Every day at 10 a.m., more than a dozen people gather outside Gold’s Gym, just south of downtown Asheville, North Carolina. After we divide into groups, let’s say the Spanish speaking group and the medical technology group, we each grab a couple of 5-gallon buckets and get in the truck. Soon, everyone rumbles off and goes about their day by performing the important task of flushing the toilet.
Twenty days after Hurricane Helen brought torrential rain and deadly flooding across western North Carolina, more than 100,000 people remain without drinking water. The crisis has spread beyond the city to the nearby mountain communities of Swannanoa and Black Mountain. Federal and state officials are sending water, but supplies are limited and local residents have been told to boil anything that doesn’t come out of bottles while service is restored. The risk of disease is rising even as hundreds of thousands of people continue to dig out from the devastation caused by the storm.
So are natural disasters like Helen and Hurricane Milton, which hit Florida last week. Direct injury and loss of life are inevitably followed by long-term physical and psychological effects. People in western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and beyond are beginning to grapple with these secondary effects, made worse by lack of potable water and pollution that has blanketed flooded landscapes. .
“Even after the waters recede, residents may be underestimating the potential for contamination from invisible bacteria such as fecal coliforms, heavy metals such as lead, and organic and inorganic pollutants such as pesticides. “Yes,” says Jennifer Horney, a disaster epidemiologist at the University of Delaware. We were warned after the hurricane.
More than a dozen toilet cleaners, who call themselves “flushing crews,” are one of the informal volunteer efforts that people in Asheville rely on to provide a basic level of sanitation. The city’s water system has been crippled by flooding, and repairs are expected to take weeks or more, leaving residents unable to shower or even flush their toilets. City water is slowly beginning to return to the city, but it is filled with high chlorine and sediment.
The folks at BeLoved Asheville, a community nonprofit, founded the Flush Brigade with help from a group of mostly ad hoc water suppliers calling themselves Flush AVL. Everyone is working at the downtown beer pub, and they’ve all started visiting apartment complexes and mobile home parks right after the storm started. They have been working all day every day on this task and will continue to do so until the Asheville Water Resources Department provides safe water again.
Earlier this week, they descended on Aston Park Tower, an 11-story public housing complex near downtown. They each entered the elevator carrying a bucket of water. Volunteers not only help with tasks that most people take for granted, but also check on the health of the elderly, people with disabilities, and people at home. Many of these Good Samaritans were nurses and expressed concern that the lack of sanitation could lead to diseases such as rubella. No matter how good organizations like The Flush Brigade are doing, the needs far exceed anyone’s ability to meet. The devastation is too great.
“I can’t go into someone’s room and clean it,” said a volunteer nurse who identified himself only as Norman. “I’m here to heal the wounds. I can help take care of them, but their health is still at risk when it comes to where they live. But we… You don’t have the ability to go into someone’s bathroom and mop it.”
These limitations are evident in towns along the French Broad River. There, residents have complained of a landfill-like stench that pervades the air as flood-saturated soil containing a combination of unknown chemicals and sewage dries and turns to dust. It’s no wonder residents feel they are receiving confusing public health information.
Lucas Ross (left) and Nathan Jodry clean mud from Casablanca Cigar Bar in the aftermath of Hurricane Helen on Oct. 1 in Asheville, North Carolina.
Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images
“I put on this suit because the mud was toxic,” said Oren McClure, who wore a Tyvek suit, goggles and boots and headed downtown with his friend Isaiah Embler to help with the cleanup. “It contains things like chemicals and human waste, and we don’t want that to spread to us.” Local authorities are still testing soil samples. , are investigating what may be in it, and official advice appears to still treat mud as dangerous.
Embler, who grew up here, never believed in the river, mainly because the town is downstream from the Woodfin sewage treatment plant. “I’ve been told all my life not to swim the French Broad for that reason,” he said. “This alone is not helpful at all.”
