“We’re in Asheville. This is a mountain community. We thought we were safe from hurricanes.”
Ellie Johnston is the Director of Programs at Climate Interactive, an organization that builds online simulators to let anyone test out the most effective strategies to limit climate change.
Johnston also happens to live in Asheville, North Carolina, a city that bore the full brunt of flooding from Hurricane Helene in late September, 2024. In our interview, which took place two months after the storm, she describes her first hand experience with the most destructive hurricane to strike the US since Katrina in 2005. Many people lost their lives, many homes were washed away, and there was no functioning water system during October and into November, shutting down much of the city.
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Ellie Johnston 00:02
We’re in Asheville. This is a mountain community. We thought we were safe from hurricanes, and Hurricane Helene came through unprecedented warm Gulf Coast waters, which led it to get supercharged, slam into the Florida coast, and then carry enough energy such that it was able to get all the way up to the mountains.
I was just working, giving webinars about climate change, and Hurricane Helene was hitting our town. And It came right after another heavy rain event, and so the combination of those two storms left just historic flooding, flooding that our community has never seen before. It unfortunately caused a lot of loss of life. Over 100,000 homes in our area have been damaged, and we’re gonna live with the different impacts of it for some time.
Cindy Ye 01:03
Because climate change is not formally taught in New York City high schools. City Atlas started this podcast to connect high school students directly with experts to find out how they would design a high school curriculum for climate.
My name is Cindy, and I’m a senior at Stuyvesant High School. We spoke with Ellie Johnston, the Director of Programs at Climate Interactive. Climate Interactive is an organization that builds climate simulators like En-ROADS and C-ROADS to help people see what actions would aid the climate crisis. In today’s episode, we talk with Ellie about the work Climate Interactive does and also what living in Asheville is like with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
Cindy Ye 01:46
Could you walk us through the design and thinking process of En-ROADS? And also the C-ROADS simulation?
Ellie Johnston 01:53
At Climate Interactive, we have two simulation models, En-ROADS and C-ROADS. Each one is a system dynamics model. And these days, our most popular simulator is En-ROADS.
It’s like a dashboard in which you can test out different types of climate solutions. So you can look at things like electric vehicles or deforestation or carbon price or energy efficiency, and figure out what the mix of those different solutions is needed to successfully achieve the Paris Climate Agreement. And so some of our thinking behind it was that we wanted to create a tool that would help people be able to understand all these different things.
Every week there’s a new article. It’s like, this new thing is gonna fix climate change! And you’re like, is it, or is it not? How do I even think about the scale at which any of these actions can make a difference or not?
So, for example, we love to plant trees, and we want to plant lots and lots of trees, and it is helpful for the climate, but you know, that’s one of the things that we’ve dug into and done a lot of research and modeling around, is how much can planting trees really help when it comes to addressing climate change, and when we add it all up, we’re looking at like, Okay, how many trees could we plant that could balance out all of the emissions that come from coal, oil and gas? And that’s more trees than we have land to plant them on.
And so planting trees helps some, but can it help fix climate change? Not by itself. So there, those are the kinds of things that we have worked to try and create a way in which people can experience them for themselves.
One of the professors at MIT that we work very closely with, he has this saying he likes to use, which is that research shows that showing people research doesn’t work, we don’t sit around and like, read a report and are like, Oh, therefore I know the right thing to do and go out and do it. You kind of have to test and experiment, and that’s why we build simulation models, so that people can explore different possibilities to try and figure out what works, what doesn’t, and learn for themselves.
Cindy Ye 04:31
I know that the simulation has been used across the globe, having reached over 170 countries and 130 members of the US Congress. How do you feel that the simulation is shaping the next generation in the classroom too, and also beyond?
Ellie Johnston 04:47
My hope is that it is, and we see evidence of this, too, that it is helping to inform people. The climate crisis is huge, and it needs so many different things to address it, and sometimes we could kind of get stuck in these policy debates of like, is it this, or is it this? No, my solution is better than your solution. It’s about not eating, you know, not eating meat. It’s about eating more plants or no, it’s about, you know, getting an electric car!
And at the end of the day, usually it’s always ‘yes, and’ — yes, we need this, and we need this, and we need this, and so I think that’s been one of the helpful things. And when we saw like as we were reaching out to members of Congress using En-ROADS with them, that was right ahead of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, and it was also like alongside calls for a Green New Deal and big packages of policy proposals, all of these different kinds of things somewhat complemented each other, where it wasn’t like, Oh, here’s this one policy that we just need, this one thing and this one solution and it’ll fix it. The Inflation Reduction Act that ended up being passed, just like the Green New Deal that people were pushing for, alongside it is a whole package of different options. It’s, you know, invest in electric charging infrastructure, invest in hydrogen and new technologies, invest in renewable energy, and so this whole suite of different things, which is what our modeling shows that it would be really nice to figure out. [Not] oh, it’s just a matter as it’s as simple as this, we just need to, you know, lots of solar panels and climate change will go away.
