This conversation originally aired in the Dec. 8, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.
If you’re in an area that’s struck by a disaster, how do you get information? Especially if power and cell service have been knocked out? You might have to use a more old-fashioned technology — the radio. Because radios work on batteries, and they don’t depend on the internet or cell reception. That’s what happened in western North Carolina when Hurricane Helene struck. Inside Appalachia’s partner station, Blue Ridge Public Radio, became a crucial source of information as the disaster unfolded.
Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams reached out to Blue Ridge Public Radio News Director Laura Lee to learn how the station operated through Hurricane Helene — while also covering the storm and its aftermath.
Adams: Hurricane Helene was expected, but I don’t think it was expected to hit western North Carolina as hard as it did. Did you all have any indication this was coming? What preparations were you all able to make ahead of time?
Lee: We had expectations of a storm. I think we thought it would just be another bad storm, maybe a power outage for a day or two. Never dreamed of anything of this scale or scope. I don’t think we could have possibly imagined that. We had heavy rain in the days leading up to the storm, so we knew the ground was already saturated, and I think that certainly made us a little bit nervous, more nervous than we would have been about another storm warning. But in terms of preparations, we really didn’t think about it any more than we would any other storm.
Adams: What was the moment where you knew this was going to be something more disastrous that had been expected? Was there one single moment, or was it sort of a cascade of things that happened?
Lee: I think it was a cascade. I had one reporter who was out in the southern part of our coverage area, so south of Asheville, Brevard, Henderson, and one of the pivotal moments for me was losing contact with him because the cell towers were down, and literally not knowing where he was. That stretched on for almost three days.
As a news director and as a human being, that was probably one of the high-stress, pivotal moments, when we were not able to get in touch with him, and sending messages and not knowing if they were going through. Then we did lose power at the station. I wasn’t physically here when that was happening, but we had to switch to a generator. That was, as you might imagine, when you’re on the air and those kinds of things happen, pretty chaotic. I knew when that happened, that this was much bigger than we imagined. But honestly, when you’re so involved in it and things are changing so quickly, I’m not even sure, even now, six weeks later, that I’ve had a chance to fully think about what those turning points were in those first few days where it was really intense.
Adams: So there’s no cell service, no internet. The water system was out. You lost power at one point. How were you all able to come together and make a plan to actually cover this storm?
Lee: We were able to get the power restored pretty quickly, and where our studio is located, thankfully, downtown was one of the earlier places to get internet restored, so that made a big difference, just in terms of the day-to-day work. We actually were able to open our doors to other journalists in the region and other national journalists who were in town. Our offices became a workspace, if you will, for a lot of different media outlets, because we were able to get power and internet back pretty quickly. It certainly changed our on-air dynamic.
Probably a couple of days in, I realized that what we typically do as public radio journalists, which is very concentrated on storytelling and narrative, was not going to be the name of the game for the next week or two. I said this to the team, “We are really going to be a conduit for information,” because we were learning that radio is one of the only forms of communication that people still had. At the time, the Buncombe County emergency response teams and other emergency response teams across the region were doing either daily meetings, or Buncombe County was doing twice-daily briefings. We just started to “hold air” and stay on the radio upwards of 12 hours a day to make sure that people were getting the information that they needed, because the information was so critical to daily living.
Things like, here’s where you can find water, here’s where they’re going to have MREs (meals ready to eat). I remember there was a period of probably a week where we were trying to help people figure out if they needed their oxygen tanks refilled, where they could go to do that. So it was quite a pivot. And then, just in terms of the amount of time that we were on the air, we’re not accustomed to staying on the air that long. It was a completely different environment than most of us were accustomed to working in, and I’m really proud of the way that they adapted to meet the needs of the community.
Photo Credit: Blue Ridge Public Radio
Adams: There was a several day period where there was very little information coming out of western North Carolina. I remember people trying to reach people they knew there, and not hearing anything back because the cell phones were down. So as the disaster unfolded, and y’all started to get a sense of what the bigger picture was, I’d like to hear a little bit more about what you did to reach your listenership and report on it accurately and make sure they were getting good, reliable information.
Lee: I was especially attuned to making sure that this was good, solid, reliable information — as we always are, but I felt a heightened sense of obligation. Gas was not in short supply, but difficult to obtain for a lot of people because of road outages, [and] was a cash only system because nobody had the ability to run your credit card. So people’s ability to travel is very limited, and I did not want to send people to a place where they weren’t going to be able to get what we had told them they would be able to get, especially when it’s something as critical to existence as water and food. A lot of it felt repetitious for us, but I think that was critically important for the people that were listening. We’ve heard in subsequent days of people who have written to us with stories of how they had no other communication, how they dug up an old radio and some batteries, or they had a hand-crank radio, and that we were their only source of any information for several days. That’s a responsibility that this team took really seriously.
