A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
The remnants of Hurricane Helene hit Appalachia hard. Flooding there six months ago killed more than a hundred people, and millions lost water and power. Archivists are now trying to preserve the history of that experience. Here's Katie Myers with Blue Ridge Public Radio and Grist.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LEXIE B: (Singing) Ah.
KATIE MYERS, BYLINE: The first time water came back on after over 50 days without, captured on video by a thrilled Asheville resident identified only as Lexie B. Then there's this...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HELENE")
MICHAEL HATCH: (Singing) Helene, Helene...
MYERS: Local singer-songwriter Michael Hatch adapting a classic Dolly Parton song to reflect on his experience of the storm. These clips are all a part of a project called Come Hell or High Water by western North Carolina archivists. Katherine Cutshall manages the archive in a library in Asheville. It already has collections from previous disasters like photographs and letters from the catastrophic 1916 flood.
KATHERINE CUTSHALL: We have the responsibility and ability to gather things that are happening right now. History happens every single day.
MYERS: And now a lot of it is digital media. They've gotten over 200 submissions.
CUTSHALL: We are all archivists now, especially in the social media age.
MYERS: Across Appalachia, archivists are making sure flood histories don't get lost. After a thousand-year flood in 2022 swamped eastern Kentucky, archivists there cleaned the mud from thousands of tapes and records.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MYERS: This is a flood-damaged tape by old-time Appalachian musicians Oaksie Caudill and Ernest Adams. It was salvaged and digitized by the Appalshop archive in eastern Kentucky. They've saved a lot, said Shane Terry, the institution's archive technician.
SHANE TERRY: It's beautifully sad.
MYERS: He said the scale of recent disasters in Appalachia have made regional collaboration important.
TERRY: We can help each other out with maybe digital storage or physical storage.
MYERS: Like all archivists, Katherine Cutshall hopes that their work can help future generations learn from the past.
CUTSHALL: One of the things that I'm really looking forward to is understanding how community members might look at those historical documents to inform the way that we advocate for ourselves moving forward and build a more climate-resilient Asheville.
MYERS: Looking into the future, she said, we have the tools to keep preserving Appalachian history at our fingertips in our growing digital world.
For NPR News, I'm Katie Myers in Asheville.
(SOUNDBITE OF DISASTERPEACE'S "PANACEA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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