Lots of solar panels will make a big difference. And we also need other things. And so that’s been one of the significant impacts is just showing and helping to sort of break up the mindset that there is, like one single thing that could possibly help us out. In my mind, though, it’s, you know, it’s good news.
We need a lot of different people working on this. If we had to rely on one industry to do this, we might not be successful. And there’s a lot of jobs out there, and there’s a lot of possible opportunities for new businesses and new ways to take action. And so therefore, even when governments at the national level might not be taking strong enough action, you can have states, you can have cities, you can have companies, you can have individuals filing in to take action themselves.
David Case 07:15
Yeah, just to build off what you were just saying, a little bit like, how have you guys seen the En-ROADS simulator kind of help bridge the gap between climate science and policy making or active action that’s really making a difference?
Ellie Johnston 07:28
Yeah, well, one example that comes to mind is it’s in the business space. So we have used inroads with a number of major companies in which they have it helps to inform their thinking about business opportunities and investments. And so there’s a professor we work with in Germany, and he met with a leading manufacturer in Europe. And this CEO was not necessarily like, oh, I need to do you know. He was not super ambitious on climate action, but through experiencing and having several conversations with Professor Florian Kapmeier, our partner, and using the En-ROADS simulator, the CEO was able to see the possibilities for his company in taking action on climate and so did make some investment decisions that steered things in a different direction than what they would have been otherwise, which was significant.
Cindy Ye 08:35
Do you think it’s considered a done project, or do you see the simulator evolving in coming years?
Ellie Johnston 08:41
Generally, we update it every month. The latest thing we’ve been adding in recent months, and we’ll, I think the next update will probably be in February, will be around climate impacts.
So the tool is built in such a way that enables you to test out all these different solutions you can look at, you know, taxing coal or subsidizing renewable energy or carbon price or electric cars, and then it leads to a temperature outcome like this is what the world would be if we do all of these different actions in terms of global temperature, but global temperature, which in the Paris Climate agreement says we want to limit warming to well below two degrees and aim for 1.5.
That’s just kind of this abstract number, like it’s like two degrees, 1.5 degrees. This doesn’t sound like much. I know it’s important because it’s in this document and it’s like in the global agreement. But really what matters to so many people is about those impacts of climate change, the health impacts, the impacts of biodiversity and nature. And so we’ve been looking at the latest science on that and trying to fold that in to create more visualizations.
So just recently, we added in some maps of extreme heat, so now you can look at the place where you live and then see, oh, wow, that’s, you know, there were only this many days above 90 degrees each year. Now we’re looking at, you know, over a month of 90 degree weather days. Or looking at the dangers from wildfires is another map we added to give different kinds of measures that people can connect to, and are like, Oh, this is how this matters to me, because there are so many different ways in which climate change connects to all of us.
Pierce Siegel 10:36
I’d love to talk about Asheville, and in particular, one of the quotes that you’ve said, that many people say we just need a big disaster, and then people are going to wake up and take action. And you said it’s a horrible way to raise awareness, but here we are. And can you just speak briefly on what that’s been like for you and how your interaction with Hurricane Helene has been,
Ellie Johnston 11:00
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I live in Asheville, North Carolina, and have lived here for a while, over a decade. And so it’s home for me. And it’s mountainous western North Carolina, so we are hundreds of miles away from any beach or coastline. It’s up in the mountains. It’s not a place that I typically think of or worry about when it comes to hurricanes. We all are very familiar with the Gulf Coast and Florida and the vulnerabilities of those communities when it comes to hurricanes.
And so in late September, I was just doing, you know, working, giving webinars about climate change, and Hurricane Helene was hitting our town, and it came right after another heavy rain event. And so the combination of those two storms left just historic flooding, flooding that our community has never seen before. It unfortunately caused a lot of loss of life. It destroyed over 100, or over 100,000 homes in our area have been damaged, and we’re gonna live with the different impacts of it for some time.
And so when I wrote that post, because I’ve worked on climate change for over 10 years, you know, a lot of times, people will be like, Oh, climate change. I just wish people would wake up to it. Maybe they need a big event. Maybe they need some disaster, and then they’ll see that this is important, or that this is real. And so some of that was like for us in Asheville in western North Carolina.
For the United States, this is one of the biggest natural disasters to hit the United States. Estimates are over 100 billion by some calculations.
It’s like, here we are. We’re in Asheville. This is a mountain community. We thought we were safe from hurricanes, and Hurricane Helene came through unprecedented warm Gulf Coast waters, which led it to get supercharged, slam into the Florida coast, and then carry enough energy such that it was able to get all the way up to the mountains. Maybe it’s been a wake up call, but that was kind of what was on my mind, and writing that it’s just like, it’s, yeah, it’s devastating. It’s, it’s, it’s really tragic what’s happened to the surrounding area.
And if we have to do this again and again, for people to realize, mainly our elected officials, world leaders, to realize what we need to do to act on climate change, it’s going to cause a lot of destruction along the way. We know these things are bad. We know they’re getting worse. What can we do to prepare and plan for that? Whether that’s the policies to prevent climate change to begin with, your investments in renewable energy, your stopping of fossil fuels, all those different things, and also on the other side of it, it’s how do you prepare your communities for incoming impacts, whatever they might look like.
