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So what difference does one year make?

I'm Chris William, welcome again to the most widely watched and longest running program on Carolina business policy and public affairs.

Almost exactly a year ago, now, as we do so often during hurricane season, we take a perfunctory notice of National Hurricane Center warnings.

Right?

It's hurricane season even now.

But a year ago, yet another named storm was barreling toward the U.S.

coast with the threat of high tides, rising water, damaging winds, etc., etc.

this one was different, though, as it clearly ripped up the coast and into the Carolinas.

It did damage, but not how we thought, not nearly.

It is an understatement to call it damage, but the crippling destruction began on or around September 27th, and when all was done on the 29th this September, it was the costliest storm in North Carolina history.

Well over 100 people killed, 60 billion plus in damages, 73,000 homes destroyed, as well as countless businesses and lives forever changed.

Now, one year later, we host five leaders who were and are key and coordinating much of the redevelopment, rebuilding and renewing of Western North Carolina.

And we start right now.

- [Announcer] Major funding also by Foundation for the Carolinas, a catalyst for philanthropy, and driver of civic engagement, helping individuals, nonprofits, and companies bring their charitable visions to life.

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And, Martin Marietta, a leading provider of natural resource-based building materials, providing the foundation on which our communities improve and grow.

On this edition of Carolina Business Review, Kit Cramer from the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce, David Jackson from the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce, Mayor Peter O'Leary from Chimney Rock Village, Mayor Carol Pritchett of Lake Lure, and Ben Duncan from the South Carolina Office of Resilience.

(upbeat rock music) Welcome again to our program, Happy Fall.

And as I was just saying before the cameras rolled here, I'm I'm in awe of all of you.

Thank you for your leadership.

And it sounds like a phrase that a lot of people use.

But truly can't even explain when you're down in it.

You know, those of us that don't live in western North Carolina and look to the mountains for the leaf change and the hiking around, you know, different parkways, etc., etc.

it's but when you're in it and living it every day, it's it's very humbling.

So so thank you all.

Kid, I'm going to ask you the first question here as we kind of kick off what is different today than it was a year ago?

I mean, I know the obvious rises to the top, but.

When you well, I mean, a year ago and I think I speak for all of us in this regard, we didn't have water power, cell service.

It was it was bad and it remained bad for quite a period of time.

So there's a world of difference and what a year ago was like, but I talk out of both sides of my mouth when I talk about our recovery, because there are areas of our community where you can go.

And I think that's probably true for y'all as well.

Where there you can't tell a storm occurred.

But then there are areas of extreme devastation.

I live in Swannanoa, which was ground zero for Asheville's water system, and we still I mean, every day I see extensive damage, and yet it is so much better than it was a year ago.

I can't even begin to tell you.

Mayor O'Leary, what is you know, I thought of the beginning of the novel A Tale of Two Cities.

What is it like living in A Tale of Two Cities?

I mean, Chimney Rock obviously had some serious devastation, but what's that like when you've got folks that are barely affected and others that are devastated?

It's always an interesting, angle to me because I do go.

I drive to my daughter's house, for example, five miles outside of Lake Lure, and it's everything looks normal there.

And then you come back to Chimney Rock and the lake lower area, and it's just total devastation.

So it's it's a weird, dynamic because we can go to a neighboring town and go shopping and go out to eat, and everything just seems like just like it was two years ago.

And yet in Chimney Rock, we're still struggling.

I will I did want to add to that one question you had about the difference, what we've seen a year ago.

And really for ten months, the whole Village of Chimney Rock was unemployed and out of work.

And we have just recently opened up.

Probably 90% of the businesses now are open, and Chimney Rock Park is open.

And for us, just the the change in mindset, as soon as we were able to open and approach something of normal life, everybody's mind just changed.

There was a much more, optimistic outlook of the people.

Genuinely.

Yes, yes.

I mean people, the employees, the business owners, everybody kind of had a switch go off in their mind.

Like, you know what, we have started the recovery now.

And that that was major.

David, what's what's different when youre there?

Im going to stay optimistic and I'm going to say connectedness without within the region.

We thought we were connected before and we are still locked in arms today.

A lot of that is still advocating for the things that we still need as a community.

But a lot of that, I think, has become, centered around thankfulness for what we have achieved.

We are also connected with one another from a tourism perspective, of course, the the drifting trip that starts in one area and ends in the other touches every one of our communities.

So it's essential that we stay together.

But as the the shift from the physical damage to the economic damage to the long term impact has occurred, we've got to make sure that we're doing that in some sort of an a semblance of order.

And and today, I'm happy to say we're all still on the phone with each other, constantly making sure that those things are happening in the right order.

Then what do you think?

What's different now?

