, compromise ballot security and potentially enable rogue county boards to block certification of election results in November,” according to reporting by the Washington Post.  

Later this month, the board is scheduled to vote on whether to require counties to count ballots by hand at each precinct, which critics believe could produce inaccurate results and be less secure. 

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger described the election board as “a mess,” and told the Washington Post, “Legal precedent is pretty clear. You shouldn’t change rules in the middle of an election.” 

Physical Security, New Rules and Turnover

Elections officials are also working to boost physical security in the lead-up to the election. 

In North Carolina, Brinson Bell said workers are securing doors and installing panic buttons at county elections offices. Staff are also being trained in de-escalation techniques to counter voter intimidation and other physical threats. Earlier this year, Georgia passed an election security law requiring police to take a one-hour class on election laws, which also included training in de-escalation, though the new law doesn’t go into effect until 2025. 

In North Carolina, a 2023 voter identification law will be in effect for this year’s election and photo ID will be required. Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee and Ohio also have strict photo ID requirements for voting.

Staff turnover, specifically county election directors, has been another concern of Brinson Bell, who earlier this summer said more than 60% of county election directors have left their post since 2019. For many of the replacements, she said, this will be their first presidential election. 

“While there’s much that’s the same processes and routines, the volume, the intense scrutiny and being a battleground state with so many high profile contests on our ballot this year, it’s just a different environment to be a new director,” Brinson Bell said.  

Urban-Rural Divide

It’s not just Appalachia’s battleground states taking election security seriously. Other states in the region are also working to combat misinformation and thwart physical and cybersecurity threats.

Deak Kersey, chief deputy and chief of staff for the West Virginia Secretary of State’s Office, said the state has focused on cybersecurity since DHS’s critical infrastructure designation went into effect. 

“West Virginia was not in a great spot eight years ago,” Kersey said. “Nobody knew what cybersecurity really was, as far as the Feds really considered it.” 

Since then, the state has pushed to disperse Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, funds to counties, which have used the funds to update voting equipment, like purchasing new ballot-marking equipment that’s ADA accessible and electronic poll books. In August, the state election commission approved sending nearly $1 million in HAVA funds to 24 counties. 

DHS also awarded $1 million to North Carolina this year, but the money can’t be spent until the state’s General Assembly authorizes it. If and when it does, then the state elections office will have to decide whether to disperse it between counties or keep some of it at the state level to continue funding a statewide cybersecurity expert to monitor for doxing, denial-of-service attacks, phishing schemes and other online threats.  

“I don’t mean to make light of a million dollars, but that doesn’t go far in a state with 100 counties,” Brinson Bell said.

The funding issues hit especially hard in the state’s rural counties.

“I think some of the concerns in Western North Carolina really are reflective of sort of that rural-urban divide in North Carolina — the economically distressed counties versus those that are prospering more,” Brinson Bell said. 

It’s a concern across Appalachia, where most of the region is rural. And while federal funding will help, elections officials have less than two months left before the election to see how far it will go to update equipment, implement new security measures and hire new people to replace outgoing directors.

The post In Appalachia’s Battleground States, Election Officials Worry About Cyber Security, Physical Threats and Misinformation appeared first on 100 Days in Appalachia.

By Grace Vitaglione

Child care took center stage at the legislature this past year, as advocates sounded the alarm about potential closures and/or price hikes when federal funding dried up in July. But the issue of affordable and accessible child care has been around for far longer. Public funding for child care in North Carolina stagnated for a decade before the pandemic. 

That’s part of why the sector’s in crisis now, advocates say. 

“This has been a problem that’s been smoldering for over a decade, and the pandemic threw gas on it, and now we have a crisis,” said Sherry Melton, lobbyist and consultant for the NC Licensed Child Care Association.

In June, state lawmakers agreed at the last minute to direct about $67 million to keep child care providers afloat for about six months. House Speaker Tim Moore (R-Kings Mountain) said at the time that the rest of the funding would come through in January.

“When it comes to child care, this is a key thing that we need to fund because we know we need a workforce,” Moore told reporters in June. “There are mostly women that are affected by this, but some men as well who cannot enter the workforce because they cannot afford or do not have access to child care.”

But this week, though lawmakers have been back in Raleigh to do a budget update, child care has not been on the table.

Most states, including North Carolina, primarily support child care with federal funds and supplement it with state money, Melton said. But neither federal nor state dollars have kept up with higher costs. In recent years, funding increases from North Carolina’s lawmakers have been “incremental and gradual and not enough,” she argued.

But some states do a better job than North Carolina in accommodating the growing cost and need for child care, mostly by dedicating funding to keep child care centers afloat and changing reimbursement rates and criteria.

Variable funding over time

Public money for child care in North Carolina usually flows into specific programs. This ensures that child care providers have multiple avenues for support, according to Ariel Ford, who just stepped down as the director of the Division of Child Development and Early Education at the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services. 

There hasn’t been a large state investment in early childhood education since the early 2000s, Ford said. And while federal money has increased, she said it’s not increased nearly enough.

