Part One: Mutual Aid in North Carolina: How Asheville Has Come Together in the Wake of the Storm

Margaret reports on her trip down to Asheville North Carolina and all of the work she saw people doing down there to keep people safe during crisis. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that for all the
bad things happening, there are people trying to do good
things too. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this week
it's just me. It's just me because I'm writing and

(00:22):
recording this on the Thursday and Friday before it's released.
I just drove from North Carolina home to West Virginia
to get to my studio. But there's no rest in sight,
not yet soon. See. I was all set to do
a regular episode this week, and regular episodes will absolutely
return next week, but I wanted this week to be different.

(00:43):
I wanted to talk about a historical event, as always,
but the event I wanted.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
To talk about. The historical event I wanted to talk
about occurred from the end of September to early October
twenty twenty four. That is to say, from last week
and this week. I wanted to talk about grassroots disaster
response to Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina. I wanted
to talk about that because I wanted to go down
there and talk to people and help. I lived there

(01:09):
for a long time that a lot of my best
friends are there, so I went down there to help,
only only for a few days. I'd be sort of
self aggrandizing to claim I did some heroic amount of work,
So maybe it's better to see me as a journalist
who wanted sort of desperately to help out and bring
some of my friends some of the stuff that they needed. Sophie,

(01:30):
my producer, agreed to let me break format to try
something new, Rory my audio engineer, agreed to be stuck
doing the audio editing at the last minute to make
it happen. And prop the guest I had booked, agreed
to let me reschedule. So I owe even more to
the rest of the crew than usual. This week's show
isn't not quite the here's the news about Hurricane Helene

(01:53):
and its impacts on western North Carolina. That kind of
show is coming, I'm sure for me or from someone else,
it probably is already out there. Some of what I'm
going to say is hearsay, because the research I did
this week was talk to people in Ashville, and I
didn't have any kind of reliable internet access until pretty
much last night and this morning, and so I looked

(02:15):
up everything as fast as I could, but not everything
is known yet. I've done my best to sort out
truth from rumor, and I'm sure there's going to be
some blurred lines. I'm also going to weave more personal
narrative into this, not because I'm anywhere near a central
figure in this story, but because I don't know. It's
how I know how to tell a story. I like hanging.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
Stories off of a narrative, and my own is the
one I know here. So I'm going to tell you
a story about rain, about floods, about Ashville, about mutual aid,
about organic grassroots organizing, about disaster compassion, and about not
only can we live in a better world, but we

(02:58):
sort of do. It's buried underneath the world that we're
used to, the world of misery and capitalism, and it
peaks its head out sometimes. So where do we start
with this story? How about some books? Everyone likes books.
There are these two books that I think about all
the time. One of them I've read and the other

(03:19):
one I actually haven't. The book I've read is called
Russia through a shot Glass by C. S. Walton. It's
ostensibly and probably actually the true story of a Russian
vagabond wandering around during Soviet times, drinking and begging and
just living his best life. I have no idea where
I found this book or why I read it, but

(03:39):
I did. And there's a part that's stuck with me. Well,
there's a couple parts. One part that stuck with me
is like, oh, right, poverty did exist under this ostensibly
communist society. But the other thing that's stuck with me
is a part of the story wherein our protagonist is
talking to another beggar, and the beggar explains that what
he does is a social service for the community, and
it's an important one. Everyone who gives him money feels better.

(04:05):
And that's one of those things that's so obvious it
shouldn't even be an epiphany, but it was one. When
we help people out, we feel better. Try it out.
Give a twenty to someone flying a sign. You feel better,
they feel better. Everyone wins. The catch here is that

(04:25):
you have to be you have to help people out
unforced right. You have to choose to help people out.
When institutions force you to help people out, it often
causes resentment. But go try tipping real good at a
restaurant like Above and beyond. You feel like you are
the best person to ever walk upon God's green Earth.
When you do that, and hey, if it's a place

(04:47):
you go to regularly, like it's sure is nice to
be known as like, oh, that girl's a good tipper
because people talk. There's another book it's more influential to
what we're talking about, and it's been an enormously impactful
on my worldview and I haven't even read it. It's
Rebecca Solnet's A Paradise Built in Hell. It's about how

(05:07):
humans come together during crisis and create altruistic societies. I
really need to read it. It's entirely up my alley,
like it forms the walls of the alley that I
live in. But that's the power of books. You can
write down ideas so compelling that they reach people who
haven't even read your specific words. A lot of especially