My house is okay, and my job is remote. But lots of people in my neighborhood, in the city, they lost their jobs for a little while, or some people have lost their homes and or they’re just dealing with the cost of it. There’s so much damage.
And even, you know, just half a mile down the street from me, is the main river that runs through our city, the French Broad River, and it flooded almost 30 feet out of its river banks. And this afternoon, I went on a run, and there it is, just the flooded destruction, right? And so instead of running through a nice, pretty park, I’m running through seeing trash bags up in the trees and knocked over trash cans, and it’s just a mess. So it’s, yeah, it’s impacted our whole community, and it’s and one of the things now that the hurricane was two months ago, so we’re starting to see those economic impacts.
So it’s not just when a storm hits, you have that kind of sudden, oh my gosh, get people to safety. Make sure people are safe, all of those kinds of emergency response needs, search and rescue. But now we’re kind of in this second phase, which is, how do we rebuild? How do we take care of things? How do we manage the fact that some people are still without housing? How do we, you know, help businesses get going again? 30% of the economy of Asheville is based on tourism, and a lot of that tourism drives a lot of other businesses too. And so we didn’t have any tourists. Hardly in October, which is the busiest month for western North Carolina, we have beautiful fall colors. It’s the Blue Ridge Mountains. And so people aren’t coming to eat in the restaurants, stay in the hotels, and that harms all the businesses too.
Helena Rambler 16:25
What has the aid looked like? Have there been either, like, a sense of governmental aid or maybe just community aid? Because, like you said, you know, your house is thankfully okay, but others, you know, they’re much more, their houses were affected.
Ellie Johnston 16:39
Yeah, it’s been interesting to see that. So initially, you know, the storm hits, and it is neighbors helping each other, because that’s all that is there. Emergency response was overwhelmed. They’re trying to get to the areas most in need. But roads were blocked. There were 1000s and 1000s of trees down blocking roads. So those people most immediately were like, okay, do you have what you need? And it was very person to person. And then in the week that followed, then things started opening up.
Roads were cleared, and then you started to see more presence from outside support, and it ranged from people who just cared and filled up their truck full of a bunch of water and drove it on into western North Carolina to put it on the side of the road and offer it for free, to the National Guard. So you had all these different layers of aid, from individuals to church groups, civic groups. Then you had your larger nonprofits, your Red Cross setting up shelters for people. And then you had the National Guard that was coming in, flying helicopters to do search and rescue, because the region is so mountainous that a lot of people live up on mountaintops or kind of in very rural areas. And so they would have dozens and dozens of trees down on their road. And if they’re not able to cut through them all they might need to be rescued by helicopter. And you had flooding and landslides, and so you did have situations in which people had to be rescued through that.
So all of that was surged into the area very quickly. In my area, there was like along the commercial corridor, you could find multiple different places that were just handing out free food, free water, like there was tons of supplies coming in, just tractor trailers full of all kinds of donated goods, filling up warehouses, any place that had extra space, it was great.
And then that stuff sort of falls off from there. Supplies get distributed, people figure out how to get back on their feet or stabilize, and a lot of those groups move on because they’re just disaster response.
Then the next period is this recovery period, and that’s where we’re really relying right now on some of the national groups that have come in and are setting up and helping to rebuild, and so like rebuilding homes and that sort of thing.
There’s a group called Samaritan’s Purse that’s been helping to, just like, rebuild houses that were destroyed. But then it’s from what I can see, it’s also very reliant on the organizations that were in our community before the storm hit. In some ways, those are the strongest because they know our community. They’re staffed by people who live in the city and live in the region, and they’re working really hard to keep providing things.
So it’s really cold right now. The weather just took a turn. Temperatures got below freezing, and so one organization last week, around Thanksgiving, gave away hundreds and hundreds of these, like propane heaters that you can bring inside and help to heat up homes. Because even though people have power now, there’s a lot of people that are just experiencing a lot of economic hardship. Because again, businesses can’t open where there’s not as much business, and it’s felt very uneven across the region.
Cindy Ye 20:30
So I take an English class called Climate Literature, and we read a lot of dystopian novels about natural disasters that occur, and a lot of them depict human nature after a disaster to be sort of like barbarous, where people fend for themselves, but the description I’m getting from you and how people are acting after Hurricane healing seems to be very different. Do you think that human nature after a disaster, including Hurricane Helene, is, you know, very strong and good?
Ellie Johnston 21:00
I mean, I would say so. It has been, for those of us who went through it all, we saw so many different kinds of heroism. I guess I’ve never experienced anything like this before, where almost every time I run into somebody who I haven’t seen in a while, since the storm. Oh, how are you doing? You know, you make it through. Okay, everyone’s got some story that’s heartbreaking, on the one hand, but then at the same time, you have these stories of just like, whoa. What the?
