“We were pretty aware that the storm was going to be significant, but we had no idea it would be as significant as it was,” says Libertie Valance, a co-owner of Firestorm Books, the worker-owned bookstore in Asheville, NC that transformed overnight into a mutual aid hub following Hurricane Helene.
After causing fatalities and catastrophic damage across the Southeast, Helene reached the Western North Carolina mountain city of Asheville in the early hours of Friday Sept. 27. Floodwaters cut off access to the city via Interstate 26, severely damaged the local water system, and left residents isolated without power or cell service. Though the hurricane had been downgraded to a tropical storm by then, Western North Carolina’s terrain makes it particularly vulnerable to flooding. The intense rainfall that came on Thursday had already saturated the mountains, rapidly causing rivers and streams to overflow.
Once the storm subsided on Friday afternoon, Valance and Beck, another co-owner who lived within walking distance of the store, ventured out to Firestorm to see if the building had sustained any damage. The two had spent the previous day shoring it up against water leaks with trash bags and duct tape amid the torrential rain that preceded the storm’s arrival. Shortly after the remnants of Helene hit their region early Friday morning, the area had completely lost internet and cell service, leaving no way to assess the damage without physically going to the bookstore.
“When we got there, we were pleased to discover that only one tree had fallen next to our building and it fell away from the building instead of into the building,” Valance recalls. The two were also relieved to find store had not flooded. “We’re on relatively high ground and the water that had been coming into the building the day before, it seemed like we had pretty effectively dealt with.”
The most exciting discovery, however, was the sign someone had left on the door announcing a community meeting to take place there on Saturday. The Firestorm collective had planned to try to gather people in the space to assess community needs following the storm, and now someone from the community had already put out that call.
As a worker cooperative started by community activists in 2008, Firestorm Books is deeply rooted in local social movements. At present, the co-op consists of a staff of five, four of whom are owners and one of whom is a prospective member. Now in their third location, the co-op moved into their current space about a year before Hurricane Helene hit. “It’s the same neighborhood we were already in, so we’re pretty well established here,” says Valance. “I would say that we came into this moment already pretty engaged with other organizations and groups in our region that do mutual aid and grassroots activism.”
On Saturday Sept. 28, the day after the storm, about 40 people gathered outside the store for the first community meeting, where they set up tables to distribute food and supplies. Everyone agreed they would keep doing this every day, and Sunday’s meeting drew at least 100 people. Beck describes that first distro as “really scrappy.” Co-op members and neighbors alike would bring extra food from their pantries and freezers to put out on the table for folks who didn’t have enough food on hand. “At that point the roads into and out of Asheville were blocked,” Valance recalls. “There was literally no aid coming into the city, so any aid being distributed was coming out of people’s homes in the first couple of days.” For several weeks after Helene struck Asheville, neighbors would congregate for a daily meeting outside the co-op, occasionally facilitated by staff but usually by community members. Valance says these gatherings served as “a space for people to gather, process feelings, get up-to-date information and coordinate relief activities.”
Even after internet and cell service were restored to the immediate area surrounding Firestorm, Beck recalls, access to the internet was extremely spotty. “That was a pretty extended period where it just wasn’t super reliable.” Because of this and the lack of running water, they say, people would show up to the meetings everyday with concerns like, “I take insulin and I don’t have power. Do you know where can I get ice? Where can I get water? Where can I get food? Are there any gas stations that I can get gas from?” The co-op posted signs with information on things like where people could go to get water or free food, all of which came from people at the meetings who would crowd around a big piece of paper and write down what they had observed was available and where. “There was just a constant stream of people coming by and taking down their own notes, or if they were able to charge their phones, taking pictures.”
“People sort of started showing up with resources who we didn’t know, and not necessarily even asking us permission,” says Valance. Neighbors would set up outside Firestorm to share skills and knowledge, like fixing people’s bicycles or teaching people to use low-tech compostable toilets. For those who lived in apartment buildings, this provided a better option than having to carry buckets of water up multiple flights of stairs to flush their toilets manually. By Sunday Sept. 29, I-26 had reopened between Asheville and South Carolina, which Beck and Valance say shifted the dynamic. Where before people had simply been emptying their garages, pantries and freezers, they were now driving to Charlotte or Greenville and filling up trucks with supplies to distribute.
One of Firestorm Books’ long-time collaborators in Asheville is PODER Emma Community Ownership, an organization that develops and supports a network of cooperatives in Emma, a predominantly Latine neighborhood. Becky Brown, one of the group’s founders and co-directors, says PODER Emma and Firestorm communicated regularly in the storm’s aftermath, sharing supplies and resources they knew about or could put people in touch with. “If they had things that we needed or we had things that they needed, we tried to make sure that we were getting things to each other.”
