Running Towards Disaster | Ep. 6: ‘Let’s find our people’

Caroline Parker: Welcome to our last episode of “Running Towards Disaster,” a series of stories about people who in times of crisis, head towards it to help. I’m Caroline Parker with EdNC. 

Over the last six months, I have interviewed students and alumni who work in forestry, textiles, trucking, electrical linework, the outdoor industry, all facets of emergency medical services, and firefighting – who in some way shape or form – helped in Helene recovery.

It seems fitting to end with the person that inspired the series title, Dr. John Gossett. Gossett has been the president of Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, or AB Tech for short, for five years. 

And in October of 2024, a month after Helene wreaked havoc in western North Carolina, he said this: “Think about who went running. It was our law enforcement, EMTs, fire, rescue, all these people we have trained — they were the ones who ran immediately into the storm.”

He is concise and to the point — the community college system trains people that are essential to our safety and survival in times of crisis, but also everyday. 

His school, staff, and students were all impacted by this storm and all played a part in its rescue and recovery. Here is Dr. John Gossett. 

John Gossett: Every campus that we have some presence on was used. Madison County campus, when Marshall was washed away, they moved all of their town offices to our campus. It was also used as relief distribution site, helicopter pad, you name it. It’s kind of in the center of the county anyway. Everything was used at Madison.

Our Woodfin campus, for lack of a better phrase, was a FEMA town. FEMA brought in a lot of trailers for housing, food, washing machines for their workers, so they took over our entire driving track at Woodfin. 

Here on campus, 300 ambulances were in our parking lot, just in preparation if the hospital needed to evacuate. Thank God it didn’t have to evacuate, but we still had all of those ambulances and their personnel there. 

Two of our buildings were used as shelters. One was a medical shelter because we had a generator, so we could get power to oxygen machines for the medical folk. Then our conference center was used as a general shelter. A third building was used then to house all the workers, Red Cross people, that supported those shelters. 

So Inca was probably the least used. The county also asked for a space for debris removal, for short term, kind of pile it up and then take it off. They used it very, very little for that, but we were still able and ready for those big projects. Now, the Small Business Administration is still at our Inca site, helping those small businesses get back on their feet.

Caroline Parker: I interviewed the president to talk about his storm experience and what it was like leading a community college during and after a disaster. 

I then headed to AB Tech’s Fire Academy to talk with another John – Fire Services Program Director John Wilson. Wilson started volunteering at his local fire department in Black Mountain when he was 17. And in 2025, he will be logging in his 40th year of service. 

Both Johns worked tirelessly through the storm and after to help their students and community.  We are thankful for their service to the region and willingness to share their stories. 

Dr. John Gossett is up first.

Dr. John Gossett: Wednesday, I was up in Avery County, and our law enforcement folk called and said, ‘The garage is starting to flood.’ And I said, ‘The parking garage? There’s nothing there.’ ‘Well, it’s starting to flood. What do we do?’ 

Started talking to my leadership team and just thinking about the eye of the storm had still not reached Florida, at that point. The eye of the storm is not supposed to be here till Friday, you know? Well, let’s be prepared. They encouraged me then to cancel classes on Thursday so we could prepare our campus and our people could prepare themselves. So we stayed home Thursday. 

Friday morning, I got a phone call from the county manager. ‘We need your building.’ Yes. The answer was an immediate and emphatic yes. About 30 minutes later, she called, ‘we need your other building.’ An immediate emphatic yes. We’ll figure out the details later. But sure got the buildings unlocked, and then communication evaporated.

I called our vice president, and she just said, ‘Do you know how bad Asheville is?’ I said, ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t because I can’t, there’s only one way to get into campus.’ I can see the river is up, but we really don’t have communication. And she said, ‘The national news, it’s bad. It’s really, really bad.’ So we’re having to hear from other people how badly we were devastated.

Our leadership team got together formally Sunday. At that first meeting, let’s put an org chart on the wall, and let’s find our people. So we were looking on Facebook. We’re looking on Twitter, like, okay, do that with yellow so we know that they’ve made a statement, but let’s phone call them. Let’s talk to them person to person, and then we’ll highlight that in pink so we’ll know who we have contacted. We heard an awful lot of people telling us how much they appreciated that. Most of them, ‘No, we’re good.’

We, first thing, we said, ‘Let’s find our people.’ Second thing, how are we going to make payroll next month? That was a short conversation. We’re paying people. And then, of course, well, we don’t have time sheets. We’re paying people. We’ll figure it out later. We’re paying them. We called in our payroll guy to talk through the process with him. 

