This coverage is made possible through a partnership between BPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
In the Swannanoa community of Buncombe County, the floodwaters from the French Broad River washed away homes and swept a still-unknown number of people away. Limited access to power and wifi has isolated many members of the community since then.
As reality has set in, the task of both emotional and material support has fallen to community members and institutions. Among them is the Swannanoa Christian Church, where congregants have been taking in and hauling out supplies for other people in the community. For the first week, that was all they did.
Finally, at 10 a.m., on the Sunday morning of October 8 — uphill and in the sun, set away from the piles of twisted debris by the banks of the river — Pastor Gordon Dasher and his family gathered with a group of churchgoers. They sang and told stories in an outdoor service, the first since the hurricane.
During the service, community members shared stories of finding faith in the circumstances around them.
Some described how their children jumped up to help load supply trucks. Others described swift water rescues. Still others wept as they recounted watching houses float away, and with them, pieces of the community’s history.
One man, Brian Gingrich, delivered supplies to a holler only to discover that the father of a boy he once worked with at the Boys and Girls Club of Asheville had passed away.
“I think one of the biggest questions that a lot of us have probably had in a time like this is how could an all-powerful God, if he's all loving, allow something like this to happen,” Zach Dasher said during the service, as congregants in lawn chairs and others standing in the shade of trucks and trailers bowed their heads. “Why all the natural catastrophes and devastation? Where is God in that?”
Dasher's father, Gordon, who is the pastor of the church, sat with his wife after the church service, reflecting on that question.
“People are sending money, goods. They're coming in. They're mucking out houses. They're distributing food,” he said. “They're loving on people and praying with people, just comforting people, giving them peace.”
As a church leader, Dasher, said, he often asked himself, over and over, how God could let this happen. He looked around himself at the congregants who were beginning to file into the church to sort donations.
“He's right here, with all these people that are calling on his name, coming in and doing this work that's grueling and depressing and sad.”
Since that first return to worship, the church has been holding Sunday service inside again.
Some congregants who are pregnant or have medical needs have evacuated.
However, Dasher, in a call placed from the road, said he had just come home from a four-hour journey to change someone’s car battery. He’s still coordinating with people in the Swannanoa Christian Church and all over the region, and country, to muck and gut, and to get coats and blankets and heaters out in advance of cold weather.
