Timeline of a disaster
It is going to be impossible for me to describe accurately the horror that unfolded on those first few days of Hurricane Helene. I can describe what we went through, but the recovery process continues even today, 3 months later.
The hurricane came through the morning of Sept. 27, 2024. I have a two-story home in the township of Hendersonville, which is about 25 miles from where I work in Asheville, North Carolina.
At about 2 a.m., the winds were howling, sticks were hitting the house. By 3 a.m., trees started tumbling and we could hear them hit the ground. One hit our house and a few minutes later, another one hit the house. It was completely black outside.
When daylight came not only could we hear what was going on, we could see, and I watched a tree go through my neighbor’s house.
When we felt it was safe to go outside, I saw that a huge tree from my property completely blocked in the homes in my cul-de-sac. The neighbors grabbed our chainsaws, but much of what came down was too big for us to handle. We had no electricity. We had no water. We had no cell phone service. I counted 14 trees down on my property.
We regained water in our house the day after the storm, but we had no electricity for 18 days.
On Sept. 30, we started getting intermittent cellphone service and planned to meet at our office in Asheville with anyone who could get there. Most of the physicians and I made it, and we discovered we had had similar experiences, just different degrees of catastrophe.
At the office, we had no water and no internet connection. Miraculously, the electricity remained on, and we were able to get in touch with many employees. Someone was able to connect by cellphone with Tammy Leahy, the vice president of the division that oversees DaVita’s operations in western North Carolina, to learn what DaVita was doing to get its centers open.
Many miles of lines of pipe — the major water source for Asheville — were crushed, so water was not reaching the processing plants. DaVita had a tanker of water delivered to us on Nov. 1, which I had hooked up to the peritoneal dialysis unit that sublet part of our building. We could use as much water as we wanted for as long as the tanker was here.
The only thing we did not have was internet — we did not have a connection with the community. So, we decided to concentrate strictly on dialysis, since we knew we could get those patients to the dialysis centers and to hospitals. Because DaVita has many clinics in Florida, its staff is used to hurricanes and were completely prepared to continue business following the storm.
Our information technology person had us connected to a Starlink satellite dish, so we could contact patients, bill, do our notes, etc. We had patients physically coming in the office on the morning of Oct. 9.
Even today, some of our people are still struggling with infrastructure, like cell towers close to their homes. One of our staffers lost everything. We are back to normal office processes. It was hard and it was emotional, but we were able to do it.
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- Thomas C. Crook, MT, is CEO at Mountain Kidney & Hypertension Associates PA in Asheville, North Carolina. He can be reached at tcrook@mtnkidney.com.
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