Okay, everything good. He leaves. And so someone says, ‘Well, you did know he lost his house?’ No, I didn’t know that! Why didn’t somebody tell me? So run down the hall, ‘Dude. I’m so sorry. Are you okay?’ ‘Oh yeah, my dad and I found another place. We’re good. I’ll get right on it.’ But he was willing to worry about everybody else, you know. And those are the stories that really keep me going.

And it’s been a slow build for me personally. You know, in the heat of it, that first month. We’re coming into the office every day trying to figure out, what can we do to support those shelters as a leadership team, what can we do to support our people? 

A lot of people came to help. We saw there was law enforcement officers. And I’m like, where are you from? Louisiana. Where are you from? Wyoming. Holy cow. Yeah, we had a three day, three days open. Y’all help us. We help y’all. That’s how, that’s how it works.

Our fire academy sends their students to their fire stations on Friday. That’s just part of their work-based learning. Well, that’s when the storm hit. So all of our students were at their fire stations. And in a disaster like that, you know those fire chiefs were like, we can’t worry about whether you’ve got the right certification or not. I need your help right now, get in the truck. Let’s go. So we knew that there was a good number of our fire students were doing that kind of work.

We lost about 25% of our students in the fall. Rightly so. They had bigger fish to fry. 70% of our students are part time. So they’ve got jobs, they’ve got families. We are third, fifth, sixth on the list of their priorities, and I understand that. So when, those students walked away from fall semester, I told my chief academic officer, if a student is going to earn an F this semester, the faculty needs to come to my office and explain to me why. Right? 

Remarkably gracious with our students in the fall. Our faculty, without having to be told, found their students just like we did a phone tree for them. They started reaching out to their students where they could. And most of our programs, especially our technical programs, are cohorted. They know their students well. They’re very well connected. 

I think because of that, the students came back in the spring, they saw how much we cared about them as people. The scholarships are great, and we appreciate all the help that the General Assembly has given to us, that our system office is giving to us. I don’t want to discount that at all. That’s a big part of how they were able to get back here, right? I have to believe the way our faculty treated their students as people, as humans first, as students second, I think that made a difference.

John Wilson: My name is John Wilson, and I’m the director of fire services at Asheville Buncombe Technical Community College, and we’re located at the Woodfin, North Carolina campus.

Our fire academy students, we are in class and out on the training grounds, doing our hands on skills, usually Monday through Thursday, and then Friday, they do an internship at their sponsoring fire departments.

On that Friday when the hurricane hit, a lot of them went to their stations. And between the EMT group and the fire group, they put in almost 5,000 hours worth of community support.

We weren’t sure exactly what all the fire departments would allow the cadets to do during the hurricane. We knew the hurricane was coming. We had no clue that it was going to be to the extreme that it was.

We had a lot of flooding prior, and then come Friday, I was off, and so once the call started coming, went to the fire department and actually stayed on duty for the first 24 hours in Black Mountain. 

Then after I went home, I stayed home and rested for a little and came back in. And then we actually got put on 12-hour shifts. And so during the day for the next week, we were helping with communications and taking phone calls about donations, and we were working getting all that set up. 

One of the things that you look at the river, you always hear about water always follows a path of least resistance. However, in this situation, it was following the path of least resistance, but it was also making its own pathway as well.

I actually had two of our students that were at that station, and since then actually both of those have been hired full time by that department.

We are finding that we have a lot of people that are wanting to get into the Fire Academy, and I think a lot of that may have to do with Helene because a lot of people were out there volunteering. The community came together so well, but they didn’t have the training that they needed. And I think that this is playing a lot into the academy. Two of our academy students this last time, they actually came here for hurricane relief and stayed and joined our academy.

Caroline Parker: You just heard from Dr. John Gossett and John Wilson, the first president, the latter director of fire services, at AB Tech. Students they support and educate were able to join in Helene disaster relief and recovery thanks to their community college. 

This was the last episode in our series “Running Towards Disaster.” Thank you to everyone that agreed to speak with us, recounting stories of a storm that changed the landscape of western North Carolina. It is because of them that the region is resilient. 

And thank you to our community college system that trains, pivots, and serves so many of our students. Education is a public good, and good for the public – and these stories personify that for me. It was an honor to produce this podcast. 

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. 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.