I Never Understood Our Data-Saturated Life Until a Hurricane Shut It Down
When Helene disconnected my part of North Carolina for weeks, my neighbors and I had to relearn old ways of knowing what was happening — and what wasn’t.
The piece explores how hurricane disasters are often accompanied not just by physical devastation, but by breakdowns in information flow—“media blackouts”—that worsen the human toll. In many affected areas, infrastructure damage, loss of internet/cell service, and delayed or censorious government responses mean people can’t get timely warnings, situational updates, or official aid information. This information vacuum breeds rumor, fear, and inaction. The author argues that in addition to preparing shelters and supplies, resilience plans must prioritize maintaining communication channels—local media, community networks, and decentralized technology—to ensure people know where to go, what to do, and how to get help when disaster strikes.
From the pen of Trevor Quirk, writing for The New York Times…
‘I Heard a Lot of “We’re Gonna Die”s’
It was early on a Friday last September when Hurricane Helene sawed through the Eastern Seaboard, unleashing trillions of gallons of water over the Southern states. By Sunday evening, the denizens of Warren Wilson College, in western North Carolina, were winding down their second day of recovery. A lightbulb sun was dimming beyond the foothills on which the old farm school was built. The Swannanoa River had spilled into the college’s crop and grazing fields. Halls and facilities had been hammered by falling trees. Roads and trails were blocked by debris or erased by floodwaters. Power and internet service was severed.
Damián Fernández, the president of the college and a social scientist by training, remained on campus, along with more than three hundred students and dozens of professors, administrators and staff members. He was updating students’ parents by dictating blog posts to a colleague in Florida whenever cell reception permitted. Helene, he told me later, had disrupted every connection, physical or digital, between the school and the world, sequestering the campus in a “vacuum of information.” “One bridge collapsed,” he said. “The other was underwater for the first day and a half. The roads were impassable, and we were not getting any information from the outside world. We were totally cut off.”
Total disconnection was a defining experience across the region. Like many nearby neighborhoods and mountain towns, Warren Wilson College quickly reverted into something “primordial,” a sort of commune where information was shared, as Fernández put it, “through oral traditions.” Each day everyone gathered at 8:30 a.m. near the cafeteria, which housed one of the college’s two generators, for a morning council — a routine that helped them strengthen morale, maintain a shared picture of their predicament and delegate the labors of survival.
Those labors were not unfamiliar to the students, who work the land as part of their curriculums. Some cut down branches and cleared brush. Others did the heroic work of the “poop crew,” supplying flushing water and emptying portable toilets. Groups lugged hay and water to cows, pigs and ewes. You find, in some of these students, an unusual marriage of sensibilities: The ruggedness of agrarian labor and bushcraft is coupled with the indiscriminate sensitivities of the liberal-arts undergraduate. Flags had been planted throughout the college’s fields to protect underground nests of yellow jackets; when those nests flooded, the wasps took to the air in a bewildered rage. Rosemary Thurber, a student studying environmental education, sympathized with the insects. She took meals by the garden where she worked and got “used to them crawling on my lips as I was eating.”
That Sunday, it seemed as though the most perilous hours had passed. The flooding was receding. Students were cooking dinner on gas stoves and circulating among the few pockets of cell coverage — one by a gazebo, another higher up the hill near the campus chapel.
Nobody remembers the true origin of the information that broke the tired rhythm of that evening. Sometime before dark, students began receiving alerts on their phones that a local dam was nearing failure. After sundown, many saw contractors driving through campus in a white truck with flashing overhead lights, blaring a warning through a megaphone: A dam had ruptured, they said, and everyone needed to flee to higher ground. As the message propagated, the exact structure that had failed alternated between two of several candidates. The nearby Bee Tree Dam retains around 500 million gallons of water. The North Fork Dam holds a reservoir of close to six billion gallons, which provides most of the drinking water for the city of Asheville. The failure of the Bee Tree Dam represented a grave danger to everyone on campus; the failure of the North Fork Dam would be a death sentence for every flightless creature in the valley.
Students began “stampeding out of buildings” into the “pitch black” of night, as Fernández described it. Most sprinted up the narrow paths that led to the soccer fields, their phones and flashlights a string of radiant beads along the hill. Students grabbed whatever was at hand: water bottles, jackets, first-aid kits. A few leaped into a small car with a giant stockpot of soup that someone had been laboring over. Faces were obscured in the darkness, reducing people to voices and sounds. “I heard a lot of ‘we’re gonna die’s,” said one student, Jonah Turner.
Small contingents diverged to warn others. A dean roused her upstairs neighbors; one of them, a woman with physical disabilities, initially asked to be left behind, fearing she would hamper the escape. The college’s director of operations sprinted to the president’s house and screamed Fernández’s name until he rushed outside. She relayed what she’d been told: The National Guard had prevented a public-safety officer from returning to campus because of a reported dam failure, prompting the officer to contact someone at the college.
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