Founded in 2016 by Emma residents, PODER Emma focuses on developing worker co-ops and mobile home housing co-ops, with the aim of building community among neighbors to fight displacement as Asheville develops. Brown describes the organization’s approach as community organizing and community development “with the idea that communities know for themselves what’s best and can be the developers of their own community.”
“We have two sides—the community development side and the cooperative development side,” Brown explains, “although they go hand in hand because part of our community development is building an economy that works for our community.” Their cooperative ecosystem includes Quetzal Community Real Estate, a community-owned real estate co-op focused on creating permanently affordable housing in Emma. At present, they have developed four mobile home housing co-ops, each of which is a separate LLC, and are under contract for a vacant piece of land they hope to purchase and develop into another mobile home co-op. While Brown says it doesn’t happen very often, they are always on the lookout for the opportunity to purchase a mobile home park that would be a good fit for them. When one is for sale, they do a financial model to see if they can operate that park within their affordable housing guidelines and if so, they make an offer on it and create a new LLC to purchase the park.
Brown is also a resident of one of the mobile home co-ops. “When the hurricane hit, I was at my home and just watching trees fall by my house, one after the other. It was really scary to see.” When the storm passed, residents were trapped in their park by the fallen trees, and immediately were all out together helping clear trees from the roads, as well as helping a neighbor whose trailer had been destroyed get to a safe place. PODER Emma staff spread the word among people to meet at the organization’s building the next day and make a plan to respond to the devastation. “We’re community organizers, and so we had maps of our community. We knew where the mobile home parks were, for example, and some of the low-income apartment complexes. We know people in our community, so when we go to people, they recognize us.”
The staff solicited supplies for the community from individuals and did a door-to-door distribution. “We set up water stations in about 30 mobile home parks and apartment complexes,” says Brown. A team would go door to door to distribute food and water to people, and ask what other needs they had, such as medications or home repairs. Chainsaw crews went out and cleared trees off of people’s homes and properties. With school out for a whole month, Brown says they provided childcare so staff and the many people who volunteered could be sure their children were taken care of. Because the worker co-ops in the network were unable to operate after the storm, they pitched in as well to do whatever was needed. “Those workers just jumped into that, which is one of the benefits of being part of this cooperative ecosystem.”
Footprint Project, a disaster response team that was on the ground in Western North Carolina following Helene, installed a solar generator on the well in the housing co-op where Brown lives in order to pump water for the water stations PODER Emma set up around the county. Brown says they pumped over 130,000 gallons of water from the co-op’s well to make sure people had water for bathing and flushing and distributed bottled water for drinking. The organization received some disaster response funds from foundations, but also from a lot of individuals locally and all over the country who wanted to help. “Seeing all of that support was really helpful, and then on the ground, seeing how neighbors were helping each other and checking on each other and saying, how can I help?”
“I think what was notable,” says Valance, “was that there was a significant gap at the beginning during which there weren’t sufficient supplies or communication in the region, and as a result, most of the aid that was happening was neighbors helping each other—not federally coordinated aid.” With no internet or cell service, people would crowd around the radio and listen to the county media briefings that were broadcast twice a day. For days, Valance recalls, the city or the county officials would said would be able to announce the FEMA sites where there would be food and water tomorrow. “And they kept pushing it back, particularly in the first few days.”
Beck remembers hearing a lot of “see something, say something” messaging in these briefings, warning people to look out for and report any crimes committed by their neighbors, a narrative that felt discordant with what co-op members were actually experiencing. “We heard from folks who are further out of the city that there was a generalized belief that Asheville had descended into chaos, of looting and violence,” says Valance, “which was sort of wild because we were here every day experiencing just a beautiful outpouring of community.” Valance says people from the community also shared experiences like going somewhere to look for supplies and finding that that place had all the supplies locked up, with a line of police officers preventing people from accessing them.
Firestorm Books recently began hosting a weekly discussion space based on Rebecca Solnit’s 2009 book, A Paradise Built in Hell, which details how humans have typically responded to disaster by coming together in cooperation and mutual aid, contrary to the dominant views on human nature. Valance believes the book holds many valuable insights for those in the cooperative ecosystem, including Solnit’s discussion of “elite panic” and the way leaders tend to assume regular people will become wildly irrational or violent in the midst of a crisis. “There is a tendency on the part of authority figures to respond to a disaster by making the situation worse through the application of a very stern law-and-order approach,” says Valance, “which is actually the opposite of what a community needs when there’s a crisis and people need care.”