The most famous tourist site in Asheville is the Biltmore Estate. The Biltmore Estate has stables with, like, dozens and dozens of horses, and so, like, there were two members of the staff who camped out in the stables with the horses while the water was rising, and then and got stranded there for days, and they had to figure out how to like feed and take care of these dozens of dozens of horses while the water is getting closer and closer to the stables. Meanwhile, they’re co-workers cut, took chainsaws and cut a path, and like got through after two days, and the horses were okay, and these two people who had been like caring for these horses hadn’t been able to contact their family, hadn’t been able to get home, had just been, you know, doing their job, basically, were able to get out. The horses were okay. That’s just like one little story of, you know, the Biltmore Estate.
But then there are lots of little stories of, like, people stuck in communities where, oh, the road got washed away, and somebody had a backhoe on their farm and just came and rebuilt the road, because that’s what you do when you’ve got to get out. So it’s been really amazing to be a part of that.
And for me, my house got power back relatively quickly, and I had actually just bought an electric car three months ago, and so I could charge my car, whereas there was a gas shortage, and so a lot of people were struggling to get gas. And so what I did a lot of in the very first week was search and rescue, not search and rescue, but finding missing people.
So there was, like, a long list of people, because the cell phone networks went down. The cell phone towers are on top of the mountains. They got destroyed in many cases. We, along with over 1000 other volunteers, were given lists of people who their loved ones hadn’t heard from them, and we just physically went to their address and knocked on doors. In many cases, they were fine and they were doing okay, but they, you know, in some cases, one woman, I visited her sister, we’ve been trying to get in touch with her, and I Just like, plugged my phone into my car and drove around with it for 45 minutes because she still didn’t have power. And by the time I came back, like all of her voicemails and messages had flooded in, and she was able to, like, call her sister who was out of state and reassure her that she was okay. So there was a lot of just people helping each other, doing what they can with whatever resources they have. Like, okay, I’ve got an electric car that’s charged up. I can recharge it. You have, you know, a truck that can carry a bunch of supplies this person might have. Maybe they can speak Spanish, and so they can reach out to the Spanish speaking community, whatever it may be. And so that was amazing to see was just how many people jumped into action and like, wanted to do something, and it was, it was a good way for us all to get through it, because it was necessary.
And also that’s just your that’s just the human reaction, you just want to do something. And so to be here and be able to do that was a good thing, and it was great to see so many people just jumping in. And we all know, know our neighbors better. We all like, you know we’re out walking around. There’s no way to there’s no cell phone, no internet. So it was like the only way we got information was by talking to each other or listening to the radio. Did a lot of listening to the radio too.
Cindy Ye 25:21
That’s really awesome. And how do you think Thanksgiving has differed from last year to now, after Hurricane Helene? I mean, we imagine Thanksgiving to be a turkey or some sort of family reunion, and I’m sure it’s been really different.
Ellie Johnston 25:37
Yeah, for many families, it has been different. I mean, you have families that have lost individuals and so and for those of us that you know haven’t lost loved ones and feel healthy, you have a deeper gratitude for what you do have because we realized how vulnerable everything was like, so quickly things changed. Oh, there’s a big storm coming. Okay, I guess we’ll, you know, buy some extra food. Well, we should get some water.
And then we didn’t realize, like, Okay, this is what we were in for. And it was like, there was just not a good understanding of what was coming. And so, yeah, there’s a lot of you know, we can be grateful for what we do have, what we came through with, while also, you know, remembering and remembering what was lost too.
Helena Rambler 26:39
And what do you think communities can learn from this experience? Or do you think that people are kind of preparing themselves more in case this could possibly happen again? Or something along the lines of this could happen again?
Ellie Johnston 26:53
I hope communities are learning from it. I don’t know. We live in a time where our storms, like Hurricane Helene, um, the Atlantic Coast hurricane season had a number of storms that experienced what is called rapid intensification. So it’s where you have a storm that’s kind of like, okay, it doesn’t look that bad, then go from like not that bad to very bad in a very short amount of time. So that means that that window in which to plan and prepare and maybe evacuate, get your things in order, take care of stuff, is short. So given that, and given all different other kinds of climate impacts, forest fires, droughts, all kinds of different things that we live with, I think it requires everyone to kind of think about what level of preparedness you need for yourself, and that because while the government response, they did a bunch, while all of these organizations did a bunch, like I said, in those immediate hours and days afterwards, it was a lot of people taking care of each other, with the people that you knew, because the emergency response was overwhelmed. And so there was, like, very basic things like that.
You know, in the future, I am always going to have five gallons at a minimum of water just in my house. You know, just you never know it’s good to have, like, some water, stockpiled a pack of bottled water, big jug of water, and then, like, when the cell phone network stick went down, like I said, all we were listening to was the radio, and so, like, a battery operated radio, so many people just don’t have radios, so it’s like, where are you going to get information if your cell phone and internet doesn’t work? So there’s, like, all of these kinds of things that now go through my head of being like, oh, there’s just, like, smart, basic things that we can do to just be a little bit more prepared if there’s a big storm coming, fill up the car with gas, if it uses gas. Or charge it up. Or, you know, buy the extra food. Have a bunch of canned food if you don’t need it, maybe your neighbor will. And so there was a, there were things like that, where the people who had some some kind of resources, whatever it was, um, were able to, like, get through it a little bit better. And, and it ranges from a whole bunch of different things, you know, like water, radio, food, that kind of thing. But then also, you know, having some savings, a little bit of extra money, and making sure you have that, like emergency fund, so that when a storm hits, you can cover some extra costs. Or if, if job, if your job suddenly disappears because the restaurant had to close, or whatever that you’ve got some some money saved away to be able to cover rent and get through it. So there are all the all kinds of like, little things like that that are just so important for everybody to take seriously for themselves and figure out what that looks like for themselves.