In the 2011-12 biennium, when Republicans took over the state legislature, leadership said that one of their main priorities was to cut spending, as reported by multiple outlets at the time. The state legislature overrode a veto by then-Gov. Bev Perdue and made around a 20 percent budget cut to Smart Start and NC Pre-K (then called More at Four), EducationWeek reported. 

That was the beginning of flat funding in the state for child care, Ford said. 

For example, Smart Start saw a cut of more than $30 million in the budget appropriations from 2010-11 to 2011-12, according to the organization’s 2012-13 annual report.

Having multiple sources of child care subsidy, and differing eligibility criteria, can be complicated. Smart Start Chief Strategy Officer Safiyah Jackson said it can be difficult for parents to figure out where and how to access help, but that Smart Start can serve as a “lighthouse” to direct them to resources in their community.

Mostly flat budgets

Smart Start is a comprehensive approach to early childhood from birth to age 5, Jackson said. It’s primarily funded by allocations from the state legislature, with some private dollars added on — usually about a 15 percent match. The program is not just child care support, it also includes things like child and family health programs. Most of their funding does go to early childhood education. 

What also is confusing is that the term “Smart Start” refers to the network as a whole, which is made up of the NC Partnership for Children — a statewide agency — along with 75 local, county-based partnerships with independent nonprofits that help children.

The statewide organization distributes funds among the county-based partnerships, as well as provides support and oversees the local partnerships, Jackson explained. Legislation requires Smart Start to spend 70 percent of its budget on early child care and education, with the rest going to functions such as family support, child and family health programs or local systems building.

The local organizations are public-private partnerships that raise money of their own in addition to the state money they receive. The state budget instructs them how much they have to raise in matching dollars and sets limits on what they can spend on administration. 

About half of the overall Smart Start network’s budget goes to subsidies to help families pay for child care; each local partnership distributes those dollars within the community, Jackson said. That’s separate from the state child care subsidy program, which goes through the DHHS Division of Child Development and Early Education.

From the years between 2011 and 2023, the state budget allotment for child care subsidy programs stayed roughly around $110 million, according to data from the legislature’s nonpartisan Fiscal Research Division provided to NC Health News by lawmakers. In the past fiscal year, that number ticked up by about $30 million.  

State funding for child care capacity building, including Smart Start-related activities, has hovered around $52 million since 2011-12, according to the Fiscal Research Division data. Those dollars include tuition reimbursement for early education teachers, as well as assistance for child care facilities to increase or maintain their star rating level. There’s other Smart Start funding that goes to child and family health programs, family support and other forms of local child care support.

During the dark days of the pandemic, funding for child care was a rare bright spot. Typically, federal support for child care to North Carolina runs at about $400 million a year, but that grew to about $1.3 billion a year as a result of the American Rescue Plan Act, Ford said. 

Those funds allowed the centers to bump up teacher pay, hire more teachers and even provide people with benefits, sometimes for the first time.

More recently, state lawmakers prioritized more funding for child care. In fiscal year 2024-25, lawmakers increased the state budget for the child care subsidy program to $150.5 million, according to the Fiscal Research Division.

State lawmakers also directed almost $1 million in funding to the NC Tri-Share Child Care Pilot Program in 2023, in which employers, eligible employees and the state equally split the price of child care for working families. That’s becoming an avenue for some families to apply for a child care subsidy, but the pilot is only available in select counties.

Facing a cliff

But those extra federal dollars for child care came to an end this past summer, prompting something of a crisis for many child care centers. 

The end of those dollars prompted a flurry of advocacy activity this past summer, where providers, parents and business leaders all pushed lawmakers for money to maintain child care funding. 

State lawmakers responded with an additional $67.5 million to make up for some disappearing federal pandemic-era dollars. According to advocates, it wasn’t nearly enough. 

Lauren Horsch, spokesperson for Senate Leader Phil Berger (R-Rockingham), wrote in an email that the state “would not be in this situation had Congress not pumped tens of billions of dollars into states and then pulled the rug out from under them.”

“Addressing the childcare needs in North Carolina is going to take more than just money, and simply having the government subsidize childcare is not a long-term solution,” she said. “Conversations about the role of the business community and any potential policy solutions will undoubtedly take place as legislators prepare for next year’s long session.”

Some states started increasing their investments into child care, such as increasing subsidy reimbursement rates and giving child care teachers better access to care for their own children.

The population of children aged 0-4 in N.C. increased from over 543,000 to about 596,000 from 2000 to 2023, according to data from Carolina Demography. While the number grew overall, there was a big rise in the number of preschoolers in the 2000s which slowly drifted down. 

The needs of young children with mental, emotional and behavioral challenges have increased along with the cost of care, Iheoma Iruka, professor in the Department of Maternal Child Health at UNC Chapel Hill, wrote in an email. She also pointed out that young children are often undercounted in the census.

“Just doing a flat line investment is not going to keep things open, given the cost of everything that we have here, particularly for child care providers and the workforce costs,” she said.

The recent drop in the number of children doesn’t justify flat funding when services — especially property and labor in N.C. — have increased in cost so much, Melton echoed.

The post Child care shortage isn’t a new problem; advocates decry decades of inadequate public money appeared first on North Carolina Health News.