(05:27):
when I was a younger activist, a lot of what
I learned came from people who've been doing the reading
or had talked to people who do in the reading.
And a sort of oral tradition also exists. And I
love books, I write books, I read books for a living.
But the oral tradition that often starts in books but
not always is also super essential. I've known and felt

(05:50):
these things for a while. Giving people stuff feels good,
and people come together during times of crisis. I've believed them,
and they're fairly central ideas to my worldview and my
political idea. I've experienced them both too. But this week,
visiting Asheville, North Carolina, in the wake of Hurricane Helene,
I've seen it in a way that I'll never unsee.

(06:12):
I used to believe in it, but now I believe
in it with a capital B, which would have been
a clever way to write that sentence if I weren't
writing a script for an audio medium. People are coming
together in western North Carolina, and they're doing amazing things,
and they're doing it through broad, informal and heterogeneous networks.
There is no one person on the ground there right

(06:33):
now who truly has the whole, big picture of what's happening,
and there never will be one history book that contains
everything that happened, because most of it isn't written down.
It's just happening. I only saw like a tenth of
a percent of the relief efforts that are happening there
on my two day trip, but they're enough that I'll
carry them for the rest of my days. But first

(06:57):
there was some rain. Let's talk about rain. If you
don't live somewhere that floods regularly, and you don't garden,
you might not have a sense of how much rain
is when it's measured in inches, right, Like you might think, oh,
an inch of rain makes the water rise an inch.
That's just not true. I know that I didn't have
a sense of rain measured in inches, not until I

(07:17):
moved on to some property outside of Asheville, North Carolina.
I want to say twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, not actually sure.
Most of the acreage was down in a field alongside
a narrow, lazy creek. The field was what's called a
one hundred year floodplain by one map, but not a
floodplain at all by another map. And that second map

(07:39):
was the map that mattered for permitting. It was the
more official map, which is to say, one half of
the government figured it didn't flood at all, and the
other half figured it only flooded about once in a century.
I'd like to say that I built my little cabin
on the hill because I was thinking ahead, because I'm
such a good prepper. But I actually built my cabin
on the hill because I'm weird and antisocial and wanted
to build a black a frame deep in the way

(08:00):
woods at the back corner of the property, far away
from my best friends. The people I lived with don't
do what I do. I'm just a strange person down
in the field. Though, it flooded not once a century,
but at first about once a season, or soon once
a month, sometimes multiple times in a week. It flooded

(08:20):
more and more, higher and higher. We talked with water
people at length about it. Official people came out and
took measurements, gave us ideas about how to reinforce the
banks of the creek so that we wouldn't lose our
houses to the widening river bed. But when we asked
those officials what was going to happen in the future,
they shook their heads. It should have been one hundred
year floodplain. But climate change is real, and all they

(08:43):
knew was that everything was going to get worse. But
I learned how much an inch of rain was. An
inch of rain is a lot. Hours of heavy rainfall
brings you an inch of rain. An inch or two
of rain means flooding. My my friends almost died during
an inch or two of rain a few years ago,
in fact, when we were trying to save some stuff

(09:05):
from the flood and they were pulled under the water
for a second, which is to say, don't try and
save stuff from the flood. But you know, we also arrived,
all of us on that land, learned to watch the
weather closely to know when to move the cars to
higher ground, to get ourselves or the animals to higher ground.
I spent more time in floodwater than I'd like to admit,

(09:26):
because you're not supposed to spend any time in floodwater.
And even this tiny rural creek, I saw all kinds
of terrible stuff washing through it. I have absolutely pulled
syringes out of this water. Eventually, we fled the flooding
land and I moved up to West Virginia. And you
know what enabled me to move to West Virginia. It
was no, it wasn't the product. I actually didn't have

(09:47):
this job yet. Actually what enabled me to move there
is the cooperative economy. Because I used to work at
a nonprofit called seed Commons that helps finance the cooperative
economy and they're pretty cool. So informally this show sponsored
by seed Commons. Why not. I really like them. Look
them up. They finance worker cooperatives, but we're probably also
sponsored by other stuff. I'm not sure. Let's find out,

(10:19):
and we're back. People tend to think mountains don't flood. Well,
people who live in the mountains know that they flood.
But if you don't, you might think that mountains don't flood.
And maybe you, dear listener, do already know that, right.
But I have talked to many people in this past
week who are very confused by the fact that mountains flood.