And then beyond that, there are the layers of like, Okay, how can the government be more prepared? And they certainly need to invest more in emergency preparedness things, and think about how resilient those are. So, for example, in our county, Asheville lost its water for well over a month, for weeks and weeks, we didn’t have drinking water, and for a while, we didn’t have any water at all.
For a while the water was just you couldn’t drink it, but you could shower in it and stuff. But for a while, there was just nothing coming out of the faucets. The city had backup water that was located along the river, and so when the river flooded, we lost our backup supplies of water.
So they’re just like, things like that, where it’s like, okay, if we have a warehouse full of stockpiled water to give out to people in the event that you lose water, let’s not put it in a flood plain. Let’s put it somewhere, I don’t know, that’s not going to get washed away. So we had, we had situations like that, and at the same time, like there was a lot that was that it could have been worse. And certainly the city did a lot of things that prevented much worse outcomes. And we do have drinking water again now, which is good.
Cindy Ye 31:42
And when did you realize that this is going to be as big as it was? Since at first it seemed just to be a big, ordinary, sort of ordinary storm, and ended up evolving into something so much larger.
Ellie Johnston 31:57
Yeah, that’s an interesting question, because I think in my head, rationally, I’m like, Whoa. I’ve never seen this before. This is wild, but you don’t, you internalize it, and you feel it in different ways, and people process things in very different ways.
And so I live half a mile from the river. So as the storm was hitting throughout the day, it’s just like, it’s there were periods in which the storm was like really, really intense winds and rain, but mostly it was just a steady rain for a while, and sometimes it would kind of disappear, like there was a period where the rain stopped and then it was just gray, and then it came back later. And so I would go down to the bridge where the river is, and there were dozens and dozens of other people, neighbors, friends, all kinds of people like down by this, by the river, watching it. And so we’re kind of processing together what’s going on.
We’re like, oh my gosh, there’s a building going down the river. There’s, you know, trees. Oh, we recognize that. Oh, there’s this building that we can watch the water getting higher and higher and higher on until the building collapses.
And so there wasn’t one moment for me, because I saw at different points the severity of it. But I have friends who didn’t live close to the river or see the impacts, and they were like, it wasn’t until we drove into the city, several days afterwards that we saw how bad it was, because, again, not a lot of information was getting out.
But the city had briefings for the whole region, where on the local NPR station they would broadcast, and so we could hear that it was like a really big situation, and the scale of it was huge. My aunt and uncle, who lived five hours north of me in Virginia, had a giant oak tree fall on their house from the storm. So they live five hours away and still had impacts from the same storm. The impacts in that area were less severe. But still, the scale was very big.
Helena Rambler 34:27
Wow, that’s it’s just so that’s like, so devastating, just on the same note of nature, how was like wildlife and ecosystems? How are they affected?
Ellie Johnston 34:39
In some ways, my understanding is we’re still, we still don’t know. Disturbances are part of the natural cycle for ecosystems and nature. But one of the unique things about the southern Appalachian Mountains, because the mountains come way down into the southeast, they are a biodiversity hot spot. So we have rare salamanders and different kinds of amphibians and lots and lots of animals and plants that are very unique to this area and are threatened.
And so, for example, I was helping to do some river cleanup, and met this woman who is a hellbender salamander biologist. So the hellbender salamander is this big salamander. It can be up to a foot long. It’s like massive. It’s also known as a mud puppy. It’s really ugly looking. Look up a picture of what a hellbender salamander looks like. And she was saying the hellbender salamander is already threatened, and what they require is clear running streams, and they like to live under rocks in these mountainous streams.
And she was like, there was so much debris and water coming down through these streams. She’s like, I just don’t know. I think we’ve probably lost a lot of hellbenders through the storm. Hopefully the population can bounce back, but it was already a vulnerable species to begin with. And in some areas that I’ve seen there are, like, the amount of trees that have fallen down is, it looks like tornadoes have come through. It’s 1000s of trees around the Blue Ridge Parkway that are just laying on the ground. So I don’t know how, like, what will regrow in those areas? Or, like, will they become vulnerable to forest fire as they dry out and lay there decaying? Not sure, but it’s definitely a concern, and a lot of people are keeping an eye on it. Another, thing that there was a lot of concern about is, of course, the river quality, like what kinds of pollution might have been washed down in the river while it was flooding. And so far, it sounds like a lot of the tests that have been done indicate that it’s not too bad, which is good, that being said, there’s a lot of plastic and just trash along the river banks, so and some of it, I don’t know how we’ll be able to get it, ever get it out, because, like, way up in a tree, hanging over, over the river, or something like that. So that’ll be there for a while.
