Running Towards Disaster | Ep. 3: ‘Read and react’

Caroline Parker: Welcome back to “Running Towards Disaster,” a series of stories from people who in times of crisis, run towards it to help. I’m Caroline Parker with EdNC. 

Back in 2022, I was attending the Outdoor Economy Conference in Cherokee, North Carolina and met in the briefest moment a man named Paul Wolf. We talked about the Nantahala Gorge, and he mentioned he worked down the road from it, at Southwestern Community College. 

A month later I was visiting his classroom and seeing all the things that make up his special Outdoor Leadership Program.

Kayaks, carabiners, ropes, and rafts — you name the outdoor equipment, and they had it. My favorite part of the tour was a shed in the back affectionately known as Paul’s Wall. He had created this bouldering gym piece by piece to teach climbing moves. It was a place his students could mimic the hardest maneuvers out there and bring new knowledge to their jobs in the outdoor recreation field. Here’s Paul. 

Paul Wolf: If you’re not familiar with bouldering moves, what you see are taped off sections. So there’s specific boulder problems that are designed in as you come along….

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, outdoor recreation created $16.2 billion in value added for North Carolina in 2023. We have over 40 state parks, 10 national park sites, and four national forests — there are a lot of jobs and businesses that work in tandem with the outdoors. 

Paul is a dedicated outdoorsman and educator, and this program is a perfect fit for our western region – one filled with opportunities to explore the outside. It was during my initial reporting on Helene, in this beautiful west, that I began to think of this audio series – and Paul was my first call. 

I asked if he had any current or past students that helped in Helene recovery, and he responded, and I quote, “I have an AMAZING person and story for you.” 

That amazing was in all caps.

Without further adieu, we’ll let him take it from here. 

Lance Buskey: My name is Lance Buskey.

So I was a student at Southwestern Community College from 2016 to 2018. I joined the Outdoor Leadership Program, kind of after a big life change. I started my college career at Ohio State University trying to study athletic training and then got a pretty gnarly concussion. And that brought me back home to North Carolina, and I had spent some time in the woods and reevaluated where I was at, and took some time to heal and recover from that concussion, and just like, kind of stumbled upon the Southwestern Community College program. And decided that it’d be if, if nothing else, like a cool way to get some outdoor experience and jump in. 

And through that program and through learning from Paul Wolf and Wags and some of the other instructors there, I developed a love for being outdoors, and for leading in the outdoors. I really enjoyed the logistical like problem solving and the like complex thought that goes into creating an outdoor program and successfully carrying out a program. 

I really enjoyed the group dynamics and understanding how people come together and all the like various things that go into helping support a like, healthy community. And then the logistical side of things – I had a lot of classes that forced me or pushed me to plan and coordinate and then execute various different outdoor activities.

And on, you know, Wednesday, we were already getting, like, huge bouts of rain. I think we got between seven and 11 inches of rain on, I think, Wednesday into Thursday. 

And so on Thursday evening, we knew that the storm was coming in. My roommate works at French Broad River Academy. It’s a really cool nonprofit middle school that works in outdoor and experiential education. We were just driving around because the French Broad was already really high. My roommate and I are whitewater kayakers, and so we’re, like, always, like, interested the in the water and keep tabs on on water levels and all of that. 

And we realized that the river was, like, already kind of about to jump the banks. You know we thought, if we get a ton of rain tonight and tomorrow, it’s gonna flood the school. And so we called his boss, and we were like, ‘Hey, can we move the vans up to a higher elevation make sure that they’re safe?’ 

So we did that, and then he called us and he’s like, I think we’re gonna come in and flood proof tonight. They were planning on doing it on Friday morning. And instead, they came Thursday night, and we all spent a couple of hours moving a bunch of equipment, trying to get everything up above chest height is like the highest that they’ve ever seen it. And so they were like, if we put it above chest height, we’re gonna be good. 

Friday rolls around, and we’re really lucky that we moved the vans. Because, I mean, the water just kept rising and rising and rising. And so you know, Friday morning we wake up and the river said it’s already jumped the banks. It’s already flooding. 

We start driving around, you know, checking places out. And there’s trees down everywhere in Asheville, and we’re driving around until 9 a.m. We had service on our phone, so we’re calling people and checking in, making sure everybody’s okay. And then connection went down, and we were in the dark. And we drove around Asheville making sure that our friends were good. We got onto, like, the Haywood Street bridge down there in the River Arts District. 

And I remember clearly I see, like, just the top of that River Arts District sign, and holy cow, like, if, if there’s this much water in Asheville proper then, like our communities surrounding Asheville had to have gotten hammered. And throughout the day, the water just kept rising and rising and rising. 

Down at the River Academy at 6:30 p.m. and I mean, we have pictures of the school. The first level is totally underwater. All of our efforts to get things above chest level didn’t really make a difference there. Moving the vans did. But on Saturday, we woke up and we were like, man, we don’t have any service, we don’t have any power, we don’t have any water. We probably should figure out what’s going on outside of like our little hub. 

My parents live in Sylva, so we drove over and checked in with them. So we went to the Sylva library and got on the WiFi and realized the wide scale of the damage. You know, we saw videos of Chimney Rock coming out Green River Cove area, and just the like, wide scale damage. And we knew we had to do something. 

So we went to the local grocery store and picked up a bunch of food, non perishables, and we, like, cooked a few meals at my parents house. My dad used to brew beer, and so we filled up a bunch of his five gallon buckets and took them to Asheville and started delivering water and food.  

