On the day Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina in September 2024, Laura Lee was thousands of miles away on vacation in Peru.
“I feel guilty about not being on the ground with everybody when it actually went down, but it kind of was a blessing in disguise,” Lee, who was the news director of Asheville-based Blue Ridge Public Radio (BPR) at the time, said. “I was in a place that had stable internet, so I could make calls and run point on some things that I don’t know I would have been able to do otherwise.”
Lee had created an emergency plan for the station long before the storm hit, but it was primarily geared around mass shootings. Helene, however, was an all-encompassing disaster: alongside more than 230 deaths and billions of dollars’ worth of physical damage, it knocked out water, power, and cellular services, in some places for weeks.
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