Hurricane Helene was more than a month ago, but workers are still impacted

After getting his degree in business administration and working for 12 years in corporate finance, Brian Fetting quit his job as a senior associate for a financial services firm in his native Minnesota and moved to Asheville, North Carolina to open New Origin Brewing.

Fetting put everything he had—time, savings, manual labor—into the brewery, which he and partner Dan Juhnke envisioned as a community establishment. They planned on keeping it small and continuing to offer $5 pints in an economy where that’s increasingly hard to find. I can personally attest that their dream came true. As an Asheville resident, New Origin had a real, local vibe that was a respite in a city built on tourism.

“We worked so hard on this vision, which makes it harder to see it destroyed,” Fetting told me over the phone, three weeks after Hurricane Helene decimated western North Carolina. The pain in his voice was evident.

A train car, thrown about like a toy in the 21-foot flood waters, leveled the brewery, which had been situated across the street from the Swannanoa River. New Origin’s ten employees—like thousands of people in western North Carolina—suddenly found themselves out of work, while Fetting and Junke’s professional dreams are currently in flux.

While the media has largely focused on Asheville, the area’s population center and city with name recognition, Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc in many smaller, lesser-known communities, like Hot Springs, a picturesque 36-mile drive up the French Broad River.

Like Fetting, David Wagner, owner of the Spring Creek Hotel, relocated to western North Carolina a couple of years back to pursue his version of the American Dream. Wagner specializes in music rights management for software companies, a position he was able to work remotely while opening and running his hotel. “I was ready for something more meaningful,” Wagner told me. His family has lived in Hot Springs for generations, and he grew up visiting. “I’ve always been obsessed with this town.”

Wager had guests staying at the creekside hotel when Helene hit, so took them to a local shelter. In the time it took him to accomplish that, the bridge back into town was inundated, and all the buildings in the business district—Spring Creek included—were under four to seven feet of water.

Both of Wagner’s business ventures have taken a hit. While he’s planning on rebuilding, the hotel is currently out of business and needs massive amounts of repairs. He’s now transitioned to partial days of cleanup—after spending weeks helping his and neighboring businesses clear out mud and debris all day. But he’s a man stretched thin. “I come home at lunch or in the evenings to manage my company remotely, and I’m just so mentally and physically exhausted that there’s no growth,” he says. “I’m doing my best just to maintain.”

We’re more than a month out from Helene, and the area’s infrastructure hasn’t been permanently restored in the region. Businesses remain closed due to lacking potable water, and other workers are sidelined by lack of wifi or power. Additionally, western North Carolina was largely robbed of its fall tourism boom, leaving small businesses uncertain about survival as we approach the leaner winter months. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid, and the average American works paycheck to paycheck and has little savings.

Small business owners and employees aren’t just dealing with devastating economic consequences. For better or worse, we’re a work-driven culture, and 70% of American workers say their work defines their sense of purpose (which is understandable, when you consider we spend up to a third of our life working).

I started a new role the Tuesday after Helene hit. I was out of town for a wedding, and getting back to my Asheville apartment (where my new work laptop and I-9 paperwork sat) wasn’t an option. I spent all day Monday on the phone with HR finding workarounds, but have spent the last five weeks being a digital nomad, bouncing from friends’ places and AirBnBs, until wifi was restored.

All things considered, I’m very fortunate. But attention is often paid most to the cinematic and immediate destruction of say, a home floating down a river, not say, the restaurant manager who hasn’t collected a paycheck for five weeks now or the account manager who was forced to take PTO because they couldn’t afford to travel the way I did to find workable wifi.

Unfortunately, Hurricane Helene’s spotlight has started waning. We often see this when disaster happens: There’s an influx of aid and media attention, and then, the collective audience moves on, even though the affected regions still need help.

Western North Carolina is starting to bounce back, but the ability to work and make a living will remain a challenge for many people. It took a full year, for example, after Hurricane Katrina for the percentage of people working and looking for work to rebound to pre-storm numbers. A year is a long time without income, and as someone recently unemployed for several months, I can personally attest to the havoc it can wreak on one’s psyche and mental well-being.

When I asked Wagner the best way for people to help impacted businesses, he said that it was still hard to know, because many factors are still in flux, and as they move from cleanup to rebuilding, many don’t know exactly what they need yet. But he says so far, cash has been the most useful. He was lucky that when he was at his most overwhelmed, his sister started a GoFundMe, which has raised $18,000 so far. He’s thankful for this, but it only scratches the surface of rebuilding costs.

Fetting and New Origin are also going the GoFundMe route and hoping to rebuild. If you have the resources, I urge you to donate to Fetting or Wagner’s rebuilds. This database of all the impacted Asheville businesses, as well as the Hot Springs Recovery Hub are also great ways to find places to donate.

“Supporting the GoFundMe goes an extremely long way,” Fetting told me. “And for anyone who can’t monetarily support, spread the word and keep Asheville top of mind because this is impacting a lot of people and businesses, and this is only the tip of the iceberg for many.”