It’s natural for him to be worried. The state Department of Environmental Quality uses the Helen incident to warn of potentially alarming events, such as drums leaking into ponds, homeowners pumping accumulated sewage into streams, or sewage treatment plans suffering significant damage from flooding. We have received over 1,000 reports. Weeks after the storm, public health departments across the state continue to warn residents to test their wells and boil or bleach their water. It also instructs people not to drink water from rivers or streams, use it for cooking or wash their hands. State and local health departments are providing water testing kits to those who wish to disinfect wells and test them for fecal matter and other contaminants. In some cases, health authorities have made it clear that the water is unsafe.
“This water is undrinkable, even if boiled,” the town of Black Mountain, a suburb of Asheville, said on its website. “Please do not use it for anything other than flushing the toilet.”
Statewide, the official death toll from Helen is 125, with an additional 92 missing. More than 2,000 households are still without power and more than 600 roads are closed. Against this backdrop, state and local authorities continue to engage in search and recovery operations and scramble to provide basic assistance. With all this happening, people in Asheville and beyond say it’s difficult to understand the public health guidance they’ve received.
“There’s not a lot of information coming from the top down, so we’re just listening,” says Amos McGregor, who owns a record store in downtown Marshall, 30 minutes north of Asheville. It was soggy.
When extreme weather events cause flooding, the floodwaters flow into sewage treatment plants, farms, and industrial activities of all kinds, and their contents flow across the landscape and into wells and water systems. That’s why public health officials in several North Carolina counties and other Helen-affected states are urging residents to avoid touching local waterways.
When a sewer floods, there is always some level of overflow. Sewage mixes with streams, manholes, and wells, creating a dangerous soup of bacteria. Such conditions can lead to the spread of highly contagious diseases such as cholera, salmonella, and norovirus. All of these illnesses can cause diarrhea, vomiting, and dehydration, which can be severe and even fatal for people with weakened immune systems, the elderly, and young people.
The flooding that followed Hurricane Helen flooded Asheville, North Carolina, and the surrounding area with water tainted with all kinds of pollution. Mario Tama/Getty Images
Hurricanes and their associated flooding produce large amounts of dust, silt, and mold that not only cause gastrointestinal illnesses but also pose a variety of health risks. “People have higher rates of several physical illnesses, including upper respiratory infections, asthma exacerbations, and allergies,” said Timothy William Collins, a disaster and health researcher at the University of Utah.
The medical and public health communities have long known that natural disasters exacerbated by climate change can continue to claim lives long after the immediate crisis has passed. They have seen this in Bangladesh, where floods overwhelmed the sewage system earlier this year and allowed waterborne bacterial cholera to flow into the water supply. Dengue fever, a mosquito-borne disease, affected millions of people in the Americas in 2022 and 2023, but researchers attribute the health surge to flooding exacerbated by climate change. are.
Considering all of this, Helen’s final cost is certain to increase, but given history, even the official tally may not reflect the true cost of the storm. When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, the government initially reported 64 deaths. A year later, an analysis of how many people would have died in the months after the storm if the storm had not hit the archipelago found that the Category 4 cyclone actually killed more than 3,000 people.
Medical volunteers and epidemiologists on the ground in Asheville and surrounding counties say it’s still too early to determine which illnesses are of most concern, especially as Helen’s impact on communications has slowed data collection. He says it is too early. A local doctor who identifies himself only as Dr. Alexander has joined Elliot Patterson, a graduate student in public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to volunteer at field clinics around Asheville. They have seen many people with irritating skin conditions and chronic respiratory conditions, such as asthma, which are probably exacerbated by dust. This also causes blisters from being bitten by yellow jackets. Poison ivy deflated as it waded through mud, brush, and debris. And infectious diseases such as the new coronavirus and influenza frequently circulate in evacuation centers. But they say it’s difficult to say with certainty what’s trending.
State epidemiologist Zach Moore acknowledged that disruptions to emergency room and health department services due to power outages and loss of internet have disrupted data collection as well as disrupted staff lives. Ta. He said the state continues to process test results and receive physician reports, but “there are limits to reportable symptom data that we track on an individual case basis.”
One thing is certain right now: the people of Asheville and the communities of the Blue Ridge Mountains will continue to struggle with the health impacts of this storm long after the floodwaters recede and the taps run clean. is.
