The Journal. - Is Asheville No Longer a “Climate Haven”?

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Asheville, North Carolina, was thriving until floodwaters and heavy wind from Hurricane Helene ripped through the region and destroyed large parts of the city's commercial districts. We talk to two business owners who are trying to figure out what comes next.  Further Reading: -The Hurricane That Threatens to Sink Asheville’s Feel-Good Success  -North Carolina in Crisis Mode as Helene Rescues Continue  Further Listening: -Hot, Dry and Booming: A Texas Climate Case Study  -‘Everything Is Gone’ — One Resident on the Maui Wildfires  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

10 days ago, floodwaters and heavy winds from Hurricane Helene ravaged western North Carolina, cutting off utilities and washing away roads and bridges. In the state, at least 77 people died and that number is expected to rise. It is very chaotic. It's a lot of just figuring out how to do the basic things. You know, we don't have running water and we don't have power. The big shelters are full. Yeah, there's still so much need. A lot of the chefs in town have just been setting up cooking food for folks.

Neighbors with big tractors are grading roads and pushing debris out of the way. So it's just been a blur. Just a lot of just trying to survive and trying to help each other out. People are still reaching people. A friend more than just this afternoon that close friends of theirs died. Like, it is unfolding as we speak. I've been hearing people comparing just the absolute level of destruction to Hurricane Katrina. And that's not supposed to happen in the mountains. Megan Parker lives in Asheville.

Up until a few days ago, I owned a yoga and fitness studio here. Another Asheville business owner is Alex Matisse. I'm the CEO and founder of East Fork Pottery, and I live in Flat Rock, North Carolina. We spoke to Alex and Megan last week. They're both navigating what Helene's destruction means for their businesses and contemplating what's next. Welcome to The Journal,

our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leimbach. It's Monday, October 7th. Coming up on the show, what happens when a climate disaster comes to your climate haven? Courage. I learned it from my adoptive mom. Hold my hand. You hold my hand. Woo! Learn about adopting a team from foster care at adoptUSkids.org.

You can't imagine the reward. Brought to you by AdoptUSkids, the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council. Asheville, North Carolina has been booming for a decade. Its mountain views, mild weather, and vibrant local art scene Asheville, North Carolina has been booming for a decade. Its mountain views, mild weather, and vibrant local art scene have drawn people

from around the country. According to the last census report, Asheville's population had grown 13%. And the heart of the city has been its colorful River Arts District, which is known for its bright murals, abundant coffee shops, and small businesses. Businesses like Megan Parker's yoga and fitness studio

called Flow at Foundy, which launched in March. What was it like when you opened it? It was amazing. Our particular building had a ton of big windows and high ceilings, and so it was just this really light, bright, beautiful old building. The fact that we even found anything and that it was that perfect was a dream come true. After Megan and her business partners found the building, there was a lot of construction work they had to do.

We did pretty much all the work ourselves. So we spent three, four months basically building out the studio from the ground up. How much was the investment? It was roughly $120,000 total. So it was most of our savings. In the months after opening, Megan's business was gaining traction.

They were adding classes and feeling like their investment was going to pay off. Not far away is Alex Matisse's pottery company, East Fork. Started in 2009, the company makes a popular dinnerware line and has more than a hundred employees. We have a factory which is kind of split between two buildings. We make about 600,000, 700,000 pieces of pottery a year,

which isn't like a lot for a big pottery factory, but it's a lot for a big pottery factory, but it's a lot from where we started to where we are now. And when you first started hearing about Hurricane Helene, were you worried? No, not really. At first, it didn't seem like Helene would do much damage to Asheville. The storm landed in Florida on September 26th and tore up communities across the South. Soon, predictions for North Carolina got more serious.

North Carolina is preparing for Helene tonight. Of course, we're talking all about Hurricane Helene. Nobody in recent memory has seen a storm of this magnitude. This is going to be a very big storm. We're also learning. The way our studio was set up, we had a mezzanine level, which was above the all-time flood height ever.

And so we had moved all of our equipment up to the mezzanine level. And then we had boarded up the front door with plywood, sealed the front door, we turned off our water valve. So we did like basically everything that we could think of for what we thought was a possible outcome from the storm. As it was raining, most of the team didn't work, but I worked with a few folks just getting

things kind of buttoned up. On the way home, I stopped at a store and I bought a generator and a chainsaw because I'd given my old chainsaw away years ago. That turned out to be a pretty good decision. On Friday, September 27th, the storm hit Asheville. Asheville, North Carolina, that town is basically cut off from the rest of the state right now. Most of the city is totally submerged in water.

Just look at this, you can see the entire home floating in the floodwaters, just floating by, and the Swift Water Rescue Team there ready to respond. We are in full response mode in North Carolina. The river in Asheville, the French Broad, rose 24 feet during the storm. The streets in the River Arts District were so full of water

that people couldn't get there for days. By Monday, the water had receded enough that we could kind of make our way there. There was still a few feet of water, so we had to, you know, it's like you get on the rain boots that we could kind of make our way there. There was still a few feet of water, so we had to, you know, it's like you get on the rain boots and prepare for this operation. We walk up and you could see through the side of our building,

I think from where a truck probably crashed into it. And there's no door. There is a tree trunk hanging from the door. So then we go inside and everything is just destroyed. The garage doors on the building had filled up, and then those garage doors blew out. All of the things within it were sort of pushed around. There was a single yoga mat just hanging from the studio ceiling.

