Amanda Green
Eastern Kentucky University
On Friday September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene dumped 12-20 inches of rain on the western Carolina and eastern Tennessee region (National Weather Service), causing 123 fatalities in western Carolina and eastern Tennessee, over $59.6 billion in damages in North Carolina, and leaving the city of Asheville without water for 53 days until November 22, 2024. When my friends stopped responding to text messages, around 11 am that Friday morning, I didn’t worry. When they didn’t respond for 24 hours, I began to turn to other sources of information, including messages from the President of Warren Wilson College, to determine what was happening to my friends and a place I twice called home.
Warren Wilson messages begin on Wednesday September 25 to alert the community to the impending disaster. On Thursday September 26, President Damián J. Fernández writes to the community, rallying them to prepare to weather the storm. One day later, on Friday September 27 when the brunt of Hurricane Helene has hit, the president writes again to report that many Sodexo food service staff were unable to reach campus due to road closures from flooding and fallen trees. The President reports, with a comforting tone, that he and others banded together and prepared meals for students.
Warren Wilson lies above the Swannanoa River which reached historic flooding levels and the devastation to the small town of Swannanoa remains unfathomable. By 4:30 pm that Friday the President’s tone has shifted. He reports that the cafeteria is open, providing food and drinking water but “most of our operational systems are compromised.” The university had no power, no internet and no running water. By 6:40 pm the President is directly addressing student’s families who are concerned about their student’s safety. Some hope to pick their students up, but over the next 24 hours it becomes clear this is not immediately possible.
By the following day, President Fernández reports that breakfast, lunch, and dinner are being provided. Students are “fed and hydrated.” Because Warren Wilson is a federal work college, complete with a student farm, they are able to access non-potable well water for washing dishes and flushing toilets. Drinking water was delivered to campus at 10:45 am on Sunday September 29. On September 30, all livestock (most of whom miraculously survived the storm) were removed from campus. By October 1, the President reports that the campus has all the emergency food, water, and supplies it will need. All additional donations should be sent into other parts of the region. By October 4, the university decides to suspend classes until October 21 and students are permitted to either stay on campus or leave. On October 28, 2024, 31 days after the event, students returned to campus for in-person classes, with boil water advisories still in place.
Watching this disaster unfold, I was filled with dread, a visceral dread which surges through me just revisiting the events. Yet, it is necessary for those of us in higher education and those of us who study student food insecurity to lay the catastrophe bare, to consider how and if we are prepared to deal with two intersecting disasters: student food insecurity and increasingly severe weather events. These events make students more vulnerable in two ways: first, in the immediate aftermath of events students are at risk of not accessing clean water and food; second, when students are forced to leave campus, they can sometimes lose access to key resources such as food and housing.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, we learned from our research with students at our university, that the immediate closures of campus made some students quite vulnerable: they had no home to return to and they had invested all their money in purchasing meal plans and supplies. For a short time, these students lived in precarity, living in their cars with limited food availability. But, our university, like many others, re-opened to vulnerable students like these: select dorms and one cafeteria were opened with a skeleton staff. Our interviewees expressed relief and gratitude that they had a place to go amidst the chaos the pandemic caused. And, with the additional federal relief funds from Covid that went to both students and institutions of higher education (amongst others), students weathered the pandemic. Because of Hurricane Helene, many colleges were forced to temporarily close including Warren Wilson, UNC Asheville, Appalachian State, and Mars Hill University, but their cafeterias and dorms remained open to students who were in need, and some, like App State, provided free meals for the wider community in the immediate recovery.
To conclude this essay, I want to suggest two research paths forward which we might follow as severe weather events become more frequent. First, in collaboration with our university’s housing and dining, we should begin discussing the preparedness of our system should our campuses be cut off from potable water, food deliveries, and food-service staff. Second, we may want to know how reliant our students are on campus food systems for meeting their everyday needs. Using anthropological methods and theory, can we mobilize new insights into these emerging issues and can we advocate for more sound policies based on research.
My friends in western Carolina are safe, though living with significant trauma and the loss of people and places that were near and dear to them. Like the students and staff of Warren Wilson College, they made do, and they helped one another, moving tree limb after tree limb from their roads, hauling and sharing water from wells and distribution points, sharing updates to extended friends and family networks anytime cellular and wireless networks appeared. Mallory McDuff, environmental education professor at Warren Wilson reflected on the experience of Helene, that the event offered, “one model of how to live in community in a climate emergency.” While experiencing devastation, students at Warren Wilson came together each morning to build work crews and celebrate small wins such as the recovery and return of their lost livestock (pigs, in particular).
We have the opportunity to learn from this model, how campuses can come together to best prepare their infrastructure, their students, and their staff, for climate disasters, knowing that universities are foundational to keeping many students housed and fed through both pandemics and natural disasters.