For South Carolina this was a different type of hurricane.

Before we were accustomed the three previous hurricanes that we were accustomed to, it being on the East Coast, this was on the western side of South Carolina up to the, the northern part of South Carolina.

That was totally different.

We are recovering, you know, recovery is a is a is a marathon.

This is not a sprint.

And we are recovering.

Tourism back is back to the normal level.

I spoke to the tourism director a couple of weeks ago, and he said we're record numbers.

So the tourism side has recovered, but we are still dealing with people who who are out of their homes, homes that were damaged, quite a number of them.

And there were 5000 homes that were damaged, 500, severely damaged.

And we are we are assisting those citizens and we're citizen centric.

So that's what we're looking at.

Our citizens, economic development and our natural resources.

We recently had the summer had a of a fire in, a table rock mountain.

Yeah.

And from the debris that was in the that was left after healing.

And it'll probably be worse next year if we, if we if we don't be prepared quite as well as we should be.

Yeah.

Okay, mayor.

Appreciate you.

Last but certainly not least on the question, what's what's different now for you?

Well, as we look back at where we were those first couple of weeks, you're in an emergency situation and everybody's really focused on making sure that people's lives, that people are not in danger of losing their life.

We're very fortunate that we didn't have any loss of life in, in Lake Lure.

And we didn't have as many, homes destroyed because the homes are built higher up on the side there, like very steep there.

So that part, that part is good.

But you transition and it's so it's a step process over the year.

And so it's probably easier at first because people are really focusing on the emergency part of it.

But as the year goes on, people start to look at, for instance, how do we survive this?

It is a very it is a marathon.

It's a long process.

It truly is.

And so, you know, business owners are trying to decide how can they make it, but I think right now the most significant point for us is that we are probably in a couple of months, hopefully, our lake will be finished.

Lake Lure, aptly named for the town of Lake Lure, will be, we'll be able to raise the level of the lake back next spring to Full Pond, which means all those people, business owners in our town will have an opportunity to for business again.

I mean, lots of tourists have come in now, and that part is wonderful on our trails, the golf courses.

And as you said, some, for instance, rumbling ball, which is a section of of Lake Lure on the other side of the lake, they were not hurt that much.

Their golf course has been open the whole time, but the lake is the center of what the economy is.

And so people now have actual hope and confidence that by next spring it'll be open and they'll be able to resume their businesses.

And I don't want to be maudlin, but I also don't want to diminish, the, the series of, of, just grieving.

I mean, are people still grieving or is there, is there is there another stage now.

I, I have to tell you, I would be happy when next week is over and the, the literal commemoration date, because it brings up lots of emotions for, on so many different fronts.

I mean, the loss of life all by itself was extreme, but it's also the loss of way of life in some cases.

And the stressors that we faced for the last year, I'm ready for all that to be in the rearview mirror, I really am.

I'm, I'm I'm ready to to forge ahead.

And I think, I think a lot of people feel that way.

Different, different, experience for anybody.

I think that anytime you have, heavy rainstorm, at this point in time in our communities, there are some people that unfortunately that means, hey, we've got, we're hopefully not losing progress.

But for a lot of us, it's just a trigger.

I mean, it's the mental health awareness of all of this.

The fact that people have been running hard and in the red for months on end.

And we said, recently at a chamber gathering, it's okay to feel emotional about this.

I think our entire community is.

But we also view September 28th as an important date to get past that so we can continue to move on with the forward looking work.

But then mayor O'Leary been talked about a visible sign of piles of debris that are now drying out and becoming a fire hazard for for you, mayor, what is what's the most visible sign of recovery that you're seeing now?

Is it the businesses?

Is it the attitudes or is it something else in another city?

Right.

I think the most visible sign is just the activity of the people walking the streets, because we are open now, and that is just such a welcome sight to, to be to see the restaurants open.

We only have two left, but they're both open and doing a great business.

The shops that are open and just see cars parked on the side of the road and not work, trucks and dump trucks and equipment, but to see actual cars with tourists getting out and walk in the street, you know, that's that's the most visible sign.

And I'll echo something that Kit said that, the people for us, we still have people that will come in or haven't even come in yet.

And they say, I don't want to see the destruction because they've seen some pictures and they know it's terrible.

And for them, they're still remembering the old Chimney Rock, and that's their memory.

And they want to keep that for a little bit longer because it's it's dramatically changed us.

And, you know, that's what people are going to have to get used to going forward.

And that's what we're trying to deal with.

You know, you all have alluded to or mentioned, tourism and it is the tourism season certainly for western North Carolina, upstate South Carolina.

And we are going to get to that in part two of this program, which will be next week.

But I want to come back to something else.

Mayor Pritchett, the idea of when when do you shift from triage and recovery into just straight up economic development?