One worker-owned business in PODER Emma’s network is a property maintenance co-op called Chispas, developed to help low-income neighbors with repairs such as roof replacements. Now, Brown says, there has been a big need to expand that program. “We weren’t hit so much by the flooding, but we were really affected by all the wind damage. A big focus for us right now is repairing damages to mobile homes.” The network also collaborates with groups in areas like Swannanoa that were hit hard by flooding, using their 501c3 status to provide fiscal sponsorship so these groups can access funding, and has been sharing supplies with other distribution centers throughout the crisis. “We’re doing ongoing distribution of food and household supplies here because so many people lost their jobs and then we have a lot of people in our community who don’t qualify for unemployment. So we know there’s going to be an ongoing need for basic household supplies and food.”
On Nov. 18, the Asheville Water Resources Department announced that the water coming out of the taps was now potable and lifted the boil water notice that had been in effect for nearly two months. Valance and Beck point to the city’s water system as one of the ways this disaster has exacerbated preexisting inequities in Asheville. “There hasn’t been a lot of investment in it the last 50 years in the way that some other communities have,” says Valance. With a history of disinvestment by city officials dating back to the Great Depression, the system is prone to frequent outages that engineering experts blame on infrastructure issues and mismanagement. Boil water advisories, usually a result of waterline breaks, have also been a regular occurrence for Asheville residents since long before this particular crisis.
“There’s a presumption that a natural disaster is sort of external to social and economic conditions,” says Valance. “But I think to a large extent, what we experience during a natural disaster is sort of the failing of our society and our economic system, both to plan for those moments and then also to provide sufficient support for recovery.”
Though electricity was restored at Firestorm Books after approximately one week, some of the hardest hit areas of Asheville were still without power a month after Helene, with officials citing inaccessibility and damaged infrastructure as obstacles. “Within Western North Carolina, communities didn’t start off with equal resources, and equal resources were not applied in the recovery phase,” says Valance. “So people have had very different experiences, often colored by their economic backgrounds, their citizenship status, their race and ethnicity, what part of the county they live in. We can speak really well to our neighborhood, but we’re super aware that disasters are not the great equalizer that sometimes people talk about them as being, because not everybody goes into a disaster with the same level of resilience and resources.”
Once the community got internet and power restored, Brown says the worker co-ops in PODER Emma’s network were able to resume work. With some of the disaster response funds, the nonprofit provided small grants to compensate the co-ops for their help in the recovery and to replace some of that income they had lost while they were unable to do business.
“We were already really well positioned in a lot of ways because we have so many strong relationships in the community through our cooperatives and through the organizing work that we do,” says Brown. “Having already built those trusting relationships was one of the key things that allowed us to move really quickly.” Before the hurricane, PODER Emma was already in the process of planning a participatory design process for the common spaces of their mobile home parks and cooperatives to see how the members of each co-op wanted to use those spaces. “Now after going through this experience, we have realized we also want to add a component to that of bringing in experts on climate resilience so that we can include that in any plan for the common space.”
Brown says PODER Emma has also dug an additional well since the hurricane. “As a cooperative ecosystem, we’re more resilient for things like the water system.” Because water is often an issue for mobile home parks due to pipes freezing in the winter, she says they decided it was worth it to have a community well available in the event of any future natural disaster that might affect the water system. Brown also thinks the common space design will probably include rain barrel systems and other things they could put into place to meet people’s water needs in the absence of running water.
The Firestorm collective has also been talking more about climate resilience and how to harden the cooperative’s infrastructure to be an even more valuable hub for community response and activity in future emergencies. Conversations around this have included getting a battery for their solar panels, allowing them to operate the building off-grid and offer electricity and internet to the community. Currently, they have three IBCs of clean well water outside their storefront that they have considered repurposing into rainwater catchments coming off the roof. “While we ultimately may not be able to fully fix the city’s water system,” says Valance, “I think there’s an enormous amount at a much lower level that we have direct control over and can coordinate with neighbors and friends in order to ensure that we have better resources for future emergencies.”
For Valance, this crisis has struck home the importance of long-term physical infrastructure that is publicly accessible. “So much was able to happen immediately because we have been in this community for 16 years and people know that this is where folks are going to come and want to do something,” they say. “I think the big theme that emerged was just that our co-op was able to provide a home for a lot of activity, and it wasn’t necessarily activity we were directing or planning or even could have anticipated. Being an already-existing sort of community institution, I think we were able to act as a container for a lot of other brilliant and altruistic behavior.”
Beck believes Firestorm Books formed a deeper interdependence with their community during that period, strengthening relationships both by helping and by allowing others to help them. “There was something really profound about the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, where we truly experienced for the first time the mutuality of mutual aid.”