When natural disasters strike, they don’t just destroy homes; they can devastate entire communities, livelihoods, and creative legacies. In this special edition of Art World Horror Stories, Asheville-based photographer Michael Freas shares the harrowing tale of Hurricane Helene’s destruction, which left hundreds of local artists without studios or income. 

Having survived multiple hurricanes, Michael offers a unique perspective on the resilience required to rebuild after such catastrophes. As a freelance photographer for ArtsvilleUSA, Michael and his images have played a crucial role in documenting the storm's devastation of the River Arts District (RAD), a low-lying creative hub located along the banks of the French Broad River. Read ArtsvilleUSA’s report on the RAD here.

For more information, please visit https://www.artsvilleusa.com/photojournalist-michael-freas

Louise Glickman, it's your partner, Scott Power, here in Los Angeles, here in Asheville. How the hell are you, my friend?

Well, we are doing the very best we can here, Scott. But it's pretty horrific for our arts community.

Well, my heart has broken from this side of the country watching via the news, the photos, vide-os, social media. Of course, the mainstream media has already forgotten the story. It's incum-bent upon us as colleagues, as partners, developing Artsville USA over the last five years to-gether to make sure the story stays alive, and we work and do our damnedest to shine a light and keep a light shine on this very important human story that has just devastated a very special part of the country that we love so dearly.

Well, I really appreciate you and our partnership through Not Real Art and the work of Crewest Studio, and the eyes and ears of people from California and your outreach globally to please come to artsvilleusa.com. Look at the art there, go to the websites of our artists, buy something. Help us, please, that way. If you can donate, please donate to us to keep the arts and crafts alive in Asheville and Western North Carolina. Of all the areas that have been most devastated by Hurricane Helene, have been the artist communities, because they live closest to the rivers. The rivers rose 27 feet, and the major areas impacted for artists are the River Arts District near downtown Asheville, but not in downtown Asheville. Biltmore Village, which is a historic retail ar-ea, an outgrowth of the Vanderbilt estate, Biltmore, which is right across the street. The Penland School of Craft in Mitchell County and a town called Marshall, where artists who couldn't afford the rents any longer in Asheville's downtown have moved, and the island itself is gone.

Your work with Not Real Art by interviewing Michael Freas, who is our reporter, who is taking the photographs and talking to the artists up and down the devastated region of Western North Caro-lina, an area the size of Maryland. Sending that information out is so appreciated. Now, we can use that same information to our audience through artsvilleusa.com. I am so appreciative to you as my partner and my friend. I hope all of you will listen and understand that the federal govern-ment has indicated as of today that this will take 58 billion dollars and is largest and most devas-tating hurricane that has ever hit the United States. Who knew? Most people moved here, be-cause there could be no hurricanes in the mountains, right? Here we are. Thank you so much for giving us this opportunity.

Well Louise, you and I joined forces several years ago, because we met through our mutual love for artists and art and we realized we shared the same values to help amplify and boost artists and art in the country, and we have over the years, we've talked about how our passion is helping artists tell their stories and promote their work. I tell you, our passion is more important now than ever, because the artists of Western North Carolina need us more than ever to help them tell their stories and promote their work, as they work to recover and restore their lives.

This podcast and our photojournalist, Michael Freas, can tell this story better than you and I ever could. Let's get to the heart of the matter, and thank you so much, Scott.

For sure. For sure. Just to set this up, so this interview with Michael I conducted actually as part of our Not Real Art programming every Halloween, every fall. Every Halloween season we like to do a thing called Art World Horror Stories when bad things happen to good artists. We've cov-ered the gamut with stories, artists being ripped off by galleries, artists being hurt on the job, art-ists causing their own problems by making silly mistakes. But this Art World Horror Story is how climate change is impacting, or has impacted artists in Western North Carolina. Michael Freas who grew up and has lived in this area is on the front lines of this disaster. I had him on the pod-cast, so that we could hear firsthand from him. And boy, is at a compelling interview. Let's get right into it, Louise. You're right. Let's do this. Thank you so much, Louise. I love you. Take care.

