I lived near Asheville for a year, and visited a bunch of times. On Fridays there was usually a big drum circle in the center of town near the bus stop. I thought they were embarrassing–I was cringe back then. I remember the sound of it coming up out of this big concrete basin that looked depressing except on Fridays when it was stuffed with the drummers who ran a spectrum of rich city kids enjoying college away from their stifling parents to barefoot, legitimate artists who smelled like shitty weed. The whole town would basically close down at like 8 PM.
Once I had an assignment from uni to interview someone doing public art, so I tried to get one with some folk musicians who played on the street in the evenings. They ignored me for hours and I remember being royally pissed at them before leaving as the shop lights started going off at 7:30. The street I sat on for all that time had surprisingly nice-looking cobblestones for some reason.
It hit me today that it’s gone. Maybe the streets will be fixed, maybe some of the cooler barefoot drummers will still meet there on Fridays, maybe those fucking washboard playing douchebags are still in a band, I don’t know, I haven’t been there in a decade. But at least a couple weeks ago I could almost pretend that Asheville is exactly the way I remember it being.
Now I understand that those memories are of something dead, to get mulched into the same layer of mental soil as everything else I know is gone. It’ll get flattened with the rest as I put new memories on top, pulped into the same stuff as the trees my neighbor cut down so he could have a big green lawn, the technicolor coral I saw when I went snorkeling at the great barrier reef as a kid, the cigarette-smoke-wreathed couple with missing teeth that I saw in Rome whose now-empty home is part of a tourist “experience,” the tiny school that I went to where you got in trouble for saying “the R word” which has been closed down by a dipshit senator looking to make the world worse for a few bucks more, and the blinking cloud of fireflies over the empty fields that I used to see driving home from nighttime events hosted there. They are beautiful memories, and I feel like I need to keep them beautiful in a way that is very much unlike what has become of them.
From what I could find online, I believe it’s rated flood zone X which is moderate risk, less severe than A or V. There’s areas near the river that had elevated risk but overall the risk was considered about average for the US, most costal areas are worse.
Map of flood zone in NC
What’s happening there could’ve happened basically anywhere outside of the desert, though admittedly it’s harder to access up in the mountains.
A huge amount of the homes that flooded were well outside the 500 year floodplain. The issue was the dams being overfull and overtopping during the storm.
Due to rain that already put the region at a 20 year high on rainwater.
That and the tornadoes that formed inside the hurricane as it hit the mountains. Something that has basically never happened before. At least not on this scale. It literally ripped while forests out by the roots and dumped them into homes, lakes, and rivers.
Yeah, that’s where it was basically a perfect storm, very unlikely and unpredictable. My point is it’s absolutely rational to rebuild in the same place.
Me and everyone I know will be doing exactly that. Asheville getting hit like this is a sign that nowhere is safe from the effects of climate change. Even the places that have been marked as more likely to survive.
Because the unprecedented will start happening and will keep happening more often.