I made a Facebook post and said, ‘Hey, I’m going to be running back and forth between Sylva and Asheville, delivering water. If anybody needs anything, let me know.’ And people started Venmo-ing me money. And I was like, I didn’t really expect like people to support in that way. 

But it just started happening. And like the next day, bought two 55 gallon drums of water and started delivering, like one, 10 gallons at a time. Like the day after the storm really hit, we were passing out food and water in West Asheville. And it just, I mean, started rolling from there.

We called Willie Iser over are at the French Broad River Academy. And like, ‘Hey, man, like, things are kind of like ramping up here. We just want to, like, deliver resources, and need a storage place bigger than, like, our like front yard.’

And we asked him if we could use the Maria Noakes Center to house some of the some of the like resources that were getting donated. Will was super supportive. He said, Yes, please hop in there. And so on Monday morning, man, it was crazy. We like started, just with a few tables set up outside the Marie Noakes Center. Folks started bringing a ton of stuff, more deliveries from Charlotte. We had a delivery from Chattanooga. We had a delivery from Atlanta, all on that like Monday, Tuesday. 

And some of our friends actually had a van with a Starlink unit. Communications were down for well over a week. They parked the van the at the Maria Noakes Center, and we were able to use Facebook a ton to coordinate with people. I think by Monday, I had over $5,000 donated to me, and then by that Wednesday, over $25,000 donated to me. 

It was absurd how fast things happened. And, you know, the early model was like, I would call a friend from out of town say, ‘Hey, can you like, are you available to deliver us some resources?’ We didn’t want to tax our immediate bubble, right? We knew Sylva was okay, but people were going to need food in our area. So we were calling friends from like that three hour radius outside of us. And, yeah, people just started rolling in. 

You know, I’d be like, ‘Hey, I’ve got $2,000 for you. Go spend it on this. Like, go get all the feminine hygiene products you can fill your car and come. Or go get all the water and food you can and come.’ 

And so pretty quickly it, my Venmo, I think by that Wednesday was locked because I had hundreds or thousands of people donating money to the cause. And it was just like, you know, totally grassroots. We weren’t thinking anything of, I didn’t know Venmo would lock my account or anything. And when we hit that point we knew, like one, that this is going to be more of a long term effort than we originally thought or knew, and then two, that we needed to figure out some more official way to do things.

And that’s where, like, our relationship with French Broad River Academy deepened. They opened up a separate fund in their account, and like, set up a system for people to donate directly to that fund, which was accessible by us. 

And so we were able to then, like, write checks from there, and people would were able to donate directly to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. And I mean, in that first, like, couple of weeks, I want to say, in the first 20 days, we had over 1,000 people come to volunteer with our organization. And that was volunteering in the warehouse to organize and receive shipments.

It was sending out a ton of shipments and delivering to the far reaches of western North Carolina. A lot of our community that was showing up and present, operating with us and volunteering with us, were outdoors people. And those people are, you know, motivated and creative and have a lot of grit, and are able to get to a lot of places that people weren’t receiving aid. And so we had a lot of search and rescue efforts going on. We had a lot of deliveries going out into areas that, you know, people hadn’t seen other like outside people in days.

A lot of the early days were recon missions. We have our, like, outdoors motivated people that can get out to the tough places. And you know of the townships and small communities outside of Asheville, and we were like, man, it seems like Asheville proper is being taken care of pretty well. Let’s start sending people out and checking on these other communities. Basically we just send three people at a time in a car. Be like, ‘can you make it to this location?’ 

I want to say that our final number of like, in those early days where we delivered resources to, was 12 or 13 counties across western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. It was very wide reaching. People were putting in four hours of driving one way in a day just to, like, get out and access an area and see what was going on there. Because information was, like, the most useful thing, even if we didn’t continually drop resources to those areas, we would find information and then be able to, like, coordinate with other nonprofits or other efforts in the area that are doing similar work.

My time at Southwestern Community College, and then I went on to Western Carolina University, those educational experiences prepared me for this experience in so many ways that I like, never thought that I would be in this position, and never thought that I would be utilizing these skills in this way, but I’m so grateful for those experiences at the colleges.

Caroline Parker: You’ve just listened to Lance Buskey’s experience in the early days of Helene. He, along with friends, during the storm and after, helped organize relief efforts to get people what they needed. We spoke with Will Yeiser, the executive director over at the French Broad River Academy, and this is what he said about Lance and his roommate Sam, a teacher at the school.

Will Yeiser: It was just kind of like what we say in whitewater, if you’re going down a difficult river and you can’t really scout the rapids, you just read and react. Those two just read and reacted to the situation kind of like you would do going down an unfamiliar rapid. They just relied on their instincts and went for it, and that, to me, is one of the proudest things I’ve ever been involved with.

This is the third episode in our series, “Running Towards Disaster” from EdNC. 

In our next episode, we will hear from three Emergency Medical Service professionals and instructors at Haywood Community College. 

This was a production by me, Caroline Parker, for EdNC. EdNC was established to be an independent source of news – providing data, and analysis about education for the people of North Carolina. In short, we tell the stories happening in our state’s classrooms and involving our state’s students. A special shout out goes to Paul Wolf, who is retiring after 25 years leading the Outdoor Leadership program. Music in this series is from the talented locals in Haywood, recorded at their Friday night event, Pickin’ in the Park. For a full bibliography of this episode and all of our coverage, go to EdNC.org.