Thank you, Scott.

Michael Freas, welcome to Not Real Art and Art World Horror Stories.

Hey.

Well, so as we were talking Art World Horror Stories, it's Halloween and Art World Horror Stories is essentially about when bad things happen to good artists. My friend, you are a good artist and something horrible has happened to you. You live and work in Asheville, North Carolina, Western North Carolina. Hurricane Helene blew through there three, four weeks ago and catastrophically devastated your home, your region, your artistic practice, your photography business. It doesn't get much horrific than what you're going through. How are you, my friend? What is happening?

I think for me, since I've been through this before, I'm a little different than most. I'm definitely mentally exhausted, that's for sure. Don't really have a sense of what your daily is when you have that routine. That's different. Especially considering October, November, usually I work 30 days straight and have maybe one day off the whole month. Where it's now the whole month off and you work maybe two days. For me, it's normal, been through this. I feel like it happens every four years to me. I think for a lot more, they're having a lot harder of a time with it, because it’s their first time.

Yeah. You and I chatted a little bit and I have the context. But for our audience, take us back to explain – you mentioned this is your sixth time. What does that mean for you? You've been through hurricanes in the past. This was your sixth catastrophic natural disaster, perhaps. Ex-plain to us the previous events that you've unfortunately had to live through.

The first one was Hurricane Hugo in 1989. I was nine years old. Had a 60-foot Poplar tree land on the front of our house. Luckily, it didn't come into the house, but it landed on the front porch. The porch protected the house, which was great. Then you go freshman year at university of North Carolina at Wilmington on the east coast of North Carolina. We got evacuated, I think a month in sometime in September when Hurricane Bonnie came through. Then it happened again in sophomore year. 1999 it happened again with Floyd, which completely cut Wilmington off from the rest of the state, because every north, south and west was all flood. It was like what we're dealing with right now.

You're to blame, clearly.

Yeah, maybe it's my fault. I don't know. That's what I keep saying around people.

It's not climate change. It's Michael Freas, people.

Yeah. That's for sure. Something about this one's different though. There's something really dif-ferent about this one. I think, it's A, I mean, I was prepared for it somewhat, and had a gut feeling that told me, Wednesday before the storm that something wasn't right. Call it intuition. I don't know what it is. I think the majority of people were not prepared. I think it was the 27th, so we're probably about two weeks. Starting our third week. I think this Friday will make three weeks, I think. There's still a lot of people in shock. You can see it in their face. You can just see it in the things that they say, too.

The mental health aspect is going to be massive from this, because people who have never been through it and seen the carnage that came from this. They haven't seen how the rebuilding actu-ally happens and the recovery happens. I think they may be skeptical. They could be a little bit on the negative side of it. It's where I'm at. I just take it day in, day out. Like, today, I've got meet-ings today. Tomorrow I'm taking – waiting on a bunch of deliveries today. Tomorrow I'm taking a bunch of deliveries out to a couple of different neighborhoods to help them out. I've gotten to the routine where I try to shoot a couple of days a week, have meetings all in one day, and then the rest of the day is keep them in limbo and then try to help out where I can and where I can't.

Well, so the mental health part of this, the shock, the trauma is one of these complex things, be-cause on a certain level, most of us, myself included, we think, “Oh, it’s never going to happen to us. It's never going to happen to us.” Until it does, right? Western North Carolina and Asheville specifically, part of the narrative has been for many years, I think that, oh, this is a great place to live, because it's safe from climate change. At least that's what I've heard. I don't know if you ever heard that, but I think a lot of people thought –

I’ve heard that.