We're moving forward.

This is how life is.

Well, I think that's a gradual process, but important to think about.

You know, certainly we've been doing that this whole year with the knowledge of the first thing we had to do was make the lake, useful again and in its former state.

And so tied to that is moving ahead.

And I think what's so really nice for us is sort of the, two things coming at the same time, this one year celebration and the opportunity to at the same time say, we hope in another month will be completed with the lake.

So this is a huge milestone for our community and people really take it.

We have many other things, you know, large infrastructure, things that need to be, be resolved.

But this is the first thing where we can actually say, check done, we've got the lake back together.

So that has been a real sense of hope and confidence for the people.

And one of the things that we noticed is because we do a lot of business tourism where people make reservations ahead of time.

There are a lot of weddings that are planned as an example there, and people are starting to make reservations for weddings now for next spring.

And that wasn't possible unless the lodge owners, the hotel owners, could have some confidence that they would be ready for that.

So that's also something in the future that brings hope to people that more, more people will be coming in.

Is is there a sense of and this is for anyone, not for you, because you had mentioned this, but I'm going to refer you talked about the one year anniversary.

Is that one of these things where you're, you know, we're going to market.

Yeah.

It's the milestone.

Yeah.

Not the anniversary.

Were not using the anniversary language.

Because of exactly what that means - this is not a celebration.

This is a commemoration of a period of time that I don't think anybody wants to revisit.

But we also have to be understanding that it is significant to, you know, to see progress move forward.

You know, there are a lot of very somber gatherings that are going to be going on in our communities throughout western North Carolina.

And they are to remember the people that have lost, to remember the effort.

You know, somebody recently said it's important for us to take a step back as a community and see, yes, here's how we rallied.

But let's not let this be the thing that rallies us again to and and let's remember all of the things that have been accomplished, because we saw that there was a need and we attack the need doesn't have to be in a disaster context all the time.

I think there's a lesson to be learned here.

And part of that is also an economic development lesson.

How are we going to make sure that businesses are resilient the next time this comes around?

Is there going to be an economic development playbook made that's going to cover things like short term cash flow and all of the things that Kit and I and others have been crisscrossing the state talking about with other chambers.

Those things are important.

And I think on the on the commemoration day, those things become front and center again.

So at the agency level, and I'm pointing to you been picking on you a little bit because you are in an agency director and in South Carolina.

Is that are there there's conversations that go, you know, not only are these things that we need to be talking about, but are there plans being put in place to to respond to the next disaster?

Sure.

I want to thank our legislature, for putting $40 million in our budget to be prepared for disaster.

So, after the disaster, I got a call from the speaker's office and said, how much money do we have to move forward with the disaster to get started faster?

And I told him the 40 million that the legislature put in there that the governor approved in our budget was ready to go.

And we got started immediately.

We started with disaster case management.

We had about 50 disaster case managers to go out and start helping citizens with, again, citizen centric, to go start helping citizens, those who were having housing problems, whatever unmet need that they had.

We were ready to go right away, to get started later, FEMA came in with with money for disaster case management.

So we've expanded from about 50 disaster case managers to over 100 disaster case managers working with those citizens directly, whatever their unmet need is.

That's what we're helping with is housing, food, clothing, furniture, whatever that unmet need is.

That's where we started.

Mayor O'Leary, David said that the conversations going on about that, what's your what's your take on the idea of not just talking about what happened and how to get out in front of it next time, but do you feel like there's real traction in North Carolina for the.

As far as getting out in front of the next?

Well, I think yeah, because this is so fresh on everybody's mind that we I feel like, you know, from the response side that everybody's thinking about it and has been thinking about it and planning.

So I feel like, at least in our case, in Chimney Rock case, in the emergency management case, we feel like we're we're ready in a sense, but, just hopefully it doesn't happen.

Obviously, we have to go through it.

But, I want to come back to the idea of switching from it's my term, of course, triage in in in morning to, what I said to the mayor and this is idea of no, we're in economic development mode.

We're back to normal in that mode is that?

We've been operating on parallel paths the entire time.

And in Asheville, we were scheduled on the the morning of the storm to have this huge meeting where we were going through our economic strategic plan.

We were supposed to.

[Chris] For Buncombe County or for Asheville?

[Kit] Buncombe County.

And we do that every five years, called ADL five by five.

And we were scheduled to have a huge focus group with the meeting with, with e y as our, our, strategic plan developer.

And we were in the midst of it, had to cancel it the night before.

And then all of a sudden we were I hate that word pivot from from the old days, but but we had to pivot because we were then working not just on our our economic strategic plan, but also our recovery plan simultaneously.

