Originally published at crisis magazine
I went to bed on Thursday night the 29th of September shrugging off the approaching hurricane Helene. I live in the mountains of North Carolina, and I know hurricanes generally peter out by the time they get to the hills. My neighbor and I did think the night before that maybe one of us should go get some extra gas, just in case. We didn’t.
I was not the only one who wildly miscalculated the storm. To situate the story a bit, we are in Polk County, which is where the Lake Lure dam was now famously near failure. That’s up the hill from me, more into the mountains; and, as you have likely seen, up from there the devastation is still something being revealed daily. Where I am, in the lower land, the trouble was mostly with an amazing number of trees and power lines down. We got power back about a week after the storm, which seems like a marvel.
Naturally, when all normalcy breaks down, one reflects on things. The most normal thing that was gone was our connection to “the world” via the internet and cell phones, since the towers were down or very spotty; and,