- that that was an area of the country that was somehow going to be protected. It turns out, that's wrong. Climate change impacts everywhere. I don't think that you could probably escape. I mean, the climate is everywhere. If it's changing, it's changing everywhere, and it's probably going to im-pact everywhere in different ways. I'm guessing, part of the shock also is because people are like, “Wait a minute. This wasn't supposed to happen here.” Take me through that. As you look into people's eyes and you hear from people and people are obviously shocked and traumatized, where is that coming from? Why do you think they have been so shocked by this catastrophe? If that makes sense.

Honestly, I think it's a combination of false complacency mixed with misunderstanding. If you know about hurricanes, or you’ve ever lived on the coast, you know that when floodwaters come in, they also recede, because we have tides. I lived in Key West for 10 years, so it's an island. Well, where does our water go? It only has one place to go, back into the ocean. Whereas, the difference being here in the mountains of North Carolina is that if it's raining 30 inches at 6,600 feet at Mount Mitchell, that has to come down the mountain. There's all these elevation changes where there's almost 4,000 feet of elevation change in between the city of Asheville and where the city of Asheville sits elevation-wise, versus elevation-wise for Mount Mitchell.

When you're getting 30 inches at 6,600 feet, it's also raining 30 inches at 5,000 feet, the same at 45 and 4 and so on and so on. That water all has to go down. I think it helps that I understand what the eastern continental divide actually does, where if you're on the west side of the divide, you know all those waters flow to the Mississippi rivers. If you're on the east side of the divide, it all flows to the ocean. Well, Asheville and everything is on the western side of the divide. Usually, the divide will protect us from storms that come up from the south, but this just came due south. It started Wednesday and there was just the way, like a high pressure, a low pressure and here's the storm and it just fumbled straight into us.

Everything was saturated. I think we got, I feel like, it was some crazy amount, like 14 inches two days prior to the storm dumping 30. I've got the river gauge on my laptop by in here, I'm looking at the river gauge in River Arts District, it normally runs at 3 to 4 feet. Two days prior, it went into ac-tion stage. Then the day of, it crested at 24.67 feet. All that water is still coming down the moun-tain. I'm a nerd when it comes to weather and learning about the topographic maps and whatnot. I mean, I understood it when they were talking about it on Wednesday and Thursday.

I think a lot of people are probably in shock, because they were just too complacent. They just went, “Oh, it can never happen.” Versus going, “Well, it could happen.” It's happened before. What should I probably do? I saw on the day prior to the storm, I saw multiple artists pulling stuff completely out of their studios. One guy told me, I forget his name and he says – he goes, “Yeah, it's my wife's work.” I went, “Well, that's smart. You're pulling out.” He's like, yeah, he's like, “We can't replace this stuff.” Sure enough, which should have been one of the high – more on the high ground studios, that was on Riverside, so to speak, he ended up having probably six feet of flooding inside his first floor. They were smart.

Now, the scale of damage that I've seen, I'm still wrapping my head around that, because it's lit-erally, if you were close to a river, you're done. If you were close to a creek, that creek turned into a river, you may have had waste deep water in your house. Did I expect to see the houses get lifted off their foundations and moved and float down the rivers like I did? No. That part's still, I'm trying to wrap my head around.

Well, so for people listening who haven't been to Western North Carolina and haven't been to Asheville, to the extent you can, help us understand the landscape. Help us understand the to-pography. Help us understand the ecology of that area. It's such a beautiful area. Oh, my God. It's just so gorgeous. I just love it. It's known for its natural beauty, and it's known for its rivers and its creeks and the rafting and the outdoor sports and all the wonderful stuff, right? Then na-ture, when storms like this come in, as you've already started to point out in terms of the moun-tains and the slopes and the creeks and the rivers and how things feed on each other and build on each other, and it's exponential. It becomes compounding, like a compounding effect, right? When you have, I don't know what the – how many miles across the storm was. I mean, you're talking about 30 inches of water. I mean, that's over what? A 100 square miles, or I don't know.

