It was a Friday morning in late September when the security alarm at Beacon Veterinary Hospital began to sound. But a person hadn’t breached the doors to trigger the alarm — floodwaters did.
“The vet down the street sent me a picture of our clinic, and it was under probably 7 feet of water,” said Dr. Catherine Ashe, an associate veterinarian at Beacon Veterinary Hospital in Swannanoa, North Carolina. “At that point, what was happening started to sink in. But we didn’t know the full extent of it for a couple of days.”
Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 storm, slammed Florida’s Gulf Coast with 140-mph winds and a 15-foot storm surge. Torrential rain reached inland areas of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky, causing flooding that devastated many communities.
Western North Carolina was one of the hardest-hit areas. As rain fell over the Blue Ridge Mountains, water funneled into streams and rivers already running high from a previous storm. The massive runoff into Asheville — 10 miles west of Swannanoa — and other mountain towns caused extreme flooding, wiping out homes, roads, businesses and lives.
According to the North Carolina Veterinary Medical Association, 284 practices were in the state’s affected areas. While some escaped damage, others were destroyed. Even damage-free practices struggled to operate without power, running water and essential supplies.
“A lot of the challenges here are different from a coastal hurricane, where there’s a line of damage that parallels the coast, and you can come at the affected areas from anywhere along that line,” said the state VMA’s president, Dr. Shanon Bass. “In the mountain area of North Carolina, many communities are served by single-lane roads that could be 30 miles long. Most of them are located next to a river, and the rivers are in the valleys of these mountains. And so the geography provides a unique challenge.”
The devastation surprised Dr. Ashe.
“No one had any idea that it was going to leave this level of destruction,” she said. “Here in the mountains, flooding is different. It’s flash floods — monstrous waves of water and mudslides coming down the mountain and taking out entire towns with them.”
State officials reported about 100 Helene-related deaths across North Carolina, including 43 in Buncombe County, which includes Swannanoa.
Helping Pet Owners
Although the flooding ruined Beacon Veterinary Hospital, Dr. Ashe decided she couldn’t sit and watch while her neighbors struggled. “I needed to get out there. I needed to help pets,” she said.
So, she called Dr. April Gessner, an acquaintance in Raleigh who owns DEGA Mobile Veterinary Services. The nonprofit clinic provides free care for the pets of low-income and homeless people.
“We parked at Popeyes and started offering medical care,” Dr. Ashe said. “We saw 60 to 70 pets in five days.”
Their goal was to provide urgent care for pets whose owners couldn’t access their regular veterinary clinic or who didn’t have the means to pay.
“We saw a guy who lost his house, car, everything,” Dr. Ashe said. “He had a sick cat, and that was all he had left. We kept the cat on IV fluids during the day, sent it home at night and had it return the next day. And every day, this guy would drive around and find whatever food that volunteers were serving and bring free hot meals for us.”
Because the two doctors couldn’t run a pop-up clinic alone, Dr. Ashe created an online sign-up to find additional help. The spots quickly filled with volunteers.
“It’s been a good experience as far as everybody coming together to help — so many veterinary professionals from different states,” Dr. Gessner said. “People who came offering assistance, expertise, donations or random medications we didn’t have.”
The pop-up clinic cared for a goat that a mudslide washed down a hillside. When the animal was found two days later, she had an open tibial fracture.
“The owners couldn’t afford more than $150,” Dr. Gessner said. “I know how to do an amputation, but I don’t see goats.”
Coincidentally, a mixed animal veterinarian from Ohio showed up with donated medications. Although she wasn’t licensed in North Carolina, she knew how to care for goats, so she stayed to observe and assist.
After spending five days in Swannanoa, the DEGA Mobile Veterinary Services team headed to other hard-hit areas, including Spruce Pine, Avery County and Newland.
Meanwhile, a colleague of Dr. Ashe’s offered to lend a mobile unit she had been trying to sell. After working with the state VMA to have the unit delivered from South Carolina and inspected, Dr. Ashe stocked it and set out to nearby Black Mountain.
“I’ll do this until it isn’t needed anymore,” she said two weeks after the storm passed. “My goal is to go back to Beacon when it reopens, but I don’t know when that will be.”
Left, Dr. April Gessner provides free veterinary care for a sick kitten. Right, Dr. Alisha Bretz cares for horses affected by Hurricane Helene.
A Need for Organization
Although the North Carolina VMA isn’t historically involved in disaster relief, its leaders understood the need to organize volunteers and supplies.
“In the three days after the hurricane, the Department of Agriculture was inundated with emails from veterinarians wanting to rush in and help,” said the VMA’s president, Dr. Bass.
The organization created Google Forms so that volunteers could register and indicate their location, availability, skill set and disaster experience. More than 300 people wanted to help.
The next step was to find out what kind of help the 284 veterinary practices and 15 shelters in the affected areas needed. Volunteers were assigned a group of practices or shelters, and then they made phone calls and scoured social media to determine which ones were open or damaged. Many of the operating practices had lost all their refrigerated supplies.
“There were three days when no one had Vetsulin in the area,” Dr. Bass said. “Our president-elect spent a whole day finding Vetsulin, and then a veterinarian volunteer from Charlotte drove a bunch of it up there.”
The North Carolina VMA also provided disaster grants.
“If you’re in a disaster area and you haven’t had water for 2½ weeks and your internet comes and goes, your ability to sit down and fill out a FEMA grant is very limited,” Dr. Bass said.
She found volunteer veterinarians to serve as grant mentors.
The experience made Dr. Bass look forward to building a disaster preparedness plan, which she thinks could be ready by early 2025.
