Just a few feet away from the Pigeon River in Haywood County lies the remnants of the gutted home of “Maria” and her husband, “Angel.”
Originally from Mexico, they are part of a small but growing population of over 2,800 Latinos who call Haywood County home, according to the 2020 U.S. Census.
On a sunny, fall day in early September, Maria sits on a bench in the patio of their barren home while her husband stands, leaning on the wall next to a window.
Hurricane Helene completely submerged their home underwater, leaving it uninhabitable.
“I'm telling you, the house looked like a broken swimming pool with water everywhere,” Maria told BPR in Spanish during a recent interview.
They’re reflecting on the experience of Helene, which caused 108 deaths in the state, including five people in Haywood County. Last September, the Pigeon River crested at 25 feet in the county, according to the Asheville Citizen Times.
The couple – immigrants without legal status in the U.S – agreed to be interviewed on the condition of anonymity, so BPR is using pseudonyms to protect their identities.
Maria and Angel say they were surprised by how proactive county leaders were in communicating the coming storm.
“They (Haywood County) were announcing it a lot,” Maria told BPR. “In fact, the police came to tell us that we had to be prepared because it was going to flood again. But we always thought that it wouldn't.”
Door-to-door knocking was one of the new ways the county’s emergency services tried to warn the Latino community of the impacts from Helene, according to Allison Richmond, public information officer for Haywood County Emergency Services. She said the county learned a lot from its experience in Hurricane Fred, so they tried to do things differently during Helene.
“ Given that we had time and opportunity to get the message out, we didn't want to fail to reach people where they were,” Richmond said. “Taking those lessons learned, now was the time to put it all into action and do better.”
The challenge of government communication with non-English speakers isn’t unique to Haywood. In North Carolina, there’s no state law requiring local governments to implement language access policies.
Instead, under federal civil rights law and regulations, local government agencies that receive federal funding must provide (within federally funded programs and activities) access for individuals with limited English proficiency.
By providing multilingual communications, local governments can better serve an increasingly linguistically diverse public. More importantly, it can help promote public safety by ensuring emergency information, safety alerts, and other critical information are available to all residents regardless of the language they speak.
But, as Haywood County’s Richmond said, even with advanced warnings and even with knowledge from previous natural disasters, the county still finds it challenging to reach non-English speakers.
Richmond told BPR that after Fred in 2021, members of the Latino community provided her feedback about the lack of timely information in Spanish.
“ We needed to try harder, that we needed to do the homework and reach out ahead of time,” Richmond said. “The connections that we had, I'll be honest, and I’m telling on myself, but they felt like enough at the time, and I know now that they weren't.”
Jake Hofstetter, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, said it's hard to quantify how common it is for rural governments to adopt language access policies, but it's a significant challenge.
“Governments seek to integrate language assistance (via interpreters or multilingual employers) as well as translated written materials into the many public touch points of their programs and services,” Hofstetter wrote in an email to BPR. “Government staff must also take steps to ensure that language assistance and multilingual materials are accurate and available in the many non-English languages that government staff may come into contact with.”
By learning from the previous experience of Fred, Haywood County was able to improve its 2024 strategies for connecting with the Latino community as it braced for Helene.
Richmond made social media posts in Spanish and enlisted the help of Spanish speakers from other agencies, like paramedics and a corrections officer, to go into predominantly Latino neighborhoods.
She also made it a priority to re-establish and expand on partnerships with community groups that serve the Latino population.
Those partnerships proved to be crucial during Helene because when cell phone and internet service went down, Richmond could rely on them to be beacons of information.
She would print newsletters with information in Spanish and deliver them to those groups in person.
“ They had volunteers there who could translate,” Richmond said. “We were bringing them all of our materials and documentation specifically by hand every day to make sure that they got the latest news, and we were encouraging them to become a hub for people who needed to stop by and find out what was going on.”
Based on the warning from the Latino officer who showed up at their door, Maria and Angel took action. Two days before Helene barreled into Western North Carolina, the family packed up important documents, clothing, and other valuables.
They moved to a mobile home they owned less than 10 minutes away, which gave them some comfort as it was located on higher ground and hadn’t flooded in 2021 during Fred.
On the night of Sept. 27, 2024, the couple didn’t sleep at all. Around 6 a.m., Maria told her husband they had to leave as water started to rise in their mobile home.
“He said, ‘Where are we going to go?’”
Maria replied: “To a place that's safer, because there were a lot of trees. [The mobile home] was unlikely to flood, but there were many large trees, and it was very windy.”
They hopped into their cars with the children and drove to higher ground.
“Since the children had already been through this, I remember that my son, who was seven, he's eight now, he had a pair of new shoes,” Maria said. “He was carrying his shoes. He had his shoe box here because he knew what could happen.”
Hours passed, and things started to calm down, so they returned to their mobile home to find seven inches of water inside and some of their belongings in a storage unit near the house completely ruined. But that doesn’t compare to the sadness they felt losing their primary home.
“You struggle every day,” Maria said. “We work very hard to have a home. When we finally get it, we work even harder to pay for it, and now we don't have it anymore.”
“In the end, it all went to waste,” Angel added.
LESSONS LEARNED FOR THE FUTURE
A year later, Haywood County’s emergency services still doesn't employ a native Spanish speaker, but not due to lack of effort, officials told BPR.
" I'm trying to identify somebody who could come and be our in-house translator,” Richmond said. “ I haven't been able to find anybody or any group that could be that person. Every time I identify someone, I lose them to another county or to another group.”
Since Helene, Richmond said people in the community are encouraged about the efforts, but are also aware of how emergency services could do better.
“ Other emergency management groups in different counties are all trying to do the same thing,” Richmond said. “We're all trying to improve in a landscape where there's not enough resources for this kind of work.”
She added Haywood County emergency services have since invested in technology to allow basic messages to be translated 24/7. The county is also building a network of physical locations where communications in multiple languages can be posted, and it is working with local partners to improve their ability to do radio broadcasts in Spanish.
“ Getting better at reaching the Spanish-speaking population was kind of our first goal because that group of people is the largest non-English speaking population in our region,” Richmond said. “The next goal is to move down the list in languages and try to build the same kind of pattern of connections and resources there that we have.”