(10:39):
And that's not because they're like, you know, unintelligent people.
They just didn't know a thing that is a little
bit counterintuitive. And it's true that Hurricane Helene was a
once in a lifetime event. It was more or less
unprecedented and unimaginable. But that's not because mountains don't flood.
It's just because usually nothing floods as much as Asheville

(11:02):
and the surrounding areas flooded last week. Mountain communities are
built in what in Appalachia we call hollers. They are
the crooks between the arms of the mountains. Sometimes the
word is spelled hollow, but it's always pronounced hollow. And
usually people just spell it holler. It's a way of
saying neighborhood. More or less. I lived in a holler

(11:22):
outside of Ashville. I live in a different holler now.
Heavy rains flow down the mountains and collect in the
low spots and join creeks or become creeks. These low
spots are what flood. The thing is, the low spots
are where we put our roads, because it's a good
place to put roads. They're often also where people put

(11:44):
their houses because they're close to the roads, and they're
flatter these areas, and they're easier to farm and graze
and do all of the stuff of life. And towns
grow up in these lower areas. So the mountaintops themselves
know they don't tend to flood, although they do have
problems with mudslides and all kinds of other things. The roads,
though they flood, they flood bad, and so do the rivers,

(12:08):
and those floods are just getting worse and worse. The
first time I responded to a flood in Appalachia was
a community in western West Virginia. I think it was
Wise County. It lost a lot of its roads and
its connection to the outside world. In part due to
the strip mining and mountaintop removal coal mining that left
the ground ill suited to absorbing rain. Because there are

(12:28):
so many different ways that human industrial society, it was
like causing all of these climate effects. It's not just
the carbon, it's also all of this other stuff. Later
we're going to talk about chemical pollution in the water
because of plastic plants, and also dead people because plastic
plant operators didn't let their people leave during the storm

(12:48):
because they are nightmare men. Anyway, in Wise County, I
don't know twenty eleven, who's to keep track of time?
Not This girl showed up as activists and mucked out
people's basements for a day or two, and I learned that, yes,
mountains flood. It seems and is odd that Hurricane Helene

(13:10):
most spectacularly destroyed a couple counties in western North Carolina
at twenty one hundred feet nowhere near the coast. Hurricane
Helene wasn't exactly set up to be history's most impressive hurricane.
I think it made landfall as a Cat one, but
I forgot to write that down in my script. But
it was, if you'll part in the way of putting
it the perfect storm, because what hit western North Carolina

(13:35):
was two storms. My friend in Asheville explained it to
me the night that I arrived. The cool thing about
getting older as a punk is that, Okay, you have
to pick a hobby right, and you can pick between
bird watching, becoming a weather nerd, weightlifting, or some combination
of the above. And this friend of mine became a
weather nerd. And so this friend explained that essentially two

(13:58):
storms hit Asheville like a zipper coming together. First rain
had been sitting on Ashville, a storm that showed up
and just hovered over the city like a little cartoon
rain cloud over a little cartoon sad person. This storm
dumped at least four and I've also heard eight inches
of rain on the city in a day, And likely
the difference between those is like different whether measuring stations

(14:20):
or exactly when they're like starting and stopping the count.
Both four and eight inches are a lot. This is
enough to fuck some people's days up good. At four
inches of rain, people start dying. Then Helene hit twelve
to eighteen inches over most of western North Carolina in

(14:40):
a three day period, hitting the area around Asheville the
hardest and When I say around Asheville, I don't mean
Asheville is the only place that was affected. I mean
a pretty large area with whole other towns and cities
that people usually haven't heard of. Some places, some measuring stations,
saw up to thirty one inches over those three days.
According to the North Carolina State Climate Office, the Asheville

(15:02):
Airport recorded almost fourteen inches before it went offline, which
is as much rain as you'd expect over three months.
For comparison, Hurricane Katrina, the costliest natural disaster in US history,
put five to ten inches of rain on the city
of New Orleans. Now this doesn't mean that Helene is

(15:22):
like worse, because you can't measure things as simply as that,
But it's just it's a lot. It's so much rain,
and there's no way that people could have known that
this was going to happen besides the vaguest hints, And
so the rivers rose by as much as twenty six feet.
The rivers rose well higher than the previous record floods

(15:44):
of nineteen sixteen, which I think was once again when
two storms converged on the area, and I think the
record from that was like twenty feet again. Didn't write
that number in the script. Working from memory here. I
was on book tour when Helene hit. I was driving
down to Charlotte to Virginia, and I was hearing vague
warnings about maybe some flooding or some heavy rainfall. But

(16:05):
nothing hit us where we were besides, you know, some rain. Saturday.
The next day I drove to Baltimore for the book
festival there, and by that point people were starting to
worry about western North Carolina. Images of destroyed towns and roads,
trapped cars, entire houses floating down the river started coming out.

