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The Assembly is putting storm coverage outside of our paywall and making it free to republish in any local or regional outlet.
Alondra Barrera-Hernandez hadn’t been too worried about Hurricane Helene—until she got a knock on her dorm room door at UNC-Asheville on Friday morning. Her dorm had already lost power in the storm, and a couple inches of flooding had crept up in the stairwells of the first floor.
The senior resident assistant and student-body vice president opened her door at around 9 a.m. to find the RA on call, who informed her there was an emergency staff meeting in an hour. Those never happened.
“They told us, ‘It’s going to be an all-hands-on-deck thing,’” Barrera-Hernandez said.
Barrera-Hernandez leapt into action alongside other students and campus employees who worked around the clock as Hurricane Helene battered the mountain city. The next few days were a whirlwind: She did headcounts twice a day, helped inform students of when meals and water were delivered, and directed residents to stop taking showers and use the portable toilets just outside the residence hall after the water went out.
She tried to provide information even when she had little herself. Her supervisors shared bits of news as it came in: when part of I-40 collapsed, when the popular River Arts District flooded, when the extent of the city’s water problems became apparent. Other clues came in glimpses of the destruction outside. Her dorm is right next to the Asheville Botanical Garden, and she could hear the trees cracking and see limbs snapping off from her windows.
Barrera-Hernandez left Asheville on Sunday to stay with her partner in neighboring Rutherford County, which was slightly better off. By then, the questions compounded in her mind about what would happen to campus.
“I want to experience my final year with my friends and stuff,” she told The Assembly. “I’m not sure when I’m going to be able to do that, and how long it will take for everything just to be fixed again, because damages are just so bad.”
Barrera-Hernandez’s worries echo those of other college students whose campuses and communities were devastated by Hurricane Helene. A number of schools have been temporarily closed. UNCA had originally hoped to resume classes on October 9, but on Tuesday the school pushed that date back to October 28. Appalachian State University in Boone said Wednesday that classes won’t meet until after October 15, while Western Carolina University in Cullowhee will resume classes on October 21. At least 13 community colleges closed, most of them through the end of the week, according to updates from EdNC.
As communities assess the damage and prepare for the long road to recovery ahead, the extent of the disruption on campuses is starting to come into focus. Nine students who spoke with The Assembly detailed flooding around on- and off-campus housing, downed trees and power lines, and displaced students and campus employees. While campuses work to reopen and resume classes, it’s clear some won’t be the same for some time.
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‘My House Was an Island’
Like others in the region who have shared their stories in recent days, students who spoke with The Assembly didn’t anticipate that the impacts of Helene would be as grave as they were.
That was the case for Aubrie Ruscetti, a junior at Western Carolina University. When Ruscetti went to sleep in the early hours of the morning on Friday, she saw the Tuckasegee River begin to rise near her house located just off WCU’s campus in Cullowhee. Growing up in Wilmington, Ruscetti was no stranger to hurricanes. Still, she felt safe in her house nestled in the mountains, where she estimated the river was six to 10 feet away.
She woke up the next morning to find the water rising up under the front porch steps, still a few feet below the base of the house, thanks to its stilts. Lost canoes and playhouses bobbed in the river’s current, and downed power lines encircled her home.
“My house was an island,” she told The Assembly.
Two of her friends and fellow WCU students, Cora Haste and Addisyn Quarles, and a few others rushed to get emergency services to Ruscetti. With a boat and ropes, emergency service workers pulled Ruscetti and another student in the house to safety. Ruscetti is still grappling with the frightening encounter.
“No one thought it was going to be this bad,” she said. “I thought I was pretty well seasoned when it comes to hurricanes, but I’m so thankful that we don’t have school or anything where I’m expected to do things right now, because it’s been such an emotionally exhausting experience.”
In a statement, WCU said its campus was “spared with minimal damage” and essential operations like dining and emergency services are open for the remainder of the week. Still, it’s hard for Ruscetti, who left town after the storm, to imagine going back to campus.