I would say, it stretched the entire Blue Ridge escarpment that runs through North Carolina. That, I would say, is close to roughly 250 miles going northwest to northeast, so to speak. Any-thing on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge Parkway got pummeled. Now, here's the interesting thing, you go to the other side to Tennessee side, it was only really bad more up towards the Tennessee, North Carolina line. More in the northern, like north, northwestern areas, but you go west. It's really weird. Tennessee's normal, but not really, depending on where you're at. Be-cause that's the way with the topography of how everything works. It isn't like, here's a ridge line, here's a ridge line, it flows in. It's all over the place.

You've got headwaters in every little drainage valley. Every drainage valley turned into a raging river. I've got seen video of the water coming down the road of a neighborhood in Black Mountain, where it was staying on the road, but it was still ankle deep. It was like, the road turned into basi-cally, a drainage ditch. I think you're also seeing how cities can't really plan for these things with their stormwater treatment and how they handle stormwater, because these storms are just – they have microburst in them almost of just tons of moisture.

I almost feel like, the things stalled on top of us for a couple hours. I don't know. I got woken up at about quarter of six on the Friday, the 27th. Terrain hitting my window. To wake me up, terrain rain hitting the window, that's hard rain. I walked outside, turned around the corner to facing more a south easterly direction and just got stood completely up straight by the wind and went, “Oh, God. This is not good.” I instantly came inside, took a shower, made breakfast, made a pot of coffee, was like, power's going to go out soon. I swear to you, 15 minutes after making the pot of coffee, the power went out. Then the water was about an hour later. We're still waiting on water.

It's been almost certainly two weeks, or maybe three weeks, and you still don't have water.

As I look at it, because I'm looking, let's see, the water went out, if I look at the calendar right now, water went out, we’re at one, two. This Friday will make three weeks. But they've made mas-sive headway with the city, where I just – there's water in River Arts District this morning. Holy crap. Water just returned there. I'm on the opposite side of the bridge. The western side of the French Broad, we don't have water yet. But on the eastern side, downtown, North Asheville, South Asheville, East Asheville, some parts of Swannanoa, Black Mountain, they've all starting to get water now from the North Fort. I'm guessing, we'll have running water, I'm hoping within the next day or two. Then, of course, it'll probably be boil water advisory for a couple weeks, I'm sure.

Right. Let's be clear. Just because you have water, doesn't mean it's potable. You're going to have to boil it likely, because it's probably contaminated, but they're going to fix that part. But it's first things first. They got the water running.

Basically, the steps is they have to recharge the lines with water. Then they have to make sure each pressure zone is correct. Then once the pressure is correct, they're treating the water as it's being shipped out. But once the pressure gets better, then they can treat it better and it can be potable. I'll probably keep drinking water for a week after the boil water is taken away. Drink-ing bottled water. I'm lucky, my parents have a well. I drive to their farm every weekend, take a shower and wash clothes and fill up with about 20 gallons of potable water out of the well. It's delicious mountain water.

It's an inconvenience and it shows you who is more self-sustaining, and the ones that you got to worry about that can't fend for themselves. That's been the biggest thing that I've noticed. A lot of people can't fend for themselves.

Do your parents live in the house you grew up in and how are they doing? Where do they live?

It's not the house I grew up in, but they've been in that same house for 27 years. 25, 27. My dad remarried after my mother passed away when I was young. Just to get up to the top, they're on a mountain top. They're on a summit. No flood risk. But they did lose power for about five days. Which means, then when power is not out, they lose water, but they have a whole house genera-tor, because of being on the farm and having well water, so they’re pretty much self-sustaining. Because when you live on top of a mountain, you're going to be one of the last people that gets power and water back, because they had to cut close to 150 trees down off the road just to get home.

I think I'll never forget listening to the radio station, which is AM/FM radio stations are gold during storms. When the power goes out, you instantly go to your – I have an AM/FM weather band ra-dio. Every person, no matter where you live should have one. I turned it on and went straight to the public radio station, was able to listen to them, which gave you actionable items and things and what to do, where you could get water, where you could go get food. Where was this? Be-cause they were being fed information in real time by the city, the county, the state. You don't need power to get an FM/AM radio signal out, or Internet. I mean, excuse me, because it's not digital. It's analog.