David Case 37:39
It’s really great to hear a lot of this firsthand from you, and I feel like I’m really learning a lot. I was wondering if maybe you feel a certain way about how, like the media or a certain coverage, if you have certain thoughts about it, or if there’s something that you feel they could be doing better?
Ellie Johnston 37:57
Yeah, it’s interesting, ‘cause, because we didn’t have cell phone service or internet for the first week, there’s a lot about the media coverage that I never saw.
And people watching from the outside were seeing more news about it than we even knew ourselves.
And I know that there was a degree of just like, there were a lot of stories about stuff, and there’s a lot of news moving around very quickly, and it wasn’t always clear, what was accurate, what was not.
And I do know, like, one of the big concerns was about misinformation being spread around the response of, like, oh, this, this has happened, like, why didn’t anybody see this?
But my experience in the city and on the ground was, like, a lot of that it was just beyond us. We weren’t even like, you kind of hear about, you’re like, Wait, what are they saying about Asheville? And then it would just be like, That’s clearly false. Like, you know, like I said, there’s these stories that come out of people in line waiting for gas, getting aggressive, or something like that. And then it’s like, well, no, actually, people on the whole were very peaceful. Maybe there was one bad incident, but that’s alongside 1000s of incidents that were totally fine and smooth.
And then you see, of course, that the news cycle moves on to other things. And so that’s, that’s the way our world works. There’s a lot going on. There’s a lot of things to take our attention. And I have seen some cases where journalists have been intentional about trying to track the longer story. That’s been really encouraging to see. For example, The Washington Post has a couple of reporters. They just put up a piece yesterday about, for example, housing evictions and how people are because they weren’t able to work, they weren’t able to make rent. The landlords still want people to pay rent, even though they don’t have power or water in their apartments or their houses. And so there’s a whole story there about that, that like those challenges, and it was, it’s good to see the Washington Post covering that, but many other news outlets have moved on.
And certainly it’s not like there’s a ton of coverage out there right now, but I hope, I do really hope that the positive stories are getting out there of like, okay, this the community did come together. People are trying their best. And of course, there’s a huge amount of need still, for a long time, and there will continue to be it’s not just like, oh, it’s done. We’ve moved on. But you also have to move on with your life too. And so it’s, it’s now like just, it’s a thing in my life, alongside my other kind of daily, daily things, you know, okay, this is my life now. I live in a hurricane impacted area.
Cindy Ye 41:18
To jump back really quickly about what you mentioned when you said there wasn’t really any running water coming out of the faucets. Out of curiosity, how long did you have to go without any running water?
Ellie Johnston 41:31
Think it was like two weeks without any water at all, and then they were able to get water into the pipes, but it was another, like, two months. Two months it was we got, we got the water on just before, just like, a week before Thanksgiving. So very recently, like, it’s been two weeks since we got water. And Hurricane Helene was at the end of September.
So what happened was so for Asheville and the surrounding area, the city, drinking water comes from a reservoir that’s up in a mountain valley, so it’s higher elevation, and it’s totally protected. It’s one of the, like, most pristine sources of drinking water for a major city in the United States, which is amazing, but all the pipes for our water come down the mountain and they got washed out. And that’s happened before, and so the city had invested in building up backup pipes and resilient pipes, and those got washed out too. So there was and the road to get to the reservoir also washed out. And this is not just like a casual washout. It’s like a 25 foot gully was created where there should have been a road. So it took them a while to even get up to the reservoir, where most of our drinking water comes from, and then they had to figure out how to treat it, where it went from being this, like, crystal clear, like, nice reservoir, to one that was, like, super muddy and looked like chocolate milk.
And so that was the biggest problem, was that the water was just too dirty to filter for a long time. And so they had to do a lot of different things, working with the Army Corps of Engineers to try and, like, figure out how to get the water into a level that was safe enough to drink, and they have finally been able to do that. And some of that sediment and mud has gone away just naturally.
But they’re also like trying, trying to filter water, and then they have to clean the filters, and it’s a whole thing. But we do have drinking water now, which is, which is good. But for a long time, I was just filling up water at like, different kinds of water refill stations that were set up around the city. So, like, the city had official ones, and then, like, churches and that kind of thing, were places where you could go and, like, refill your water. And again, that’s where it’s like, have five gallon jugs, which was really helpful to fill up water. And then, because the water is a situation, mostly for Asheville, I was able to, like, go to friends’ houses outside of the city to shower and do laundry. And did that for weeks where it was just like, had some friends who were really generous and were just like, yeah, just come on over every time you need a shower and do laundry, which was not ideal, but we did it. So it’s nice. It’s definitely one thing I am grateful for here Thanksgiving week is like running water that you can drink when you don’t have it. You realize the luxury it is.
Helena Rambler 44:49
On a similar note, how do you think infrastructure in Asheville can be kind of improved and changed in a more kind of defensive way, you know? And kind of go back to this idea that if something like this could happen again, how would infrastructure change?