Then, we did get a lot of people saying, “Hey, I can’t get in touch with my relative, my friend.” People from all over the country, so trying to also share reliable other sources of information where they could go to find out. “Here’s the phone number that you can use to call that county emergency management line to figure out if your family member’s okay, or to report that you haven’t talked to them.” Some of this was both on the air and in the end on the web, but also sometimes just behind the scenes, making those phone calls to make sure people got what they needed on the internet. It was quite a shift for us, because we’ve really had to focus on digital news and increasing our digital presence. That was not particularly useful at the outset, because no one had cell service and almost no one had internet service. So we had to make some pivots there.
When we did sort of get back up and online, and other people were able to read it, we were very fortunate through the North Carolina Local News Network — who pitched in and helped us in so many ways, I can’t begin to thank them — but one of the many ways was that they connected us with some other resources, BlueLena and NewsMatch and a woman named Mel Kramer, who worked with us to get a text-only version of our site. The reason that was important is that if people did have very limited cell service, which a lot of people did for weeks, you could go to the text version of the site, and it wouldn’t try to download the photos or any other images/graphics, so that you were able to access it, even if you had scaled-down service.
We were also really lucky to have partners that helped us with editing on the back end. We had an entire network of people from the Public Radio Network and from NPR who pitched in and volunteered shifts to be available to help us edit.
Adams: I know you’re kind of still working through it, and there’s still damage. There’s still a lot of recovery going on and will be for some time. Have you all taken away any changes that you made to cover this that you think you want to institute permanently?
Lee: Yeah, several. I mean, the one that comes to mind first is our Spanish coverage. We, before the storm, had been having a lot of conversations and meetings and ideas and plans about Spanish-language content, and we had soft launched our Spanish-language part of our website called Estamos Aquí, and Jose Sandoval, our afternoon host-reporter, had been translating some of our stories and had been doing some interviews in Spanish, but we really had not ramped that up or rolled that out. He called me and said that someone from Buncombe County, I believe, had reached out to him and said, “We need to get this information out in Spanish. Can you help us do that as well?” And so he called to ask me if we could. And I said, yeah, absolutely.
I don’t know how he managed with all the other work that he was doing to do that, but he was putting together frequent updates in Spanish. So one of the byproducts of all of this is our very unintentional fast launch of something that we planned to do, but accelerated that timetable a lot.
Adams: Blue Ridge Public Radio staff weren’t just covering the storm; it was living through it, too. So how did you ensure that you and your team were getting what you all needed as human beings?
Lee: Let me just say, first, I think we’re really lucky in the composition of this team. They’re reporters, but they are incredible human beings, so compassionate with each other, so enthusiastic about this community. I feel like we had a really great baseline to put us into these circumstances that none of them would have chosen. But we were dealing with the same challenges that everyone was dealing with, like not having water to flush the toilet. So having staff here bringing in buckets full of creek water, until the government started providing water for toilet flushing. I’m not unaware of how much I think each one of them sacrificed — the hours, incredibly long hours that they worked. Then you go home and there’s no power and there’s no internet. So that was another thing to get any work done. There’s no work from home, so you had to do it here and finish it out here before you try to go home and sleep.
We had air mattresses set up here, and I would say people slept here, but sort of piecemeal, that they slept at all. It was a struggle. One of the very small ways we tried to cope with that, is that in the morning meeting and in the evening meeting — we had two meetings a day — I would do a reminder of self-care. Sometimes that sounds like a bubble bath. We certainly didn’t mean it in that way in this context, but I said, “You’ve got to figure out what it is that’s going to be your self-care for today, and if you feel comfortable sharing it, we’ll go around and you can say what it is.” And then a little bit of accountability in the evening meeting to say, “Hey, did you do your self-care thing, or any self-care thing?” Sometimes those self-care things were, I laid down on the middle of the floor for 10 minutes, or I walked around the block. I mean, these were not big things, but I think the team reminder was helpful. And then a lot of grace for each other. When you haven’t showered — and it’s probably the longest I’ve ever gone in my life without showering — and you haven’t slept, and you’re dealing with really traumatic circumstances from sources all day for 18 hours a day, you just have to be really especially kind to one another.
Adams: Do you feel like you’ve taken any wisdom away that you can share or encapsulate?
Lee: I take away a lot of gratitude, because you can sit in a studio behind a microphone and not really know who’s hearing you, if anyone is hearing you, if it has an effect. The response that we’ve gotten from this community has been absolutely overwhelming. The gratitude that they have for getting this information. Some of it is getting the logistical information, and some of it they’ve described as just feeling connected — that they didn’t know what was going on in their community, and to hear stories from around the region really helped them get through the early days of this.
Yeah, I feel really, really proud of the work that this team did, and really proud of this community. I mean, the way people have come together. We just did the election coverage, even though we were right on the heels of all of this with the storm. You think about a divided country or a divided region — and that is true, and that’s obviously been true in the political side — but just seeing so much that runs counter to that narrative on the ground here, in terms of people helping each other, has been really encouraging. I think our little universe at Blue Ridge Public Radio is a microcosm of what we saw going on outside of here. There’s a lot of work still left to be done. There’s a lot of assessment and accountability reporting that needs to be done. I told my team they get to rest up a little bit, but then, it’s back to the grind.
