August 25, 2026 — Cailin Anderson
It had been raining for days before Hurricane Helene ever had a name in our mouths.
I homeschool my kids, and a few mornings a week they climb onto a video call with their Nana, my mom, who lives up in Black Mountain. That week, every single call kept dropping. Her internet would come up, then fall away, then come back. The ground out there was so saturated from days of rain that even the signal could not hold steady. We laughed about it at the time. Nana’s freezing again. We had no idea what that saturated ground was about to mean.
On Thursday, September 26, around four in the afternoon, I was driving the kids home from camp out in Chatham County through the worst rain I can remember driving in. It was not a hard, violent rain. It was a soaking rain, the kind that just keeps coming, hour after hour, until the whole world feels waterlogged.
Then Friday morning I got on a call.
It was a maternal and child health group, people who work, professionally, on keeping mothers and babies well in North Carolina. And while we talked, my phone was lighting up with messages from the mountains. First my friend Jennifer, telling me the road up to Beech Mountain had washed out, a gully twenty feet deep, she said, and by the end it was closer to forty. Then a photo from someone I had gone to Appalachian State with, floodwater had risen up over the top of a Wendy’s drive-through sign.
That is when I came off mute.
I said, out loud, to a room full of people whose whole job is the health of mothers and babies, that this was a catastrophe. And someone on the call said, not unkindly, just matter of factly, “We don’t have anyone from Buncombe County on the call. I think we’re okay to continue.”
I have thought about that sentence a hundred times since. These were good people. They simply could not see what I was seeing, because I could not share the photo, because the connection was too weak, because the disaster was still just pixels and rumors leaking out of a region that was losing power and cell service by the minute. But in that moment I understood something that has shaped everything I have done since. Our state, our country, does not yet understand how tightly the health of mothers and babies is tied to a weather event. We treat a hurricane as a problem for emergency managers and linemen and the Red Cross. We do not think of it as an infant feeding problem. And because families, especially mothers, are often used to managing on their own, no one in authority thinks a problem exists unless they ask. That gap is exactly where babies fall through.
I knew, sitting there, what was coming, because I had seen a smaller version of it before.
Years ago, in the fall of 2018, around my sister-in-law Cailin’s wedding, there was flooding down near the coast. It was severe on the coast and barely a footnote in Durham. But water runs downhill, and people do not. Families from the coast had driven inland, up to us, to get away from it. I went to a Walmart near I-40 to buy my boys two cheap matching polo shirts for the wedding and a box of Cheerios, because what does a little kid eat? Cheerios. And I could not find either one. The polos were gone from half of Durham. The entire cereal aisle was empty. The store had been stripped bare by exhausted, weathered families who had evacuated a week earlier and were still trying to put clothes on their kids and food in their bellies. I can still see their faces.
Standing in that emptied-out store, years before Helene, I filed something away without knowing it. This is what a disaster looks like a hundred miles from where it happens. It looks like tired parents buying out the Cheerios.
So here is the part I most need you to understand about the calm before the storm. We were not starting from nothing.
By the fall of 2024, the organization I chair had spent years quietly building the exact machinery a disaster would demand. We just thought we were building it for ordinary life. More than twenty communities across North Carolina were working with us to become Breastfeeding Family Friendly Communities, putting in place a set of steps to make everyday feeding easier for everyday families. Three weeks before Helene, I sat in a room at the White House. The Office of Public Engagement and the Gender Policy Council had invited a small group of us to talk about the PUMP Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, about what life was like for nursing mothers before those protections existed and what still needed to change. Days before that, I had sent a letter to the U.S. Breastfeeding Committee proposing that we organize nationally around breast pump access and Medicaid, because families in one state could get support that families one state over could not, and there was no federal floor under any of it. We had sent questionnaires to candidates up and down the ballot asking where they stood on keeping mothers and babies healthy. We sat on our state’s perinatal health committees.
I tell you all of this not to list accomplishments, but because it is the heart of the calm before the storm. The response that the world would later call heroic and improvised was standing on years of unglamorous, blue-sky policy work. The plane we would build in the air already had an engine. We just did not know we were about to fly it into a hurricane.
Let me tell you the thing I am least proud of…
I knew these stories. I knew what happened to babies after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. I knew the failures after Katrina. I came up through the advocacy world that formed in Katrina’s wake. I had heard, more than once, how badly infant feeding can go when the water and the power and the roads are gone. And still, somewhere underneath, I believed it could not really happen here. Puerto Rico is an island the country chronically underfunds and under-supports. New Orleans sits below sea level. Those places had infrastructure problems we did not have. We were North Carolina. We were fine.
We were not fine. Not in the mountains.
That belief, it cannot happen here, is not just a personal failing of mine. It is the national policy gap, wearing a comforting disguise. It is the reason no one’s job description says make sure the babies are safely fed when the water goes out. It is the reason a room full of maternal and child health experts could agree, in good faith, that we were okay to continue without addressing the disaster unfolding around some of our members who were not present.
The rain kept falling. By that weekend the water was coming down the mountains, and everything I thought I knew about who is responsible for feeding a baby in a disaster was about to be tested, and found missing.
Voices from the Storm
Previous: One Cloth, Many Hands, the series opener.
Next: 2. The Flood, coming September 2026.
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