Ellie Johnston 45:06
Yeah, I mean, the water system is one that’s like, very, very actively the city is working to address, because that’s one of the biggest economic impacts. So because it’s a mountainous city, there was severe flooding and many destroyed buildings in the floodplain of the river, but then there’s a lot of the city that’s okay. But because the city didn’t have water, businesses had to shut down unless they could figure out some way of bringing in, like, a bunch of water themselves, they couldn’t open and so that economic impact was really bad. And so that’s where the city is very focused right now, on, how can we create a stronger water system such that it won’t get washed out again in the next storm, and that we can treat water even when it’s really muddy. And the US Army Corps of Engineers is working with our city water department to, like, try and do some of that work.
And we’re looking at a new water treatment system that would cost $100 million like, that’s a huge amount of money for serve a community of like, I think, around 100,000 people and but those are the kinds of things that like are needing to be explored for water, because it’s so, so important.
In addition to that, there are things like bridges that have been closed since the storm, those will need to be rebuilt, and hopefully rebuilt in ways that are stronger and lots of buildings, and there’s a lot of discussion that will need to be had about what the floodplain for our rivers has been redefined. Areas that had never flooded before have just been flooded. So then what does that mean for people who own property in those areas? Can they rebuild their homes? That’s where their land is. It’s not like you can just move uphill if you don’t own that land or the businesses in those areas. And that’s, I don’t know, what outcome of those conversations will be like, can you just rebuild and get insurance, or do you have to locate somewhere else?
Helena Rambler 47:27
Earlier in our call, you said that there’s this kind of idea that people need something bad to happen, something drastic to happen, or to wake up and kind of acknowledge climate change, but on a kind of smaller scale, was there talk about climate and environmental and like climate change in people in your town,
Ellie Johnston 47:51
Yes, and in some ways No. I mean, it’s just like any city, it’s got full of all different kinds of perspectives. Asheville is home to NOAA, our government’s weather data organization, so [NOAA] stores all of the climate data for the country in Asheville. It’s just like all located here. So there’s a lot of very smart people who work in this town and know a lot about climate change, and in some, in many ways, it is on people’s minds, maybe more so than other areas. But is it on our minds enough? I don’t know. Is there more we could do? Probably, and certainly beyond the city, there’s a lot more that could be done.
Cindy Ye 48:42
Is there anything else about Hurricane Helene or Climate Interactive that you feel you’d like to share more about?
Ellie Johnston 48:50
In summary, as it goes with climate solutions, like we’ve figured out with our simulators, it takes a lot of different types of action, and it takes a lot of people doing things. The same is true for emergency response. It looks like a lot of different things, and you can’t rely on just one thing to get you through. And so as we think about whether they’re addressing climate change or responding to the impacts, I think what is important is that we all think about it is we have to kind of take personal responsibility for some elements of it. We don’t have to do everything, nor can we. And so we also have to, like, just give up that idea that we can fix it all, but we can fix some things, and we can be helpful in some ways. And so it’s finding that balance, which is kind of hard mentally. You’re like, well, either useless or I can be helpful. But that’s the real key, is you know, figuring out, okay, well, I hope I can be helpful to my neighbors, I can be helpful to my family, my friends. Maybe there are ways to help beyond that. And one of the things that I like to think about is, when it comes to taking action of any kind, it’s like an onion where you have these kind of layers coming outwards, where it’s like the first layer is yourself taking care of that. So in an emergency, you’ve got to take care of your own needs first, put on your mask, the oxygen mask for yourself before you put on the oxygen mask for anybody else you know. They say that in the airplanes when you fly. But then beyond that, there’s that layer of those people just around you. And then there’s like the layer of the institutions that you’re connected to, your schools, your workplace, your churches, your community organizations, whatever that might look like for you. And then there’s, like, the ways in which we show up to our whole community, voting, you know, donating money. There can be all kinds of different activities. And so these layers scale upwards to the national level, to the global level, and we all just find our ways to chip away at it and make the biggest difference that we can thinking about those different tiers and making sure we’ve prioritized them along the way.
Cindy Ye 51:13
We’re out of questions. But do you have any questions you’d like to ask us?
Ellie Johnston 51:18
I’m curious for you all, what’s on your mind regarding climate change, and have you all seen climate impacts yourselves?
Have you all had any kind of experiences like this where you were like, Oh, I need to be more prepared? What’s something that you’re taking from this to think about those disasters that you might encounter?
Helena Rambler 51:44
We actually spoke about this recently, and it was sometime last year, but in New York City, there were like crazy floods, and for me, that was kind of the first, I guess, firsthand account that I had experience with climate change for like, an actual event, and I think that a lot of people started talking about it, which was, you know, good kind of coverage, I guess, but it was obviously very devastating. And many people who lived far from our school, they couldn’t get home, and it was like a really big issue. And lastly, for me, like I could just walk home and felt very fortunate in that, but it was almost like it was just a very, like, striking moment when I realized, like, the kind of the weight of it all.
Ellie Johnston
Yeah.