(16:26):
But more importantly, we stopped hearing from our friends. I
sent Signal messages to a bunch of my friends. Hey,
just checking in. When you send a message with the
app Signal, it's an encrypted app. Everyone should be using it.
It uses little icons to show you how far your
message has gotten. One check mark means it's gone to

(16:47):
the server right, and two check marks means it's reached
the recipient, and then both turn white when the message
has been read. If both you and the recipient have
message read, receipts turned on. All my message were stuck
on one check mark because no one had received them
on the ground a group of friends with Ham radios,

(17:08):
which are amateur radios. We're like, Okay, this storm is bad.
Cell phones are out, but hey, we've got Ham radios.
They're kind of like seen as the sort of if
any technology is going to work, Ham radio is going
to work, you know, or radio is going to work.
But it turns out that they are radios. While radio
is indeed the most reliable form of communication during a

(17:28):
storm like that, they still weren't incredibly reliable because mountains
make a lot of frequencies hard to use, because well,
radios are really complicated, but basically like some radios are
a little bit more line of sight than others, and
some move over obstacles better than others, depending on what
frequency it is and how much power you're putting out
and stuff like that, and mountains make frequencies hard to use,

(17:52):
and water in the air also can make frequencies hard
to use. Some folks could hear other folks, but it
wasn't reliable, Like one person person A could hear person B,
and person Z could hear a person B, and you
know whatever. So in the end, they went door to
door I believe, on bicycles and gathered up their crew
at someone's house. They called for a community meeting at

(18:14):
two pm at firestorm. Then they went door to door
again and told people about it, leaving notes at houses
of people who weren't home. So people met in mass
and they started organizing. And what they organized was to
get together and take advantage of these sweet, sweet deals.
That's not what they organized, but you can. You can

(18:35):
listen to the sponsors if you want. Meanwhile, those of
us outside the city had been getting organized too, through
a group called Mutual a Disaster Relief, which is more
of a network. It's complicated, semi autonomous groups working together.

(18:56):
It's great usually look it up. They are the main people.
I'm going to be like, hey, you should donate money too.
We'll talk about that a little bit later. I don't
know how much Wei language I should use here about
this organizing, because I tried to help out a little bit,
and I was on some signal chats and things. I
cannot paint myself in any way es central to any
of it, as anyone who made it happen. Information coming

(19:18):
out of the area was, of course real spotty, but
within twenty four hours of the storm there were anarchists
coordinating a small fleet of planes to get relief supplies
into the area, trying their hardest to work out which,
if any airports were still open for relief traffic. In
the end, it wasn't small planes that did most of
the work. It was helicopters and well, the relief supplies

(19:39):
mostly went in by truck and car and van and
things right, whereas the actual relief on the ground for
people happened more with hikers and ATVs and dirt bikes
and helicopters and all kinds of other methods of a
string of pack mules most photogenically and also usefully anyway, okay,

(20:00):
and short planes to save the day. But I still
thought it was pretty cool that I know people who
can coordinate a fleet of planes on short notice. People
tend to think of grassroots disaster response as sort of
the like scrappy and impromptu and small thing that like
kind of fills in the little tiny gaps left by
the big stuff, And that's just not true. It is

(20:20):
the first of those two things. It is scrappy and impromptu,
but it can scale up to some serious infrastructure and
often does. I remember, on one of these signal threads,
someone was saying, you know, asking for some type of
tent I'd never heard of to store supplies. And I
was like, well, I got I got a ten by
ten easy up. It doesn't got walls, but maybe it'll help.
And then I realized that what the what the grown

