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 The hundreds of FEMA staff on the ground in western North Carolina will remain and will not be redeployed to Florida in preparation for the devastation expected there from Hurricane Milton, an agency spokesman said. “FEMA is not taking any resources away from ongoing operations here in North Carolina,” spokesman Darrell Habisch told Asheville Watchdog. […]

Faced with a continuing water outage and uncertainty over when full sanitation will be restored, the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office has transferred 129 inmates to five other jails across the state and to a mental hospital, Asheville Watchdog has learned — and attorneys for many of the inmates who remain say their clients should be […]

While the Tropical Storm Helene questions keep coming in, I’m going to keep dedicating the Answer Man columns to them. Let’s get to today’s batch: Question: The city’s unwillingness to offer any timeline for water restoration beyond “weeks” is a cop-out and an insult to citizens. They could certainly give us ‘best-case’ and ‘worst-case’ scenarios. […]

No, Hurricane Helene was not somehow orchestrated by people who can control the weather, FEMA is not out of money because it diverted $1 billion to illegal immigrants, and federal assistance is not limited to $750 for each storm victim. These are just a few of the numerous false rumors circulating in the aftermath of […]

[Editor’s note: Tom Fiedler’s Election Watch normally appears each Wednesday, but Asheville Watchdog is suspending its normal publication schedule for now following Hurricane Helene and will make each column available as soon as possible.] In addition to destroying much of western North Carolina’s infrastructure and upending the lives of all of us, Hurricane Helene may […]

By now, the “bears in canoes” meme seems pretty quaint, right? You surely remember before Helene hit the mountains how we’d already gotten a half-foot of rain and people started sharing the memes of Asheville’s plentiful bears taking to canoes and kayaks downtown to survive inundated streets. It seemed to capture the moment in a […]

That dreadful sense of loss. We’ve felt it time and again the past nine days, over neighbors who lost lives and homes, over our infrastructure that lost the ability to provide for our basic needs, and over our beloved city and county, unrecognizable in many parts. But Asheville has also lost part of its soul, […]

Twice in two decades, enormous transmission lines have washed out at North Fork Reservoir after torrential, hurricane-induced rain events, leaving city residents without water for days on end. In September 2004, a historic rain event spawned by a hurricane pummeled the Black Mountain and Swannanoa areas, causing a catastrophic failure of the City of Asheville’s […]

In terms of rainfall, flooding, and, tragically, lives lost, Hurricane Helene is officially worse than the historic 1916 and 2004 floods that until last week stood as the most damaging natural disasters in recorded Buncombe County history, according to state climate data. “I just kind of assumed that … we wouldn’t ever actually see another […]

To Dr. Ruchi Moore and her colleagues at Asheville’s Laurel OB/GYN, Hurricane Helene’s onslaught felt like a rerun of the COVID-19 pandemic “plus just an insane snowstorm.” The storm shuttered the practice, leaving patients in crisis, and destroyed one employee’s home. But Moore and her staff plan to reopen today, even though they lack water. […]