In Appalachia, Helene’s Water Crisis Taps a Global Christian Response

International Christian engineering nonprofit Water Mission usually responds to clean water crises overseas, like flooding in East Africa this year or the earthquake in Turkey last year.

But when the South Carolina–based organization saw the extensive damage to Western North Carolina’s water infrastructure after the historic storm Helene, it decided to activate a rare disaster response in the US.

“We’re able to take our systems and plug them in here,” said Brock Kreitzburg, the director of disaster response at Water Mission, speaking from Boone, North Carolina. “North Carolina is in our backyard, so let’s use our expertise in providing safe water.”

With permission from the state government, the organization drove up to Western North Carolina and put into operation four of its proprietary mobile water treatment systems that can produce 15,000 liters of clean water a day, or enough for several thousand people. Water Mission has also now distributed and gassed up 400 generators for people who need power to pump their wells, assembling a team of electricians to install the generators as needed.

Swaths of Western North Carolina are without running water for an indeterminant amount of time. Helene’s historic floodwaters took out the pipelines to the main water treatment plant serving the city of Asheville, as well as hit hard Swannanoa and Black Mountain, two smaller communities near Asheville. City officials do not have a timeline for when water will be restored but expect it to take weeks more.

Areas in rural Appalachia are struggling with water supply, too, because they are dependent on wells, which need power to pump. Electricity remains out in many parts of the region nearly two weeks after the storm.

First Baptist Swannanoa, a church that has been a key relief resource and distribution point in the hard-hit community of Swannanoa, set up a health clinic on its property early last week. There were no preexisting clinics in the area. Pastor Jeff Dowdy said the volunteer doctors and nurses have been seeing people with health issues related to lack of clean water. Dehydration has hit people of all ages, he said.

“Once you don’t have access to clean water, all sorts of things can happen healthwise,” Dowdy said. The timeframes he has heard for water to come back are four to eight weeks. “This is a long-term crisis that we’re in.”

Spotty cell service, power outages, and destroyed roads and bridges have compounded the difficulty of restoring infrastructure. One of Water Mission’s trucks got stuck on a mudslide.

“The amount of destruction here in this region—you don’t see this [in the US],” said Water Mission’s Kreitzburg. The death toll from Helene stands at 227, with most of those killed in North Carolina, making it the deadliest hurricane to hit the US since Katrina in 2005.

Without running water, residents must gather water to drink, cook, flush toilets, bathe, and wash clothes. Donations of bottled water are abundant, but locals said they are beginning to see more large water tanks positioned around town. Tankers with potable water where community members can fill large containers for their homes are the ideal in-between measure, international clean water engineers told CT.

The residents of Appalachia might not have known, but Taiwanese Christians were watching their plight. After the storm, World Vision US heard from the leaders of World Vision Taiwan. The Taiwanese leaders had seen the water crisis in Appalachia and said they already had a solar-powered water filtration system in transit to the United States, a system they had used in Taiwan after a recent typhoon.

The Taiwanese leaders wondered if North Carolina could use the water system.

Reed Slattery, World Vision’s national director of US programs, had an idea for where it could go. He had been in Swannanoa and the Asheville area and met with the head of Western Carolina Rescue Ministries, a Christian organization which is providing emergency housing to about 120 people, including 6 pregnant women and some babies. The shelter needed water. Slattery thought the mobile filtration system would produce the right amount of water for the shelter—providing 1,900 gallons of water a day.

The system from Taiwan was scheduled to be delivered to the shelter this week, and the Taiwanese staff planned to remotely train the shelter staff on using the system.

The uncertain length of the water outage requires more than bottled water, these relief nonprofit leaders say. World Vision’s “chief water officer” is working with local North Carolina officials on those longer-term solutions, Slattery said.

Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian international relief organization whose headquarters are in Boone, also typically responds to disasters overseas. But the organization has set up three water filtration systems in the Asheville area.

Each of its systems can produce 50,000 liters a day, or enough for 10,000 people. The organization has also been airlifting water to difficult-to-reach areas. Dowdy, the pastor in Swannanoa, said his community has benefited from large tankers of water from Samaritan’s Purse.

Other international nonprofits like chef José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen have tankers of water on the ground in the area. WaterStep, which responds to water crises overseas, has established clean-water operations in Augusta, Georgia, one of the places Helene hit hard.

The responding Christian organizations’ leaders told CT their operations are coordinated with emergency management officials, but they are also proactively reaching out to heavily damaged areas and talking to local fire departments or other local officials to learn the needs of the communities. Water Mission is targeting more rural areas where it will take longer to get power and water back.

Local governments have been responding well, said Water Mission’s Kreitzburg, but “it’s just such a wide area of damage. They have to prioritize. So we’re trying to be the supplement between the disaster happening and the restoring of services.”

He added, “It’s a privilege to serve them and serve the Lord.”

The head of the North Carolina Baptist Convention, Todd Unzicker, said the Baptists have semitrucks with water arriving to more than a dozen sites in Western North Carolina every day. Most of that is bottled water, but more tankers of water have been going out. He said the state Baptists are serving 140,000 hot meals a day in the area, and he didn’t know numbers on water distribution but said they were distributing more water than food.

The lack of cell service has made that distribution and communication difficult. Unzicker traveled to the storm-hit area with his daughter recently, and they had to use a map book to navigate.

The presence of so many churches and nonprofits in the region, on top of the government response, meant that the “immediate need is being met,” World Vision’s Slattery said. But residents he talked to were worried about what would happen when bottled water donations dried up or when attention shifted to other crises like Hurricane Milton.

While staffers of these relief organizations are focused on the basics of restoring infrastructure, they are also seeing the hurt and trauma of residents in the aftermath of the storm. People coming into the churches that Water Mission is partnering with have often lost everything, sometimes including family members.

“Wherever we’re responding around the world, we want to partner alongside the church,” said Kreitzburg, adding that his organization would stay as long as it was needed. “The church is going to be in that community a lot longer than we are.”

Dowdy, in speaking to CT from Swannanoa, had to move several times to chase a fleeting cell signal. The area around him is a landscape of cars flipped upside down in trees, destroyed homes, and washed-out roads. But morale is good at his church.

“Everything we’ve gotten in here has been from churches and individuals who have brought it to us,” he said. Outside groups coming in more recently have allowed his church members to rest and attend to their own disaster recovery. “It’s encouraging to see the church in a time of great need.”

Before the storm, his church had been wrestling with the question of whether anyone would miss the church if it ceased to exist. The congregation had begun looking to be more involved in the surrounding community.

“Wow, has God provided that!” he said.

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