(20:41):
ups in the chat were discussing was the sort of
tent that you set up a field hospital or a
mess hall inside, the kind that takes a forklift to
move before they're assembled. I was quite obviously out of
my league. After the Baltimore stop on my tour, I
was up to Brooklyn for the Brooklyn Book Festival, and
I had the hardest time paying attention to anything besides

(21:01):
my phone and the incessant signal messages coordinating relief. The
first crews from outside the area were making their way in,
and some people living in town had managed to find
enough internet access to tell us what they needed and
who was okay. Largely that happened by starlink actually, and
there was oh, so many things were happening immediately, just
like right away from the storm. Right there's a there's

(21:22):
a Ramen shop in town that once it's up and running,
go support Ido Ramen on Heywood they absolutely help people
out amazingly. So did so many places. But that was
the place they had starlink internet access and people would
go there, and I think they were one of the
many different places that once they got power up and
other people didn't. I'm not sure what was with generators
or just you know, luck of location. They would just

(21:45):
put extension cords out their door with like USB chargers
and stuff on them and make sure that people were
okay and that people could come and charge their phones.
And they weren't like paying customers get power only or
any of that nonsense, you know. I think they were
actually even that place was like just bring out food
to people who were waiting there. Anyway, that's besides the point,
but that's how my friends first started getting internet. There

(22:08):
are other people who managed to do it in different ways.
And actually, one of the things that's just kind of
funny is that starlink doesn't work really well during heavy storms,
so even that wasn't really working during the brunt of
the storm. A lot of the relief work, it turns out,
doesn't even happen on the ground. A lot of relief
work is just coordinating by signal, by spreadsheet, by discord

(22:30):
by slack, by SMS messages, by phone calls, by going
door to door. People announce needs like insulin is needed
at the following nursing home, or can someone do a
wellness check on my aunt? Or diapers are needed in
the following neighborhoods, and then people track those needs and
coordinate it with people who can meet them. Gas stations
are called one at a time to find out who

(22:51):
has gas and wear, and as the kind of work
that people can do from anywhere. I think it was
Sunday morning when a friend in Ohio wrote me and
asked for a wellness check on a family friend whose
North Carolina address included the words riverside. He wrote an
hour or so later to say that her body had
been found. I hadn't yet heard from some of my

(23:14):
closest friends, and so I decided that I was going
to go down. I actually did, in the end, end
up hearing from them before I started my trip, and
that friend of a friend is the only death that
I've personally experienced out of this so far, and I
hope it is the only one. But anyway, I had
heard from my friends before I started the trip, but
I made my decision when I had end, and by
that point I'd committed, and I'd talked with other volunteers

(23:37):
about what I was bringing and how I was going
to get there and who I was going to caravan with.
It's a tricky thing to decide to go into a
crisis zone. Nine times out of ten, the most useful
thing you can do is to not go into a
crisis zone. In combat medicine, one of the first rules
is basically, don't make another victim. If you go into

(23:57):
a crisis zone and need help, you've made the situation
worse instead of better. But I had an awful lot
of preparedness supplies, and I have a van, and I
was connected with some folks bringing even more supplies in,
and we weren't so certain about the roots yet, and
we wanted a caravan and do the whole safety and
numbers thing. And I'm pretty well set up for self reliance.

(24:20):
So Monday morning, I woke up in Queens, New York,
and I drove home to West Virginia, and I packed
my van with supplies for my own stash, plus some
stores that I hit up. I stopped at the gas
station at the bottom of my street to pick up
a last minute request. I'd seen bar and chain oil.
This is the stuff you put into even an electric
chainsaw to keep it lubricated and running. It's very important

(24:40):
part of running a chainsaw. I walked to the cash
register with an awful lot of bar and chain oil,
plus engine oil and ratchet straps. I was buying like
way more bar and chain oil than any one person
needs to buy at one time. Big job coming up.
The man behind the counter asked. I told him I
was going to Ashville. This man sells Trump hats at

(25:02):
a store, and I'm walking in with earrings and bangs
and gender ambiguity and whatever I mean. He's also seen
me before I lived there, but Asheville is famously the
den of queer lefties with purple hair or whatever, I
told him. I figured if it could happen there, it
could happen here. No podcast name pun intended, and he
nodded gravely, and he thanked me, and he gave me

(25:24):
a forty percent discount, effectively taking no profit off of
the sale. I drove down to Regular Virginia and I
met up with a friend. The next morning. We woke
up before the sun rose and strapped gas cans to
the roof of her car, and we drove a rather
circutuitous route up to what was at the time the
only road into town. We stopped at the last reliable

(25:47):
gas in Shelby, about ninety minutes out of town. The
gas stations weren't mobbed, but they were full, and most
cars were filling up gas cans like we were. We
started seeing relief vehicles. Some were official like trucks with
trailers holding generators the size of cars. Others were just
folks with pickups loaded down with palettes of bottled water.

