This time of year, Penland School of Craft in Western North Carolina is usually welcoming artists from all over the country to participate in a semester-long session with world-renowned instructors in sculpture, book-binding, print-making, and more.
In early October, instead, they fed and sheltered people who have been uprooted by the disastrous force of Hurricane Helene.
The craft school’s quick pivot from normal operations to serving as an impromptu disaster-relief facility is being replicated across Western North Carolina, as people who were spared by the flood figure out how they can help their neighbors who weren’t.
The century-old school has residential and food-service facilities, which make it uniquely suited to help people who are trapped or made homeless by the storm. But Penland’s first qualification for the job is that it didn’t suffer catastrophic damage from the storm.
“Compared to the immediate surrounding areas, we’re really lucky,” said Ian Henderson, director of operations at Penland School of Craft, in a phone interview with the Daily Yonder.
The school has canceled its fall sessions, according to its website.
Penland sits on top of a mountain in Mitchell County, one of the North Carolina counties hit with deadly flooding and landslides from Hurricane Helene the last weekend of September. Helene dropped 24 inches of rain in the Mitchell County town of Spruce Pine, about a 15 minute drive down the mountain from Penland.
Hurricane Helene claimed 130 lives and counting, 56 of which are in North Carolina alone.
Western North Carolina is essentially closed because of damage to roads and bridges. The storm chewed up everything from mountain back roads to Interstates 40 and 26, the main arteries serving the region. Secondary and tertiary roads fared even worse from erosion, mudslides, and tree-falls.
Photos of the Penland campus show large numbers of downed trees but none of the extensive flood damage that struck other areas.
Just down the mountain in Spruce Pine, for example, the North Toe River inundated downtown. Water, sewer, power, phone, and internet were out. The town government posted on social media Oct. 1) that it had limited phone and internet service at the police and fire departments. Staff from the city of Greensboro, North Carolina – three hours away with I-40 closed – were helping with water lines and rebuilding the road to the dam that holds the city’s water supply. The town had placed a generator at the sewage treatment plant, but the road to the plant was gone.
“We are down but not out,” the post said.
Unlike other small towns that Helene has left in desperate straits, Spruce Pine (population 2,200) has gotten some national press attention. That’s because the flood closed down a nearby high-quality quartz mine that supplies the tech industry with materials for microchips and solar panels, according to National Public Radio.
Search the internet for “Spruce Pine, North Carolina,” and, as of Oct. 1, the first page-and-a-half of headlines focus on the flood’s impact on the tech industry.
At Penland, employees, students, and instructors were on campus when the storm hit, and most of them are finding shelter on Penland’s campus, living in the school’s lodging facilities and receiving three meals a day through the school’s dining facility and kitchen staff.
Penland is also temporarily housing local Mitchell County residents who have nowhere else to go, including some neighbors who hiked up the mountain in search of aid. Volunteers are also compiling lists of community members who haven’t been accounted for and providing wifi connections through a donated Starlink satellite hookup.
Volunteers at Penland make supply trips to Johnson City, Tennessee, 54 miles northwest of the school, to gather food and clean water for those on campus. The most dangerous part of the journey is the winding road up to the school that switches back and forth across the mountain. Henderson said the earth under some sections of the road has been eroded.
On Saturday, Sept. 28, a group of white-water rafting professionals visited Penland with their equipment to get to some of the harder to reach spots in the mountains. Henderson said they shared a breakfast at Penland before they headed out on Sunday morning.
Mitchell County is not the only rural area in desperate need of aid. Some business owners in the town of Marshall, a community of 796 that sits on the banks of the French Broad River in rural Madison County, to the west of Mitchell County, said water rose up to seven feet in their buildings. Entire homes floated down the river.
At a press conference in Asheville, Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina said that the state’s Department of Transportation has deployed more than 1,600 employees and contract crews to repair roads and bridges.
“But travel in Western North Carolina remains limited and dangerous,” Cooper said.
Sarah Melotte is a Daily Yonder staff writer and data reporter. She lives in Bakersville, North Carolina, in Mitchell County. Tim Marema contributed reporting to this article. This story was originally published in the Daily Yonder. For more rural reporting and small-town stories visit dailyyonder.com.
From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2024
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