Most people wouldn't know about that, unless they've been through a storm. That was a god-send. Those guys got stuck for almost seven days inside the place, because they counted over 400-plus trees that were down on the road that led up to the radio station. This is insane. The way I put it with people is if you take the flooding that Katrina had, but imagine that in a mountain city. Then you could take the wind damage from say, Wilma, or Andrew in South Florida, or Irma, and see that in any area that didn't have a river close to it.

Then there were pockets. There would be two, three blocks, city blocks that nothing's wrong. Then you go, there’s a third block and every tree on the block is completely down, because there were tornadoes that were just bouncing like yo-yos. That's what they do during these storms. They come down, they spin, they go right back up. They come down, they spin, go right back up. You saw, like in Florida, they're super intensified. They come down, they touch, they go flying across them and they jump back up in the air. You can see remnants of that. I think we had one close to my house, because it looks like a saw just came right across perfect level across a row of trees. Trees don't snap like that, just in high wind.

You would see most of the uprooting and toppled over. That gives you the perspective when you see them snapped in half, you know there was some convection close to it. But if you see them on the ground rooted over, that was just wind. Pushed them because of a saturated ground.

How long before you had power and Internet?

We're trying to remember. Power went out about 9.00 Friday the 27th. Then, either had it on the 29th or the 30th, and it came in late at night. I can't remember what day. I feel like it might have been Monday evening, because everybody went out on the balconies and it was – I tell people, if you remember seeing the videos of New York City during COVID when they would come out at shift change and everybody come out and clap. I had a wooden spoon and a pot. I was banging on the pot. Everybody was going crazy, because we wanted the lineman to hear us, because we wanted to thank them for when we had power.

Internet came back, I feel like Wednesday. So, five days afterwards. It came back for two hours and it was a tease and disappeared until Friday. Then it came up Friday really well. Then Sunday, it died out again, because more people got power and Internet. I feel like, it was, yeah, roughly around a week we got Internet back. But it's still, it falls out in the afternoon. Sunday, it was great. I came home Sunday night and it was streaming. I was streaming movies on TV. In the after-noons, around 3.00, everything just drops off and it won't really connect.

Not enough bandwidth. Too much demand and not enough supply, basically.

I think so. That's what it probably is.

Right. You grew up there?

Yeah. I grew up in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, which is the foothills of Boone. I'm two hours southwest of where I grew up, but yet, I'm in the higher mountain elevations. Because the way our topography of North Carolina, the far western reaches are all 4,000-plus. A lot of the bigger cit-ies are 25 to 3,000. The hardest part is growing up here and seeing the photos that are coming off the Blue Ridge Parkway, because that's the place that you go for nature, where you go for soulless, where you go to decompress. We can't access them right now. The whole Parkway shut down. All of Pisgah National Forest is shut down, which sucks, because you can't go hiking. I would love to be out hiking, but the trails are – there were so many landslides that, who knows what the trails look like?

The Blue Ridge Parkway, there's landslides. There's chunks of road that just slid a thousand feet down the side of a mountain. It's going to take time to rebuild, which really stinks, because I know a lot of people, that's where they pull a lot of inspiration from, especially in this area. It's from the mountain areas and you can't access them right now. That's a weird feeling to be driving down the road and I'm staring at the mountains in the distance and I know and I can't access them. It's like not COVID where they're just closed and you can sneak on. Right now, it's a safety issue.

Well, I mean, as I understand it, right? Let's talk about this. I mean, you've mentioned it already, which is the infrastructure, the highways, the bridges, the roads have just literally been washed away, or destroyed and need to be rebuilt, which will take months and years, potentially. For ex-ample, I understood the road to Tennessee, I think it was was washed out. You couldn't even get to Tennessee?