(26:09):
The stream of help pouring into the city was heartwarming,
to say the least. I got a little choked up.
I had been not sure what I was driving into,
and immediately learned that what I was driving into was
a steady stream of people trying desperately and succeeding at
helping people. And then I drove into the city and

(26:32):
into a storm of mutual aid, which is better than
the kind of storm I was afraid I was driving into.
I talk about mutual aid all the time on this show.
One of the most influential books in history that once
again I haven't read all of, but oddly enough, again,
you don't need to read a book to be influenced
by it, because you can be influenced by people who
are influenced by it. Is a book called Mutual Aid,

(26:56):
A Factor and Evolution by Peter Krapotkin. I feel like
I reference this book or Krapotkin like every other week
because his ideas have influenced so many people. The book,
which is like nineteen oh two or I don't know
the year off the top of my head, but it's
like turn of this old century. The book is an
evolutionary biologist and anthropologist rejecting social Darwinism, not rejecting Darwinism

(27:18):
and evolutionary theory. Competition absolutely plays a role in biological evolution,
as Kropotkin will be the first to admit, it's just that,
so does mutual aid, so doaes cooperation. We are wired
at least as strongly for altruism as we are for competition,
and I have never been more convinced of the truth

(27:39):
of that. We first showed up at Firestorm, which is
the anarchist bookstore, because we heard it was one of
the dozens or hundreds of hubs accepting donations, to then
get them out to people, and because we'd heard about
those daily two pm community meetings to get people plugged
in with each other about how to help, and we
wanted to be plugged in figure out how to help.

(28:00):
All along Haywood Road, relief centers were running the Auditorium,
which is the punk bar across the street from Firestorm.
As soon as the storm at hit they had cooked
up all the food in their walk in freezer and
given it away, and still days later they were serving
free hot meals out front another punk bar on Heywood. Look,
there's lots more places besides punk bars, but I'm a punk,

(28:23):
so I know that punk bar is the best. It's
called the Double Crown, and it served as the landing
spot for a group called Ashville Medical Solidarity, plus a
rotating crew of various medical professionals and street medics. Every
group I talked to was like this, A specific, often
named group was working with all comers to help people

(28:43):
to the point where it no longer felt like that
group's project, where multiple groups would just sort of merge
organically and if they're doing similar work in similar areas.
But yeah, Asheville Medical Solidarity and friends set up easy
ups underneath the skeleton of the old front patio time
Heart pavilion, which had been destroyed in the storm. I

(29:04):
talked to one of the doctors there, and they explained
that under an Emergency Authorization Act, doctors are allowed to
treat patients in informal settings without risking their licenses. And
this was less of a field hospital and more of
like a field CVS. People gathered and distributed first aid supplies,
and medical professionals there were able to help connect people

(29:25):
with ways to legally refill their medications due to complicated
emergency measure stuff that I'm not in the best place
to explain. I gave them all the medical supplies I'd
pulled out of my basement I used to I guess
I still do, but there'll be a while because I
just gave away all this stuff. I'd make these like
emergency kits and give them to my friends. And so
I buy all this stuff in bulk and assemble it
because I figure I can't convince my friends to prep

(29:47):
but if I do all the work and hand them
a little pack and say throw this in the back
of your car, I can get my friends to do that,
you know. But that means I have all of these
like tots, or I used to have all these tots
full of like individually wrapped U aspirin and things like that,
and so that's what I ended up bringing to them.
I know you all wanted to know the details. That's

(30:07):
what you all are here for. So I gave them
all of that, and then the next day I returned,
or maybe later that day, I don't know. Time is
a strange thing in this situation. A different trip there.
I heard that they needed some power banks and a
solar generator, and I had some of that, so that
went over to them too. Outside Firestorm, I met a

(30:28):
man who ran a permaculture farm who had taken upon
himself to make fifty five gallon drums with spigots at
the bottom, which is like an oddly annoying plumbing problem.
Once you like do it, it's easy. But having done
this a couple times in my life, like figuring out
the pieces to get to put spigots in the bottom
of barrels is like annoying. But again, he already knew

