One winter night in early January, Delia Bailey awoke, shivering, in a camper parked outside of her house in Black Mountain. She has been living there since Tropical Storm Helene ravaged her home in late September.
Her fingers were numb and her breath was visible.
She went to the door. It was frozen shut.
Then she realized the problem: Her tank had run out of propane.
Out of gas
Propane is a valuable commodity in Western North Carolina these days. Helene destroyed roughly 100,000 homes and many of those people have been living in campers ever since. Keeping them warm is a struggle — most are not designed for the harsh winter conditions that have enveloped the region in recent weeks.
It’s just one more indignity that survivors of Helene have been forced to endure after the severe storm tore through the state, leaving a swath of destruction in its wake and residents like Bailey displaced from what used to be their life.
Life for her and many others has now been reduced to a simple, solemn struggle for survival. And winter is only adding to that.
Meanwhile, FEMA hotel vouchers are set to expire on Jan. 25, leaving more than 3,500 families without the hotel rooms, and shelter, they’ve had for months. FEMA has extended this program a few times and it’s possible that may happen again.
But there’s no guarantee.
Evictions, too, are on the rise. Landlords and leasing companies have brought forth nearly 2,000 eviction filings since Helene struck on Sept. 27.
Southwood Realty Company, which owns buildings in Asheville, Hendersonville and Waynesville, accounts for 153 of those post-Helene eviction suits. Hawthorne Residential partners, which operates buildings around Asheville and Weaverville, is responsible for 53 cases. Bayshore Homes, which owns two manufactured home communities in Arden, has filed 42.
Though activists were hoping for an eviction moratorium in Western North Carolina after the storm, it never materialized.
As a result, area homeless agencies are preparing for a rush. Many more may end up living in campers and sheds by the end of the month.
And they all will need propane — as well as patience. That’s because they’ll be standing in line to get it.
Winter and worry
Most FEMA emergency shelters in the region have closed.
Homeward Bound, a homeless agency in Asheville, is operating “Code Purple” facilities, which are cold-weather shelters with low barriers to entry. The agency was seeing an increased need for services since the storm, and a spike in cold weather over winter has accelerated the demand even further.
“We still have people outside on the streets,” Kate Krizanek, a case manager at Homeward Bound, told CPP. “We still have people sleeping in tents, but now we have a lot more people who still don’t have water or heat and they’re staying in campers or poorly-winterized sheds.”
A Disaster Energy Assistance program is now available through the state’s Department of Health and Human Services. Funds are designated for households with heating systems that require repairs or are currently inoperable among other qualifications.
“Our friends and family in Western North Carolina will feel the impacts from Hurricane Helene for years to come,” Carla West, a leader with NCDHHS, said in a statement. “We are only midway through winter and these funds are critical to keep residents safe and warm as they continue to recover and rebuild.”
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development allocated $225 million to Asheville, which Mayor Esther Manheimer has earmarked for rebuilding homes and infrastructure.
But some feel the money would be better spent getting people off the streets.
“I don’t know why the city and the county haven’t set up more sustainable community centers and shelters,” said Sara Legatski, owner of the Asheville store Honeypot Vintage. “It seems like all their energy has been on getting more funding. But I don’t know why there’s not a more concentrated effort to house people, especially in this weather.”
‘A bad situation’
Helene terrorized Western North Carolina homes: falling trees crushed roofs, rushing waters wiped away interiors, high winds ripped off siding and landslides uprooted entire homes.
Thousands of families who lost their homes took advantage of FEMA’s temporary sheltering assistance program, heading to hotel rooms in Tennessee and South Carolina. But many who were eligible could not afford to leave their jobs and livelihoods in North Carolina, and had to find another way to carry on. Many are still trying to figure out what that way might be.
And then there’s Bailey, waiting for her home to be demolished. It’s standing, but uninhabitable. It’s still good for some things, though. Like electricity and water. That is, when the pipes don’t freeze.
Bailey, her husband and teenage son still use the bathroom in the house, wading through the wreckage in winter coats.
But she needs the house demolished before she can start building a new one. Not that she has the money to do that.
“I feel like I’m stuck,” Bailey said. “I got insurance money, but the insurance money paid down the mortgage because I no longer have a house to use as collateral for the mortgage, so they wanted me to pay that off. Now I have no money. I appealed to FEMA because they gave me some money to repair my house, but I’m told that since I can’t repair it, they may want the money back.”
High winds shake the camper and rip holes in the tent where she and her husband cook and eat. The propane smell inside the camper scares her, as does listening to trees fall at night. Ice covers the small, rickety front steps. Keeping the space heater from blowing a fuse is another issue.
“To go from losing everything to living in extremely tough winter conditions — it’s really just a bad situation,” said Starli McDowell, the director of Mitchell County Shepherd’s Staff.
Shepherd’s Staff was one of the sites in the area that experienced a recent run on propane.
The place was emptied out.
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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