Background: My family and I live in Asheville, NC, and last fall we rode out the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. I have been urban homesteading and low-level prepping just outside of the city since a few years before COVID. The pandemic showed some folks close to me that I'm not entirely crazy to imagine that resource distribution systems and social order are not 100% rock solid forever. Our preps have ramped up gradually to what I'd call medium level. We garden veggies and greens, I hunt for game meat, can meals and veggies with water bath and pressure, have a couple of chest freezers in the basement, a few shelves of canned foods and dry beans, packed a go-bag, trained wilderness first aid, stock water filtration and camp cooking gear, keep extra gas and propane on hand, etc. That kind of thing. Not end-of-the-world restart civilization level stuff, but thinking ahead a little. One thing I didn't have going into it was a generator, but we bought after about a week when the food began to spoil.

When Helene hit we really had no idea how bad it would be. I knew we'd lose power and have a wet basement, but the power went out on a Wednesday night and didn't come back on for seventeen days. Cell service was gone for almost that long, which I think no one predicted. The water system for the entire city of 80,000 people failed on about the second day, and it didn't come back online for almost two months. All roads in and out of town were impassable for several days, including the interstates. Water tank trucks and emergency food showed up at distribution sites around town after a couple lanes of highway got dug out. Schools were out for the entire month of October.

(Disclaimers: I'm just one guy. I don't speak for anyone else. I'm not pushing an agenda or have any grievances. My family was extremely lucky to avoid injury or major property damage. Many, many people had it far worse than us. Also, I live just outside town past some farms. I didn't experience life in the downtown city setting, so forgive me if I'm ignorant of different goings on in denser neighborhoods.)

Lessons and reflections from my experience:

1. Most people defaulted immediately to being really genuinely good. The sense of community support, generosity, and good will was palpable. Lots of people set up roadside kitchens and gave away food, restaurants fed whole neighborhoods, churches became distribution hubs, folks drove around clearing debris with their work equipment, and on and on and on. Yes, there was some looting of some stores. That sucks. Yes, there were some robberies of TV's from empty houses and other businesses. But overall I didn't hear of roving bands of criminals with guns taking advantage of the weak even though law enforcement was pretty well tied up full-time with rescue and recovery for a while. I didn't hear anyone talking politics or sniping or price gouging. It was a lot of love and support, and everyone also took a turn needing to accept help and support too.

2. Know your neighbors. Folks in my neighborhood already help each other out with watering plants and holding the mail when we're out of town and we all talk regularly and have a baseline of trust. This made it easy to come together during the blackout and have a neighborhood plan for communication and emergency situations. And who had what resources and protection. It would have been tougher to knock on a stranger's door and introduce myself during the emergency.

3. Communication was key. We felt very isolated from the rest of town and the world for a long time. I stupidly had no battery powered radio prior to the event, so I found myself sitting in the car for the daily radio briefings. On streetcorners folks set up whiteboards for information about food, medicine, activities, gatherings, and requests for supplies.

4. Doing every little thing took more time and energy than you'd think. All the coordination of light, water, cleaning, timing, supplies, made each meal kind of a big deal. Days turned into missions: "Today we're going out to look for water refills..." "Today we're getting groceries and ice...." "Today we're going to go check on Julie and then go sit outside the library where they say there's wifi signal so we can email our parents and let them know we're OK."

5. Toilets need to flush. That's a big draw of water that became very apparent quickly. Gray water for this purpose became as valuable as drinking water. Able-bodied folks went door-to-door hauling water buckets for flushing at apartment buildings and nursing homes.

6. Showers go away with no city water. We have a spring that feeds garden hoses, so we set up an outdoor shower with a tarp for privacy. Neighbors came by regularly to get clean, and a lot of people around town had a rougher go of it, I think.

7. Flashlights and headlamps are great, but having a room lit up with a lamp was desireable. After Helene I purchased several small Ryobi converters to sit on my tool batteries and provide one plug for a room lamp anywhere in the house.

8. My chest freezers stayed cold longer than I expected. I kept them closed and had a temperature probe. They took about three or four days to go from -5 to 32 degrees. Then another day to get up to about 40. At that point I abandoned them and did what I could to salvage my game meat with a community venison stew and a round of pressure canning.

9. Dual fuel generator was a game-changer. At first we said "We should get a generator when this is over." Then after a week with no power we said, "What the hell are we talking about? We need a generator right now!" With propane it ran at full blast and went through those tanks quickly. Then I switched to gasoline and it allowed the motor to drop down when not drawing power and that fuel seemed to last longer overall. We ran it a few hours at a time twice a day to cool the fridge and recharge phones and headlamp batteries.

10. Cooking: I had a big propane burner for canning which was a bit too much for cooking meals and a small backpacking camp stove for boiling water that was not enough for meals. I needed a goldilocks middle way. After the storm I bought a GasOne dual burner propane stove. A Coleman camp stove would have also done the trick.

11. We had extra coffee beans but no way to grind them with no power. I now have a hand grinder. I like it better, and we use it now for daily coffee instead of the electric grinder.

12. What got gone from store shelves quickly (and I was glad to have extra on hand!) 10W-30 motor oil, hand sanitizer, batteries.

13. Cash is king. No power means no credit card readers. I was very glad for my cash stash.

14. Sundown was bedtime. I slept better than I have in years after wearing myself out everyday running around doing stuff. When power and cell service and the internet came back up I spent an extra couple of days slowly reintegrating. It felt weird to get texts and read the news again. Very thin and distant after living so deliberately for an extended period. I really really didn't care about what policitician said what about what. People were helping each other load water jugs and dig out from destroyed homes and living in tents on the high school lawn with helicopters flying rescue missions and delivering feed to trapped livestock. TV jerks arguing about whose fault it was or who didn't help enough was white noise to me.

Last week I visited a friend an hour north of Asheville in Burnsville, which got hit really hard. The beautiful river is all gouged out and gravelly, totally different now. It's a constant sadness to see. Across the road were foundations of three houses. My friend told me that their neighbor who lived there was killed when his house was picked up and washed away. The neighbors in the other two houses got out and lived, but there's nothing left of their homes but concrete foundations. Everything they own is downstream somewhere in the riverbanks and in the trees. And this played out thousands of times all around the mountains. We'll be cleaning out the rivers and streams and mud for years.

If you're curious about anything I didn't mention here, please feel free to ask. I learned a lot, and I hope others can benefit from the crazy misfortune that this whole beautiful area is still dealing with.