How do community leaders provide vital updates when the power is down and cellphone service is out? One North Carolina town devastated by Hurricane Helene has brought back a decidedly low-tech solution: the town meeting.
Residents in Black Mountain, N.C., about 12 miles east of Asheville, have pitched in to make signs alerting their neighbors to the daily gatherings, using posters, markers, wooden boards, spray paint and anything else they can get their hands on. It’s working: About 1,000 people are turning out for daily updates in the town square.
Spotty phone service is just one of the many problems facing western North Carolina and the surrounding region, where floods and landslides turned some communities into rubble. Blocked roads have left people isolated and forced them to fend for themselves. In many places, the National Guard has had to use helicopters to get food and water to residents.
But the disrupted lines of communication have compounded those difficulties, making it hard for relief workers to know where people are and what they need. Being cut off from the modern world has also left many residents feeling frustrated and alone. So they’ve turned to methods that have been out of date for a century or more.
The town square in Burnsville, N.C., became an ad hoc communications center for residents, the local ABC affiliate reported. People have scrawled messages in marker on whiteboards to let their neighbors know how they’re doing or what they need. “We are alive, house gone,” read one. “I am safe,” read another.
In Black Mountain, home to about 8,000 people, daily meetings started on Monday, when the town was still struggling to receive much-need resources like food, water and fuel. By Tuesday, the worst blockages had been cleared from Interstate 40 into the town, and helicopters were providing relief supplies.
“We were cut off from everybody,” said Josh Harrold, the town manager. “We couldn’t get anything up here.” The town meetings gave local officials a way to provide vital information about supplies, roads, repair estimates and tracking down missing people.
They’re also providing a much-need sense of community amid the widespread destruction, Mr. Harrold said: “We’re going to get through this, but we’re only going to do it if we do it together.”
A photo posted on X by a local meteorologist showed the scene at the initial town meeting on Monday: A police officer stood on a picnic table, addressing hundreds of people sitting on benches, the ground and their own camp chairs.
Cell service and internet access were slowly being restored in some places by Wednesday. A daily briefing from the Federal Emergency Management Agency showed that North Carolina had 10 counties with major cell site disruptions, an improvement from 17 on Tuesday.
In Banner Elk, N.C., a town in the Blue Ridge Mountains that is popular with skiers and hikers, the town hall has morphed into a distribution hub for food, water and supplies. Officials post about these resources on Facebook. But with internet and cellphone service still spotty, the most effective way to let people know about what’s available has been simple word of mouth.
“It’s a very old-school method,” said Lora Elder, a volunteer who is helping to manage crisis communications for the town. “But that’s how the word’s been getting spread.”
At the town meeting in Black Mountain on Tuesday, Mr. Harrold said that officials were working to get the city government up and running so that they could once again turn their attention to things like payroll and garbage collection.
He added that there was, finally, internet access in the town square and at the town hall. By Wednesday, the signal was strong enough to upload a video recording of the meeting to the town’s Facebook page.
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