Yeah. Interstate 40 that runs pretty much from Wilmington, North Carolina, all the way west, to Barstow, California. Only reason I know that is because we always laughed. There was, we'd leave school and there would be a sign that says, Barstow, California, 3,200 miles.

Yeah, right. That way to Cali.

Yeah. I can't remember what it was, but it's just something that's always stuck in my head. Yeah. The Pigeon River that runs through the Pigeon River gorge, which is the Tennessee, North Caro-lina line on Interstate 40. I mean, I've gone white water rafting down that. The videos I saw of how raging that river was, it’s scary. I mean, it ate up the entire West Bayland Lane for a mile. It just disappeared. It just fell into the river. It's crazy to even think that.

Then you can't go north on Interstate 26 north, because there was a big landslide at the North Carolina, Tennessee line there. It's almost like, Tennessee was saying, “We don't want you North Carolinians coming here, so we're going to make sure it doesn't happen.” A lot of bridges are washed out. A lot of bridges are not fully washed out, but the footings underneath them have washed out. They've made the bridges to where you can't go across them. That's the reality. That's why people keep saying, they haven't seen government, or they haven't seen this or that. It's because you can't get to them.

People seem to think that you can just snap your fingers and people show up and they forget. If a bridge is washed out, that's going to impact an entire neighborhood, or any person that uses that bridge daily. It's going to cut people off. That's what everybody's going through right now.

Well, and even if you have helicopters to fly in, they may not be able to land, right? I mean, given the landscape, in your mountains, if it's not flat. I mean, all that stuff, right? It's just, you're a slave to the topography.

Yeah, because you can't just come in with supplies and airlift them in and drop them in. Even if you're doing a hoist operation, which means you're pulling them with a rope or something. You got to have clear line of sight to be able to come down and drop that, because if that thing swings and gets caught into a tree, well, that could bring the helo down, then we got a real big mess on our hands. I think a lot of it just comes from, like I said, again, false complacency, where people who live in these areas that are remote, that are the ones that we're not reaching that are the ones, I hate to say it, but the ones that are complaining the most about not getting governmental help are unfortunately, the ones that live the farthest away, because they don't want the govern-ment as a part of their life in normal times. But now they do.

It's like, well, you put yourself into a remote area, you should be self-sufficient if you're living “off the grid” somehow. That's been the biggest thing. I think there's a lot of conspiracies going around about things and how they happen, which is not making it easy for people that are doing recovery. I think this is going to set a precedent for how disasters are handled moving forward. I was thinking about that the other day. This is going to be studied big time. I honestly think it's go-ing to end up being one of the worst disasters of all time in American history. There will definitely be case studies done off of how things happened, how the response was.

I, as somebody who's been through a lot, I think the response has been great. I've seen govern-ment help since the day one. I saw them in town prior to the storm. I saw them as the rivers were rising, high water vehicles already bringing people from flooded out areas of Asheville into down-town, to where we had a high and dry shelter set up. I saw that day one, because I had to drive to the fire department to report a hazmat situation, because I had seen and could smell and could see with my own eyes propane pushing out the side of a building, because a tree come down and hit the line that goes into the building. You could smell the propane in the air.

There was a lot of shock and awe with people. Whereas, I was like, okay, this is not a fire drill, but I've been through the same scenario before. I became an asset, versus somebody that could have been a liability.

You've hit on a couple of things I want to drill down on a little bit, because North Carolina, gener-ally speaking, as I understand, I mean, it's a mountainous state, right? There's different eleva-tions, all the way down to the sea, but then all the way up to Mount Mitchell, right? And everything in between. All that elevation and there are towns and cities at various elevations. I don't know what Charlotte's elevation is, but Asheville in particular, for example, the downtown area of Ashe-ville is a higher elevation than the River Arts District, right? Downtown Asheville actually fared pretty well, right? It's a fairly dry area. It wasn't a lot of damage.

