“Imagine if… you stepped up during a crisis, without formal training, and made a difference.”
In Vol. 82 (2022), long-time Make: contributor Tim Deegan shared an Emergency Prep mini manual that ran with a cover proclaiming We’re All MacGyvers Now, which included an article about the character who has become a verb. Deegan shared prep techniques and posed the obvious hypotheticals of an emergency: How bad will it be? Where will you go? What do you need? Who are you prepping for? His subtext (and our intent in publishing his guide): Makers with think-outside-the-box superpowers can help when things go sideways.
Read: Emergency Prep! How Makers Can Prepare For Disruptions and Disasters of All Kinds
And go sideways they will. On September 27, 2024, people of all stripes in Asheville, NC and the surrounding region found themselves faced with these questions as Hurricane Helene barreled through a region ill prepared for this level of catastrophe. Reading about tips and techniques for disaster response in the pages of this magazine is one thing; living it is a whole different story. There is a documentary’s worth of extreme images and video online that share the devastation the befell this mountainous region during the storm and the full extent of the damage that was revealed over subsequent days. As Maker Faire Asheville producer and Maker Educator Christa Flores noted when asked about the clean up efforts six months following the storm, “We’re still cleaning up.”
Asheville has a diverse maker community and in gearing up for their 5th Maker Faire on April 5th, the producers of Maker Faire Asheville wanted to share the resilience they experienced and witnessed in the immediate aftermath of the storm. These are, to some extent, universal stories of crisis: Each “emergency” of this scale requires individuals and communities to show up and come together in an effort to restore normalcy and the services that most people rely on. The resilience, sense of community, and ability to improvise and “make do” that has long shaped Western North Carolina, and Appalachia as a whole, were on display–add in modern maker skills and help was on the way.
These efforts take many forms and we connected with two makers who responded to the crisis for their communities with the best tools in their a quintessentially maker toolkits: resourcefulness, ingenuity, grit, and collaboration. Notable about the work of makers in this situation is the particularly modern problem of reconnecting digital and analog processes at a time when there interdependence has never been more evident. Ian Baille and Ben Hanna both worked to provide essential services and a sense of normalcy at a time when everything had been, literally, swept away.
What Would You Do If the Lights Went Out…For a Month
In late September 2024, official warnings about the second major storm of the Atlantic hurricane season predicted a broader than typical path for the event, which came aground near Tampa, FL on September 26th. Despite this awareness and the advance measures it prompted–including the stationing of the National Guard in the region–Western North Carolina was unprepared for the catastrophic flooding that accompanied the deluge of rain the storm brought. Overnight the mountainous terrain, bisected by two major rivers–the Swannanoa and the French Broad–and innumerable smaller watersheds, was transformed from a largely rural, picturesque region to a mess of mud and debris. By September 27th power, water, and communications systems were all down; roads washed away or impassable from fallen trees. Despite the warnings, local and federal services–including the National Guard which was stationed East of Asheville since such storms typically veered toward the coast–on hand to deal with the potential fallout were unprepared for the level of destruction that emerged in the following days.
Ian Baille is a local to Western North Carolina; a self described hillbilly, whose family has lived in the region for generations. His skill set is as varied as his clearly insatiable curiosity and his strong sense of community and cultural continuity born of necessity in a region that has long been rural and relatively isolated due to its challenging topography. After a decades-long career in the automotive industry, Baille now works as a regional planner for the Land of Sky Regional Council–a multi-county, local government development organization that has correlates in many other states across the country. Though his official title of “Regional Planner” undersells the complexity of work he does on the ground, the diversity of his problem solving efforts has deeply acquainted him with the resources and needs of communities across the region–something that proved invaluable in the aftermath of the storm.
Baille is a maker in the most basic sense; he takes things apart and puts them back together, determining if and how they can work together, and figuring out how to do all this with non-standard parts. He is a mechanic and organic gardener and also–importantly as it turns out–a ham radio enthusiast, and both officially and unofficially, an alternative energy geek. He got to put these skills to use immediately after Helene, which knocked out communications systems (as well as the power grid) across the region. Turns out more than a few folks in rural North Carolina have access to short wave radios and one of Ian’s first efforts was to get an unofficial switchboard in place to relay calls for assistance and to get that information to the families of residents outside the region using the limited cell phone signal available. Baille’s efforts were amplified (literally) by the regional amateur radio clubs at Mount Mitchell, the tallest peak in the Eastern US that sits about 50 miles from the city of Asheville. Learn more about those efforts, and especially the work of Vicki Barnes (below amid the wreckage of the storm) with Project Helene, “an initiative that bridges the gap between the ham radio world and the internet.” The organization offers training in ham radio skills to further prepare people for the occasions when the digital world fails with a simple message: “Because: When ALL else fails, ham radio works.”