There was actually a memory card that was sitting on my desk in a bowl, and it had lifted straight up kind of to the ceiling, and the bowl hadn't flipped over, and then it had dropped back down, and the memory card was just sitting there. It smelled like oil, and it smelled like sewage. There was a layer of mud that was in some places six inches deep and slowly it just, I knew that the mud was like the mud is it's not good mud. It's like the things you know we spent so many hours doing and trying to get perfect and everything was gone.

It was devastating because we had just opened. We hadn't even been in business for a year for everything is gone, all of that work is gone, but the sense of loss for what could have been because it became immediately clear when we saw the building that it's not salvageable. With all that damage, how much is salvageable? That's next. The building where Meghan Parker had her yoga studio seems to be totaled. Will you be able to recover anything? Um, no, probably not.

And I don't know. Yeah, I don't know where know where we go from here. I hope that we have the opportunity to rebuild real estate in Asheville. Both residential real estate and commercial real estate has been very challenging to come by and so what is very uncertain is, can we even find another space? And what does that look like? And will the rent be affordable?

And can we come back from this? So I would say the intention is there, but all of the logistics are very uncertain at this point. Do you have flood insurance? We do not have flood insurance. So the building was in a 100-year floodplain. And that's, you know, so roughly like a 1% chance that it floods, meaning that it takes on any water.

So our thought process and what we based the decision on was there's a low probability that it floods at all. Even if we take on several feet of standing water, which is highly unlikely, we have a contractor as part of our team will rip out the drywall. Our floor was all waterproof. The electronics were high enough that they wouldn't be damaged.

The value equation didn't make sense for flood insurance that would have been $12,000 plus a year. And so obviously in hindsight, it would have been great to have flood insurance, but we prepared, I would say, for the 100-year flood. We did not prepare for what happened, which was, it sounds like, the thousand-year flood. For Alex Matisse at East Fork, one of his buildings was damaged but not destroyed. His inventory is largely intact and his factory is too. After checking in on his employees, he started thinking about what to do next.

Figured out kind of how we were going to go through the next few weeks and then said, okay, well, it's not work as usual, and we're not, well, we can't make any pottery, but we're not really worried about making pottery right now. Instead, his employees are helping with relief efforts. We organized an aid run from Charlotte. One of our board members who lives in Charlotte, we brought up a bunch of things.

We had staff going around delivering to folks that maybe didn't have mobility. I was at the store where I get parts for my chainsaw and saw a whole line of generators there. So I'm texting, hey, I got a ton of generators sitting in front of me. Do you want me to buy these for you? Can you use them? Alex is trying to keep the paychecks coming

for his employees and is running payroll out of his house because it's one of the few places with reliable internet. And he's thinking about how to keep his business going as Asheville begins the long process of rebuilding. Asheville's infrastructure has been an issue for a long time. Water is going to be the issue for the city of Asheville. We won't be able to make pottery without water, but we can ship pottery.

I can get people working, we're gonna have interesting shift schedules, people are gonna be doing different things, but it will be working, we'll be shipping, and we'll get through this. I feel kind of silly talking about what we experience because it pales, like pales in comparison to what so many other people went through

and have been through and are going through. Communities washed away, people's homes, trailers washed away. The last I heard there was still 15,000 wellness checks that needed to be made. We will get through this. I have no doubt. that needed to be made, we will get through this. I have no doubt.

But how others will, I think, is a question. It's obviously devastating, and we're so lucky. We're the lucky ones. There are still so many people that are missing or have died or watched their homes literally wash away, entire towns that are wiped out. And I think that we still haven't even been able to get a good picture of the level of destruction in this area because those smaller towns have literally been unreachable. I don't think of Asheville as sort of like a place that would have disasters,

wildfires or hurricanes. No, people I think generally thought Asheville was a pretty safe place. I mean, temperate, moderate climate. I think there's things that we could have done. Climate change plays a part in all of this. But no, people did not think of Asheville as a place that was susceptible to hurricanes, to a disaster of this scale. We considered it to be a climate haven. And we thought, you know, we don't get a lot of wildfires. It's pretty far inland.

Sometimes we get heavy rains from hurricanes, but hurricanes don't usually come through here. We don't get tornadoes. And so it's just unimaginable that something like this could happen. How do you reflect on that? When you think about why didn't we prepare better or why didn't we remove everything from the building or why didn't we get flood insurance, it's because this isn't supposed to happen here. This doesn't happen here. And how do you prepare for something

that you didn't even think was possible, you know? What will Asheville look like? I don't know. I think a lot of people will leave. A lot of those folks won't come back. I think you saw that with Katrina. I think Asheville will recover. There are communities where the damage, I think, was much, much more severe. I think was much, much more severe.

I think that always the most vulnerable people get hit the hardest in any of these things. Trailer parks that were in low lying areas. So I don't know yet how Asheville will look on the other side of this. Don't know. on the other side of this? Don't know. Things obviously feel very uncertain right now. Like, where do we go from here?

Do we stay in Asheville? Do we leave Asheville? And I think that there will be some people who leave, but I think that there will be more people who stay. And I think it is because of the amazing community here. And I think that's what is getting a lot of people through. That's like all that you can hold on to. That's all for today, Monday, October 7th.

The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Valerie Borline, Angela Owens, and Rachel Wolff. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.