If you were down by the river, down by the river, River Arts District, you were completely wiped out, because you were down on the river's edge and the river flooded. Just within Asheville alone, you have this disparity, because of the elevation. It's like, some folks were at a higher elevation. They fared better than the folks at the lower elevation. You're calling me, or we're doing this from – I can see into your house right now. You look like you fared. You must be at a slightly higher elevation. It looks like, you didn't have any flooding, particularly at your house, although you were without power and water and all that stuff, because you still rely on the infrastructure of the place, because you live in the city.

There are elevations within a town. But then you talk about some of these mountain towns that I've been there, so I know what you're talking about. It's maybe hard for our listeners to under-stand, because Asheville, the town, even though the downtown area might be at a higher eleva-tion, at other counties and other communities, I mean, this is at the end of the day, a rural area, if not even a wilderness area where people are – It's mostly wilderness. It's trees. It's mountains, and people, God bless them, they decide, “I want to live remote. I want to live off the grid. I want to live away from people.” Great. But they're at a higher – maybe they're in a more of a isolated area, they're at a higher area, maybe they're by river, maybe they're not by a river, but it's impos-sible to know sometimes where these people are, because they don't want you to know where they are, number one.

Exactly. Exactly. That's very true.

The rescue effort is not – I mean, listen, if a hurricane hits Fort Myers, Florida, it's a densely populated area, and the damage, you know what you got to do, because everybody's there. But when everyone is spread out across an area and you have this city, or that city that's densely populated, but then you have this diaspora of humans spread across the mountain scape, in the landscape of Western North Carolina, it is absolutely going to hamper a rescue area, because just finding – it's like the needle on the haystack. Where is it? Where are these people, right?

I'm looking at a map right now. I'm trying to look at, what is the elevation difference? If I look at a map right now of where I am, and if I pull up, let's see. If I look at an elevation map for where I live, I'm at 2,132 feet, okay? Now, if you go into the River Arts District, and you look at where the river is at, where the river itself is, the river is at 1,976 feet. I'm what? 200 feet higher than the riv-er? If it hits me, we're in big trouble. I would think this world's around. Those 200-foot rises just can happen like that, that quick, because somebody sits up on a hillside, or there's a ridge line. Because the ridge lines don't run just straight across, or up north was. Yeah, they run southwest to northeast, but then they all go like this all around it. Whereas, some people, I mean, if I look at, let's see, I'm curious. I know areas that flooded the most. I can actually just go and look at the Swannanoa River. The river in downtown Swannanoa, it's 2,187 feet. The river through there runs pretty much right there. You're like, 2,189. Whereas, there's right behind it that funnels all the water into that area, it instantly goes up to 3,500 to 4,000 to above 5,000, that quick. I mean, some of these are 45% -

It's a steep pitch. Yeah.

Yeah, it'll go from running level to a 47%, a 30% grade real fast.

Right, right.

You run around with a lot of that. As I look at the elevation map of this thing, the problem that I think is the biggest part is just the areas east of Asheville, where it rained the hardest were high elevations. It almost just got funneled right in through. I mean, where you look at – Then you look at the river in Fletcher, North Carolina, the problem is there is that all that water, most of the higher elevations, the 5,000-plus peaks, a lot of them are all in that area, which are headwaters for the French broad in that area, which pushes through Fletcher, where it went to 33 feet. Then it pushes into downtown, where it's 24 to 27. It's like, there's no place for the water to go, except down.

Then eventually, if you're on the, as you said, western side into the Mississippi, eventually, and on the eastern side, obviously, to the ocean, eventually. That could take days and days and days for all that water to run out. Then of course, the destruction left behind is now what we're dealing with. I want to pivot into that part of the conversation now, because you're an artist that's been devastated. One of your revenue stream certainly is wedding photography. Your work is incredi-ble, obviously. Western North Carolina, Asheville, North Carolina is a fantastic place for wed-dings. It's so beautiful. It's a huge draw for weddings and tourism, because it is so beautiful. You've been able to build a successful, wonderful business serving that market and your busi-ness has been decimated. You've lost all of your gigs, so to speak, for months and months and months to come.