“We are uniquely positioned to work with veterinarians in the disaster area and with veterinarians who want to help,” Dr. Bass said.
Returning Home to Pitch In
One of the veterinarians who reached out to the state VMA in the days after Hurricane Helene was equine practitioner Dr. Alisha Bretz. She lives in Frederick, Maryland, but grew up in Asheville, where her parents still reside.
“There was zero road access in,” said Dr. Bretz, who spent the first three days after Helene hit trying to confirm that her parents were alive.
Once she knew her family was safe, she contacted the North Carolina VMA to see how she could help.
“What put me higher on the list of volunteers was that I was equine, I needed no help with lodging, and they knew I wouldn’t get lost, she said. “I told them I could bring 18 gallons of nonpotable water and my own fuel. I understood the mission.”
Her initial reason for driving to western North Carolina was to resupply a veterinarian who couldn’t get provisions delivered and had run out of medications. After completing that mission, Dr. Bretz was deployed to check on a stallion suffering from leg wounds.
“I drove through seven landslides to get there,” Dr. Bretz recalled. “The second lane of the road was gone. I was in one lane in my vet truck, and there were just 30 feet of nothing beside me. We drove over probably 200 sets of power lines, around transformers, around holes in the road. That visit took five hours.”
Next, she went to Swannanoa to see if she could assist at the pop-up clinic. Although it was fully staffed, helicopter pilots with the relief group Savage Freedoms were organizing deliveries of grain and hay in the Harley-Davidson parking lot next door.
“These guys didn’t know how much hay to send, how much hay weighed or what kind of grain to send,” Dr. Bretz said. “So many people called and said, ‘In our community, we have 20 goats, 30 chickens, 200 head of cattle and 10 pigs, and we need supplies.’ Very quickly, I became that person. We basically started a livestock arm to their whole relief operation.”
After returning home to Maryland, Dr. Bretz continued to organize volunteers to fill her role. She expects the need to persist through the winter.
“We’re trying to get at least 20 large shipping containers to the communities that have lost their barns. We can’t drop off long-term hay because they have no storage,” she said. “These people need hay in January, February and March. Their pastures are under 4 inches of mud, and there’s not a blade of grass in sight. They’ve either lost all their winter hay or are feeding their winter hay now, and they have no money.”
The Ethics of Helping
The veterinarians involved in the relief efforts learned about the fine line between solving a problem and adding to it. Although hundreds volunteered, few were deployed. Without power and running water or places to house displaced residents, bringing in additional people — even to help — wasn’t necessarily the best strategy. Additionally, providing free veterinary care isn’t always beneficial to local practices.
“A difficult issue that I never anticipated is the ethics of free care,” Dr. Bass said.
Dr. Bretz warned of “a real risk of undercutting local veterinarians with relief response if we’re not careful.”
“There are veterinarians self-deploying into the region and doing work that may not need to be done,” she added. “Everyone’s trying to help. We have to let local people take the lead and not introduce people they didn’t ask for.”
Dr. Bass said she wanted “to make sure there are veterinary clinics still in business to care for the animals when this disaster is over.”
“I talked to a vet who hasn’t had internet or working computers, so clients have allowed her to handwrite their credit card information in a spiral notebook for her to key in at some point. Although this vet has seen patients, she hasn’t realized any money. And so, how does she pay her staff?”
BEFORE AND AFTER
The American Veterinary Medical Association provides disaster preparedness resources at bit.ly/40aeJOE. The web page also offers grant and insurance advice for AVMA and Student AVMA members affected by disasters.
TEXAS A&M SPRINGS INTO ACTION
Texas A&M University’s Veterinary Emergency Team spent two weeks on deployment to North Carolina following Hurricane Helene to provide care for search and recovery dogs.
“We were amazed by the resiliency of the people affected by Hurricane Helene, as well as the search and recovery teams who worked miles of mountainous river areas every day,” said VET’s director, Dr. Deb Zoran. “Working canines and their handlers play a critical role in helping families find closure after disasters of this magnitude. It was an honor for us to be there to support their work and help the communities begin the long journey to recovery and renewal.”
According to Texas A&M, “At the height of the response, the VET provided end-of-day check-ups for up to 25 working dogs each day, with care that included addressing injuries, assessing overall health and decontaminating the dogs to remove any potential hazardous substances they may have been exposed to during their searches.”
HOW TO HELP AFTER A DISASTER
Although a veterinary professional’s first reaction after a disaster might be to pack a car with supplies and drive to a damaged area, that’s often not the best way to help. Here’s advice from veterinarians who volunteered their services after Hurricane Helene.
1. Do not self-deploy.
“That first week, so many people came to help, which was great, but it was just too many,” said Dr. April Gessner, who owns DEGA Mobile Veterinary Services.
Instead of rushing to the affected area, find out how volunteers are being organized and add your name to the list. Don’t be disappointed if no one reaches out, as most areas can accommodate only limited personnel and might need volunteers with specific qualifications.
2. Find out which supplies are needed.
Keep in mind that anything you send must be organized and stored on the other end. You might create unwelcome work for volunteer crews if you send unnecessary supplies.
“If you want to donate supplies, make a connection on the ground because the needs change so fast,” said Dr. Shannon Bass, president of the North Carolina Veterinary Medical Association.
3. Consider sending money.
Although a cash donation might feel impersonal, it’s often the best way to help. Dr. Bass suggests calculating what you would spend on a trip to the affected area and instead donating that amount to a trusted organization you think will spend the money appropriately. The American Veterinary Medical Association and many state VMAs accept disaster relief donations.
The damage to Beacon Veterinary Hospital was readily apparent after the floodwaters receded.