And I think it's a better plan as a result, frankly, because it's got elements of both, because that we're living in that duality in our community.

You've got areas that are going to take sustained work for years.

I mean, to your point, it's going to take years to do this in some of these places.

And then, on the other hand, we need an excellent fall.

We need a season that we completely missed last year for a component, just one component of our, our overall industry mix is tourism and retail.

That was completely it was robbed of a season, a whole season and the most profitable season last year.

So we're working on both.

We had we've had economic development announcements occur.

We had a Pratt and Whitney expansion that did not make news purposefully.

They they toned down the whole thing.

[Chris] Out of respect?

[Kit] Out of respect for where we were.

There was no continued negotiation for incentives.

We're good at that.

That particular project will top $1 billion in total capital investment.

[Chris] So they move forward.

[Kit] They moved forward with it and made the announcement and just kind of continue to move forward.

We're seeing folks from other areas of the world who are looking.

We've had we've had folks from the EU come in and look at our market for so that activity, our our entrepreneurial activity has continued.

We're working on parallel paths.

And so it's been time consuming, though, to think about the things that we didn't know as well how to do in terms of of the recovery pieces, because so much of the timing of those things are out, literally out of our control.

So it's, you know, we're I would love, I would love to see a list of when things are scheduled to be demolished, when we can begin to work on new projects.

But we've also got planning processes underway in a huge way throughout the community for small geographic areas that were hard hit, but also overall fun.

So I think one of the things that comes from that, though, that small business entrepreneurship, we have seen things progress even in the wake of all that we've been going through.

You know, I point to the Valley Cruces community where they lost a business due to some sort of storm impact.

But here came another one right behind it, with somebody that that had a plan that was hatched two weeks before the storm hit and decided to progress with it because they knew that there was going to be a need for a restaurant in, in that particular part of our county, right outside Mass General Store.

Mass General Store loves it because people can stay there now they've got a place to eat.

It didn't dampen the entrepreneurial spirit to the point where, hey, if you if you were ready to go, you could still go.

It just change the timeline a little bit like you're you're talking about, but the energy is still there.

I think that's something that we can take with us moving forward, is that people do want to reconstruct in a way that is is purposeful.

And and we're excited to see that.

So so the communities hold on just a second, because I want to bring you in on this one, Mayor Pritchett.

So the communities have to move forward with economic development, but they also have to move forward with the regular processes and operations, like all public safety and education.

So what happens with a reset around public safety?

And I'm talking about the cops doing their job and keeping things in line.

Does that completely reset?

And we know education has been lost.

Educational attainment for kids that weren't in school or not even going back to school.

How tough is that in communities?

Well, it's not really a hotbed of crime, I'll tell you that.

[Chris] Well thats good to know.

[Carol] That's not been a huge problem for us.

Our our police force was part of the immediate disaster recovery.

So where public safety is pretty good hands, there.

The school continued to function the majority of the time it was out, and certainly for a while.

I think, you know, for us, the thing that has to be, focused on is in order to have economic development and recovery and Lake Lure and the whole Hickory Nut Gorge, our infrastructure has to be workable, and, able to support, you know, the other towns in Chimney Rock gorge.

And so that means, we have to have a dam.

Our dam is the last bastion of flood control for the broad River all the way down to Charleston.

And so we look at resiliency and what are we going looking forward?

What are we going to do differently as we contemplate other hurricanes?

We need to make sure that any dam that we build now is sufficient to withstand any hurricane of this magnitude, because we know what would happen if that were not there, and that that water went down the broad river.

So just from the dam.

But our sewer system and our wastewater treatment plant serves the whole Hickory Nut Gorge.

So as we function up, factor in how do we do economic development.

So small business plans are good for that.

But first the town government has to make sure the infrastructure supports the economic development.

And so that's what we have to factor in.

We have about a minute left.

Mayor O'Leary, is there anything that's that's sounding different than what you're experiencing on, economic development?

No, I mean, we're it's it we are all tied together, at least in our case, Lake Lure, Chimney Rock and Hickory Nut Gorge.

It's very much, a single entity in a lot of ways.

I did want to just touch on something we said earlier about milestones.

Yeah, I think the milestones are extremely important because that's that's a measure.

But it's also a way for us to celebrate our achievements in our, moving forward.

And that's very important to let people know that we are moving forward and to show them those that progress along the way.

Okay.

You know, and thank you all for redefining what one year later means that it's a milestone, that it's not an anniversary and the consideration of that.

And thank you for being, on our program.

And thanks for your leadership.

I mean, that sounds inane to say and even kind of kind of lame, but it's, pretty important.

So thank you, thank.

You, thank you.

Thank you, thank you for being here.

Thank you for watching our program.

Until next week, I'm Chris William.

Goodnight.

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