(30:52):
how to do it, so he did it a whole bunch,
and he drove them around and he set up all
these distribution centers for water across town and then filled
them up with spring water that he hauled around with
his diesel truck in an IBC tote. You ever see
like a plastic tote with like a metal frame around it.
That's a style of tote that's used in a lot
of rural applications. It's also used by restaurants to bring

(31:12):
in like soy sauce and things. A lot of the
rural applications are people going and getting the ones that
were used for soysauce and things and then cleaning them
out and filling them with water. Anyway, he was driving
up to a spring that was up above the flooding
and so hopefully away from a lot of the toxins
and stuff, and driving around and filling them up, still
putting a like hey, this is you know, wild water.

(31:33):
You should boil this or filter it first, little sign
on it. He was shy to let me take a
picture of his truck because he didn't want to be
advertising himself out of crisis. It was all I could
do to convince him to let people give him free
diesel for his truck, even though his truck didn't have
a working fuel gauge, because he assumed there were people

(31:53):
who needed it more than him. And meanwhile, construction companies
still today as I this this morning, I'm you know,
hearing messages, how do we plug in these construction companies
that have five hundred gallon tanks of water that I
guess they use for like job site clean up water
or something, I'm not entirely sure. And they're talking with
anarchists and churches about where they need to go, anarchists

(32:16):
and churches being kind of two of the groups that
really kick assidt mutual aid. Not to pat my own
ideological back, but that's where we're going to leave it
today because on Wednesday, I'm gonna come back with Part two,
and I'm gonna talk about so much disaster compassion. I'm
going to talk about so much people helping each other

(32:39):
from pretty wide spectrum of people, and I'm really excited
about it. I know that an awful lot of awful
stuff is happening there and will continue to happen there,
and there's going to be a problem where once the
immediate needs are done and once you know, the city
has its water or turned back on, although that's honestly

(33:01):
going to be weeks, if not months, some of the
harder hit places are still going to be in trouble
and it's going to be harder to get mutual aid
to them. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't celebrate what's
happening now. If anything, it means we should build it
up and keep its momentum and encourage ourselves to care longer.
And if you don't want to wait till Wednesday to

(33:22):
know how, I think you should help. If you're far
away and you can donate money, donate money. The two
groups that I can like personally immediately vouch for are
Appalachian Medical Solidarity AMS and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. Both
of those are on Instagram, and there's lots of stuff
lying around about venmos and stuff to hell to help

(33:42):
them out. But there are a ton of other grassroots
things out there as well that also can all use
your support, and everyone's sharing pretty freely, and the at
least currently, the lines between all of these groups are
very blurred in a very useful way. If you're a
little bit closer, if your days drive or so away,
then actual stuff might be useful. But don't drive that

(34:02):
stuff to Ashville. Drive it to a distribution center that
people are setting up in different towns. I've only been
paying attention to the ones in the Carolinas, but there's
you know, if you're in like the Triangle area, North Carolina,
there's a bunch of these set up, and Charlotte and
a bunch of other places, and coordinate with people. If
those aren't happening where you are, reach out to mutual

(34:23):
a disaster relief, or just start setting it up yourself
and collect things and hear what people want. It's going
to be less like old sweaters and more like insulin
or diapers, or water jugs or solar banks or generators
or chainsaws or you know, it's going to be different
at different points during the crisis, too, right, And so
you can help collect these things and eventually someone will

(34:46):
then drive them to Ashville. That could be you, but
it doesn't have to be. There's no reason to. I'm
not trying to tell people they shouldn't go, but like
you know, that's not the most immediate thing that's needed.
And there's a lot of people on the gro there already.
So that's some of how you can help. But the
other way you can help is you can get prepared yourself,

(35:07):
because Ashville was voted to be the climate haven of
the North America. And here we are there is no
climate haven, not even Mars, because that's actually got a
worse climate even than Earth does. What the fuck are
people thinking? How would that be safer? How can people
talk about colonizing Mars if they haven't even had a

(35:28):
successful biodome on Earth. That's unrelated. I'll talk to you
on Wednesday. Cool People Who Did? Cool Stuff is a
production of cool Zone Media. Or more podcasts and gorl
zone Media, Visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check
us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

(35:51):
you get your podcasts.