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In the wake of Hurricane Helene, UNC-Asheville announced on Tuesday afternoon that it would close its campus through October 14 and not resume classes for at least two more weeks after that.
Several other colleges in the region have closed campuses due to the destruction in Western North Carolina. But UNC-Asheville has remained without power or water since the storm hit on Friday.
Around 1,300 out of 1,600 residential students were still on campus when Helene hit. After the storm passed, the university worked to get those students off campus. Now that students have been relocated, Chancellor Kimberly van Noort told The Assembly that recovery planning can begin.
Here are highlights from our conversation with van Noort.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
This isn’t something Western North Carolina universities have really seen before. What did preparation for the hurricane look like?
We took it very seriously, although nobody could have predicted how bad this is going to be. And so we began planning about a week before the hurricane hit. We put in orders for portlets. We put in orders for bottled water. We knew that even if it wasn’t as bad as it ended up being, we were going to have a serious situation on our hands.
I don’t think anyone anticipated those three or four days of hard rain before the tropical storm hit. And as we began that realization, and we started getting very different-sounding predictions, we began to shift our plans a little bit and operationalize some other emergency plans. It was very difficult, if not impossible.
The one thing that we did not anticipate—I don’t think anyone ever does—was a complete and total breakdown of all communication systems. And so that’s something that’s going to be very interesting for us to think about when we are later working through this. How do we address that? I think every university in the country now, every city, every county, they’re going to have to be thinking about what happens if everything goes down.
We just have not seen that before. I worked with UNC-Wilmington after Florence, and they had communications all throughout. This is more like what we saw during Katrina in New Orleans, when universities there literally just had to evacuate their students as quickly as possible and just walk away at the moment. So it’s been a highly unusual situation.
UNCA pretty quickly lost power, water, cellular communications, and internet service. How have you kept campus running and essential services going the past few days?
When the storm hit, we had about 1300 students still living on campus, and we communicated to them through our Bulldog alert system. However, obviously, we very quickly out here in Western North Carolina lost all internet and all cell connectivity. That was an extremely difficult piece as we came through this.
When the storm abated, we were able to ascertain the timing of when we could get our saw crews out. Our main issue here was the downing of trees, the blockage of our roads. When the storm ended, there were no open roads on campus, so we had to move very quickly to get an open road for emergency vehicles if necessary to come in.
And we also realized that we needed to feed our students, and our meal service was not able to get to us. And so, all hands on deck. We did have one of our caterers come in. We scrambled and fed the students that afternoon, and we fed them that evening. We have fed them three times a day since then.
There was a lot of angst on the students’ parts when they couldn’t reach their families. And of course, the families were frantic as well. We worked very hard to identify some hot spots, but if there was nothing for a very long time, slowly, we began to have some connectivity. We began shuttling students to a Kmart out on Patton Avenue—a former Kmart, it’s closed now—where there was some connectivity. We were giving international students priority out there because they were having a hard time getting overseas calls in. We were eventually able to reconnect, or connect our students with family and friends and help begin the process of relocation.
When we knew that water and power were going to be out for a significant period of time, that was going to cause our campus infrastructure to deteriorate. We really can’t operate without running water here or power, and we knew we needed to safely relocate our students, so we organized carpools. We gave students gasoline if they didn’t have gas for their cars. We gave them cash if they needed cash on the other end, we hooked them up with people driving. We had parents coming in to pick up one child, and they ended up taking four down the mountain to meet up with parents down there.
So we had a really nice, coordinated effort. All of the student staff here—the student affairs staff—has just been amazing. We kept track of where every student was. Were they eating? Were they in their rooms? Because it was not a particularly safe time. So it was really hard, but the students were fantastic. They pitched in, they were patient, they were concerned for each other. They supported each other. And actually a couple of them told me they enjoyed a little time away from their devices. So that was what that was, maybe the one bright spot in a pretty dark situation.
We’ve all seen images coming out of Asheville that are absolutely devastating. What does campus currently look like?
The campus is currently closed. I want to be clear about that. There are no students remaining on campus, and the campus is closed to all but mandatory employees. Those are generally the facilities folks, the operations folks.
We still do not have a clear inventory of the actual condition of all of our buildings. We’ve not had time. We are not sure about the total extent of water damage or what else we may find, so it’s very important that we keep folks off campus.
Right now, we are providing some support to first responders who are coming into the area and to federal and state officials. We had a (Federal Emergency Management Agency) strike force here in the last two days. They have since been redeployed, but we are reserving our resources right now to make sure that we have the support for the first responders who are coming in to address the larger situation in Buncombe County.
To what extent are you seeing displacement of students, faculty, and staff, and what do the next steps look like for them?
We’re trying to identify anyone who has been impacted and necessary information about the resources that are available in the city and the county. We’re reaching out right now to all faculty and staff that we haven’t heard from to see if we can establish contact, to see what they may need in terms of information and resources.
I’ve talked to UNCA students and others across the region who are worried about what the return to campus will look like. What do you want them to know about the road ahead?
I would want them to know that we are doing everything we can with the availability of power and water to get our campus back to an operational state as soon as humanly possible.
There are crews out there right now—I can hear the chainsaws—who are working very quickly. We do not have confidence, however, that the power and water are going to be restored by next week, and so all students will be receiving further communications in the next few days about the timeline and what to expect. We will continue to constantly communicate with them. [Editor’s note: UNCA later announced that classes would be canceled through October 28 after initially planning to resume classes on October 9.]
About the campus itself, the buildings are fine. Our residence halls have not been damaged. So we do not have a massive facilities infrastructure problem. We have a utilities infrastructure problem, and that’s not anything that we have control over.
So we are talking to the city every single day trying to get estimates. Much of their equipment is still underwater, and so they are not able to even assess it at this point. But we are Bulldog strong. The semester is not done. We will have things up and running in some fashion as soon as we possibly can.
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