If any of you have the means or motivation, try and visit those places that are open. They totally depend on tourist dollars and October is the perfect time to go. A good friend lives in Hendersonville and they are open.
My son plans to visit WNC with a coworker whose family owns a lumber company to assist with whatever they can do with this lumber company. He had to work in Houston this week which cut into his helping plan, but is planning a trip...not for siteseeing, but to help his fellow North Carolinians. He lives in Charlotte. He is just sick about this as we all are. It will take months and months....if not longer, to bring these people back.
If you want to support the local businesses, purchase from them. Most businesses have an online presence, and have goods and services that can be ordered online. Many have gift certificates as well. They also have staffing shortages due to how their workforce was, and now is, disbursed. It's the holiday season when people will be buying gifts anyway. It's a great time to make a difference without taking resources. That tack is already bringing much needed income into the area, without the pressure to perform. (Nor the long drive around the disaster area.
Even the Home Depot there that lost 21 people is having to transfer people in from out of state to keep the store available. They can train up a new hire quickly instead and at less cost. They just couldn't find enough hires.
Municipalities have been putting out the call for tourists in many areas for sure. They don't have the same interests as the people who are trying to live and work there. If you're in an area mostly unscathed, you're still paying more for gas than usual due to the massive influx of gasoline purchasing (disaster > the highest peak of tourism) and supplies are more expensive and sell out. It's just the nature when the "open" areas mostly undamaged become the staging grounds for the recovery workers.
Towns are worried they'll lose their tourism forever if people don't come this month or next. These are the same towns and counties that have comprehensive multi tier evacuation schedules by law and despite half a dozen landslides in the days of the previous storm and almost all bodies of water in the region at historic levels, with the Helene warning and more than 48 hours didn't even evacuate tourists, nor tell them to go to Wal Mart and stock food and water for 3-7 days. And it's sad because needing to do drops to those people, and do rescue sooner delayed help to those whose need was more urgent because they were more remote and cut off, or because they'd entirely lost shelter, and that cost us lives.
Hopefully this was at least a wake up call for the counties. None of the people making these decisions had seen large scale destruction the way, honestly, all of the rest of NC has in the last 3 decades. That luck tends to breed a complacency. Because, all things considered, NC was lucky. There could have been another rain storm after Helene like the one before it. Thankfully it missed the west and went east. otherwise the death toll would have been very bad. And road repairs in their current stage will be fragile and susceptible to water for many months going forward until they can get the funding in place to do more permanent repairs, whenever Congress finds it in their heart to allocate disaster funds. But since Congress is currently forcing FEMA to shelve projects like the Rodanthe homes and a program to raise Tampa homes while they're being rebuilt/gut reno'd, I don't expect much work or compassion from Congress.
What we can do without taking up resources will help them recover faster, even if it doesn't inflate the "business as usual" tourism numbers the municipalities use to get public and private funding for pet projects. I can understand their urge for tourism and normalcy. But I can also appreciate the statistics that prove time and again the faster you push for it, the more you push the residents out of the region. To investors and to towns that's an opportunity to level up. But is that really an improvement? Not for the people.
Most of us will be buying holiday presents. We can leverage that to make a difference for these people, instead of furthering their replacement.
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