“The idea of starting school just doesn’t seem real right now,” she said. “I know it’s going to have to be.”
Constant Triage
Campus administrators and staff have been working around-the-clock since last Friday.
UNCA Chancellor Kimberly van Noort has been taking the helm of the university’s makeshift control center at around 6 or 7 a.m. At times, that meant walking through campus to check on students and let them know it was all going to be okay. Other times, that meant personally restocking portable toilets with toilet paper.
“Everyone had to do everything,” van Noort told The Assembly on Tuesday afternoon.
When the storm hit, van Noort said about 1,300 of the university’s 1,600 residential students remained on campus. Almost immediately, the university lost power, water, cellular communications, and internet service.
The next few days consisted of constant triage to keep the campus running: clearing trees fallen on roads to make way for emergency services, preparing three meals a day with what was on hand, and shuttling students to a nearby abandoned Kmart that had some cell service so they could let their loved ones know they are OK.
Alexandra Lail, an A-B Tech student who lives in UNCA housing, tried to head home to Winston-Salem on Saturday with her boyfriend. But mudslides, massive trees, and sinkholes forced them to turn back. On Sunday, they drove down through South Carolina and then back up into North Carolina. After seeing and driving through parts of the university, Lail thought the damage from the wooded areas surrounding the UNCA campus looked severe.
On Monday, UNCA announced that it would relocate any students who remained on campus due to resource constraints and the ongoing interruptions to water and power in Asheville. Most have returned home or are bunking with friends. A “minimal number,” van Noort said, were taken to UNC-Charlotte.
“The crisis response is beginning to subside, because we have successfully gotten the students elsewhere, in a safe place,” van Noort said. “Now we need to plan for the recovery phase.”
Barrera-Hernandez, the student body vice president, and Liv Barefoot, a junior who serves as student body president, told The Assembly on Monday that the sights on and around UNCA are difficult to process, including all the downed power lines and trees.
As a senior who studies music, Barrera-Hernandez is already worried about finishing her graduate school applications without campus resources and is thinking about taking a gap semester. “It’s just like a great deal of uncertainty and, like, fear in my mind all the time,” she said.
Still, “the semester is not done,” van Noort said. The university is in constant communication with the city and working quickly to clear off campus—she noted that she could hear the sounds of chainsaws as she spoke. “We will have things up and running in some fashion as soon as we possibly can.”
Helping Out
Despite the devastation, students said they were working together with faculty and staff to provide support and resources for their campuses.
Buncombe County has two shelters running on A-B Tech’s Asheville campus. Appalachian State’s convocation center has become an emergency shelter, and the university has served more than 40,000 free meals to campus and community members since last Friday. Multiple UNC campuses and the system office pooled resources and sent law enforcement, food trucks, and IT experts to UNCA. Displaced students can go to any institution in the UNC System for mental health support, the system said in a press release on Monday.
At Appalachian State, a student-led relief effort, App State Helping Hand, has amassed more than 2,600 followers on Instagram. Lyle Parker, a freshman social work major, started the page on Friday with a few other students who connected over the social media platform Yik Yak during the storm. In addition to sharing resources from around the area on social media, the group has handed out care packages, coordinated volunteers and donations to local businesses that are trying to provide free meals to community members, and connected people looking to leave the region with transportation.
“You don’t ever think about this stuff until you’re out there doing it,” Parker told The Assembly. “You never really think that you’ll be in a situation where you’re helping with emergency relief, especially in a place like western North Carolina.”
Several academic buildings at Appalachian State have “significant water damage,” interim Chancellor Heather Norris said at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon. Norris also said some students, faculty, and staff have “lost everything.”
Appalachian State student body president Kathryn Long said students who have lost property or their housing still have a lot of questions about what to do and where to get assistance. But she’s been proud of how the campus has banded together.
“For college students already, it’s a financial struggle. It’s already hard to be living on your own, to be living off campus,” Long said. “But I do feel confident that they’re being supported in all the ways they can be right now.”
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