Baille also used his skills and awareness of local infrastructure and relief organizations to work with Footprint Project, a New Orleans based non-profit that aims to “green” emergency response efforts – #BuildBackGreener. Essential to facilitating relief efforts was to get communications systems, both for relief agencies and organizations and ordinary people up and running. Ian worked with Footprint to source batteries and deliver mobile charging stations and build community power depots using mobile battery units–many of which are rented out by companies like Amazon to film crews working in the field–around the county/region to community centers. Ian and his colleagues’ skills and local knowledge, alongside Footprint’s mission to repurpose commercial solar equipment for emergency response, provided essential communications services, as the uphill effort to clean up began. These microgrid processes were essential to helping both individuals – folks who need electricity to power medical devices, for example – and the community as a whole come together. The primary issue, however, as with all power systems is storage: It was essential that there was not only a way of creating power but storing it. People in regions where the power grid is traditionally unstable or susceptible to disruption (see California fires for example) are adopting these technologies permanently (read more HERE and Photo credits).
Never Underestimate the Privilege of a Hot Shower
In many parts of the world, running water and, indeed, HOT running water is taken for granted. One of the most profound effects of Helene in Asheville and surrounding counties was the disruption of the water supply. Asheville and its surrounds are bisected by rivers and creeks. It is a region shaped by water as much as by the mountains it is famed for. When a river overruns its banks, when trees are uprooted, when landslides follow torrential rains, however, water turns to mud. The clean up in Asheville in the days to weeks to months that followed Helene was dirty business. And, there was no running water. Not for drinking and certainly not for showering.
Ben Hanna moved to Asheville with his young family from the Bay Area in 2021 after poor air quality from successive fires made California feel increasingly unsustainable as a place to raise a family. He is an avid outdoorsman and runs wilderness retreats for organizations, among other ventures. He knows his way around setting up off grid, as he and his family did on a plot of land in Nevada City, CA prior to the pandemic, using simple and easily attainable materials to create basic amenities like hot showers.
He has also participated in large camps at Burning Man, as thousands do each year, and in the process created community infrastructure within the ephemeral city in the desert. When the question, “What did you learn at Burning Man?” gets thrown around many assume stories of wild times and spiritual enlightenment. But Hanna, as many who have long attended the event, knows that Burning Man participants – although manufacturing its survivalist ethos of radical self-reliance through choice – often use or pick up skills that are incredibly useful in experiences where there are legitimately limited resources. This experience also included bringing community together, which he did in his immediate neighborhood by setting up a film screen in the evenings for impromptu block parties (battery powered, of course) as neighbors began the hard work of cleaning up and removing the trees that blocked their access to the rest of the city.
Realizing that he had on hand the materials to build his family a shower — much of the hardware saved from the work he’d doen on his Nevada City property — he set about constructing a simple shower system with a ~300 gallon water “cube” and a (solar) battery powered on-demand hot water heater. He gave his neighbors access and, seeing the need, quickly set out to construct a second unit for the neighborhood. The lure of a hot shower quickly gathered steam.
Following the build in his immediate neighborhood and with the assistance of the volunteer networks that emerged in the region to get supplies to those in need, Ben provided Mobile Community Shower Solutions in and around the Asheville, particularly for several public housing complexes, in the weeks following the storm. He and his team built mobile water trailers offering drinking water and mobile showers outside the hardest hit zones. The water was trucked in by FEMA and other agencies and it was no small feat to get it from point A to B. The wastewater from the showers was also used to flush toilets, illustrating the extent to which everything becomes necessary when resources are limited. He also worked with several volunteer organizations to host “Dry Toilet” workshops, teaching people how to make at home composting / dry toilets with 5 gallon buckets and sawdust.
With the same tech, in the following month Ben was also able to get running water and a mini power grid up at his young children’s small school and it became the first in the city to reopen once these basic amenities became available. Like Baille and others, he reached outside the area — to his former university, for example — to help bring in valuable resources.
Prepared, Not Prepping
Half a year later, the community in and around Asheville is still getting back on line, cleaning up, and beginning the long process of rebuilding. Mercifully, the month after the storm proved to be a mild one, easing the recovery effort and mitigating the suffering and loss of life that was bad enough, but could have been far worse. Christa, Ian, and Ben all shared how powerfully the community came together in mutual aid and, as during the pandemic, the extent to which makers stepped up to use their skills to figure out solutions to immediate problems with the resources on hand. They’ll be sharing these stories at Maker Faire Asheville this weekend.
Ian and Land of Sky Regional Council will be on hand to share how they used available resources to get basic communications infrastructure up and running in the days and months after Helene at their booth, Necessity is the Mother of Invention. The take away from Ian and Ben’s work and that of others in their community is that outside the box building skills, a repair mindset, resourcefulness, and community action are everything when nothing is as expected. In the words of Project Helene and its Mount Mitchell beacon, Vicki Barnes, “Imagine if… you stepped up during a crisis, without formal training, and made a difference.”
Check out Maker Faire Asheville’s 2024 promo video for a taste of what to expect Saturday, April 5th!
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