David Case 52:32
So tack on another thing from June of last year we had, like, the wildfire smoke that was really present here. And so that was, like, definitely a really big thing in terms of, like, seeing things, like tangibly impacting, I guess, our everyday lives. And then the other thing I would speak to is temperature, like it’s December here, and for a lot of November and October, we’ve seen, like, really warm days or warm weeks. And so I think that’s the thing that definitely stands out in terms of personal experiences.
Pierce Siegel 53:01
Yeah, I would definitely agree. I think for me, thinking about that air quality crisis we had where, I think it was above 300 points, which was pretty like, disastrous for us. I mean, we couldn’t go outside. I think sports were canceled. So for me, I mean, like, compared to, like other events, it’s minor, but for me, that was the eye opening experience.
Cindy Ye 53:25
And on a similar note, just very recently, New York City was in a drought, and the air quality was horrible, again, not to the level of last June, but still, I had a road race, and I could definitely feel it in the air. I heard a lot of people coughing. And there were also a couple wildfires, not in Canada, but in New Jersey and also parts of New York. So it felt much closer to home than it ever did before.
Ellie Johnston 53:54
Yeah, for sure.
Helena Rambler 53:56
So adding on to the wildfire, the major wildfires from last June, like, David was saying something that I noticed during that time was that people were half joking, half not that, like, oh, the world was ending. And they kind of said that more just because, like, oh, the color of the sky was not normal, and it was like, red and yellow that had a lot more weight. And, like, it was actually a lot more true than I think people realized, because it was genuinely like an effect of climate change. And I think that, you know, as more and more people realize that it kind of becomes a lot more real.
Ellie Johnston
Yeah, certainly, Certainly. I mean, statistically, a lot more people have experienced climate impacts of different kinds.
Cindy Ye 54:41
Thank you so much for your time. It was really enlightening hearing you speak about hurricane, marine and Climate Interactive.
Ellie Johnston 54:46
I’m so glad that some of you have used our tools at Climate Interactive and happy to share my experience about the hurricane and hopefully it gives you some ideas for things you might do to help prepare and for yourselves for whatever disasters might come your way. Certainly, we live in unpredictable times, but yeah, I really appreciate the conversation with you all today.
Helena Rambler 55:19
Thank you for listening to our tiny podcast about a giant topic. We’ve learned we have listeners from all over the world, and we’re curious who you are and what you would like to hear on the show. So if you’d like, please send us an email at podcast@thecityatlas.org. Thanks for listening!
More stories from Asheville on the lingering impact…
“When a hurricane washes away a region’s child care system: Nearly six months after Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina, some child care centers remain closed and young kids are still reeling from the disruptions“ Sara Murphy, Hechinger Report, March 24, 2025
and on the crisis in the first few days:
“I wasn’t prepared to be a climate refugee” Melissa Hanson, Scientific American, October 4, 2024
Excerpt from Melody Schreiber’s interview with fly fishing guide Jerry McNeely, about the damage in the mountain communities near Asheville (October 10, 2024):
One of the occupants was trapped in one home. I ran up there — I had to do something — and I worked for about 45 minutes. I got back far enough where I could see her toenails, because they were purple. There was a beam pinning her leg, I think.
About this time, three or four more Good Samaritan neighbors started to show up. And one, his name was Cheney. He crawled into the completely collapsed structure head first, with a headlamp and a rechargeable reciprocating saw, and climbed, I don’t know, 30 feet under the collapsed, flooded structure in a hole that a rabbit probably couldn’t have crawled through, and cut the beam supports that could have collapsed the building on his head, and was able to remove the lady from her structure. And we got her boxer out, her dog. We’re really happy. This is a morale booster. She had injuries to her leg, but they were not life-threatening, and she had large black eye. We finally got her evacuated about 18 hours later, and we kept her stable for the interim. Later on, we found out that the black eye was some sort of a head trauma. But she’s stable.
About the time that was wrapping up, we start hearing screams off the mountain, and there was an elderly man with a broken back. He had been tossed out of his mobile home. He’s on the far side of the mudslide, which is 75 yards wide, and the mud’s waist deep.
We work up there. By then he was nonresponsive, but he was alive, and we just — there was no help coming. But I took off down the mountain looking for any sort of policeman, any sort of paramedic who happened to have gotten across, because at this moment, I didn’t know the situation at the bottom of the mountain and how it was on the river. No one was found, and the man passed away on the mountain. One of my neighbors found his wife 200 yards further down the mountain. She had been killed instantly.
When I got down to look for the help at the bottom of the mountain, 150 yards from where the river should be, there’s the river and dozens and dozens and dozens of collapsed structures. They call it a river, but by anyone else’s standards, it’s a creek. You could walk across it in 12 to 15 large steps. And at this point in time, it was 300 yards wide of white water that went across the entire Swannanoa Valley. That valley was covered in mobile home parks, homes, churches, and a lot of that was just completely and totally erased.
Western North Carolina is still rebuilding. The cover photo for this post is from a tourist guide, RomanticAsheville.com, and the region welcomes the return of visitors.