Yet, you know so many artists that are as bad off, if not even worse than you are, because their studios have been washed away. Their life's work has been washed away. They have no income. Maybe they have no insurance. They are completely catastrophically ruined. Let's talk about the artists and the art community, as you've known it, and as you know it now, and as you think about it moving forward. Let's start with today. The artists that you know, what are they dealing with? How are they feeling? What are they saying?

I think there's a huge sense of panic, because everybody lost their months, their season that they pay their bills with. We're a tourist-centric area that just had its busiest tourism season taken away. I mean, even with me, there's confusion, because as you were saying, I started – I was just thinking, there's not a ton of help for self-employed people, especially when it comes into the arts. When you go to apply for unemployment, or disaster unemployment, the problem is that un-less the Fed gives money for it, most people are going to get turned down by the state of North Carolina, or any state they live in, because when you're self-employed, even myself as being a W2 employee of my business, I'm still considered self-employed. It's how we report our income. If we don't have a ton of income in the first three quarters, which a lot of people don't, they don't pick up their income till the end of the second quarter, maybe beginning of third quarter, but usu-ally end of third quarter.

I feel like, Asheville, where people make the most money, honestly, I would say, just as it's scratching that the surface would be August through December. Because leaf season, people are buying art, people are buying things for other people, because the holidays are coming up. You usually see people start looking for new houses during the fall, during the winter, spring. Maybe they purchase it in June, in the summer, they start moving stuff in, that stuff. It makes your last quarter of business usually heavy on revenue. Well, if your first three quarters are light, you don't qualify for unemployment in the case of myself.

Money that I paid into unemployment every year and each month, I'm not seeing that, because my first three quarters weren't that busy this year. It was slow. 24 and 23 have been slow years, especially just in the wedding scape. I also, I'm sure, artists have probably been feeling the infla-tionary pulls of everything. I'm sure that's been an issue for some people. I think, there's a lot of grant programs out there that people are applying for. I've been turned down for a few of them, because it's like, I didn't lose my work. My work's all-digital, so it's online. I think it applies better for people who have lost actual tangible items that aren't digital.

A lot of people like, “Where are we going to go? What are we going to do now? Where am I going to rebuild?” I was talking to a restaurateur in River Arts District, and he's been there for 11 years. One of the best-known places and he told me, he was like, “It's going to cost me three times the amount to reopen as what it did just to open the place, because of new build out.” He's been there for 11 years. The inflationary cost of how things have gotten different. There's a lot of peo-ple, they're not going to want to take out a EIDL loan, which is an economic impact disaster loan. Because even at 1%, you still got to pay that back. A lot of people are going like, “I don't know when my next paycheck is going to come in.”

Anybody in the gig worker mentality has been definitely affected. Anybody service industry-based. Service industry, hospitality industry, that's my biggest concern right now is what's going to hap-pen to those people. Are those people are going to get work? If we get water back, are people going to come here? I know after Hurricane Irma, it was huge. In the keys, things returned to normal really quickly, because they switched to mass media marketing and everybody just flood-ed the keys. When that happened, I saw a completely different demographic of people start showing up in the keys, which those weren't the people that were going into these galleries and buy an art. Maybe they were, but not what I used to hear, and it wasn't the glory days that people used to have selling art. That's a real concern. Because sometimes you spent this amount of time curating the type of people that you want to come to the town that come after the things that the town holds.

Well, when you negate that mentality and switch and say, everybody come, because everybody thinks of the pow of more money is not always good money. This is the way I put it to some peo-ple. Because if your clientele takes a dive, and it's not who it used to be, well, then you're alienat-ing all these people.

Well, it's one of the examples I heard. It's like, some places are party places. It's like, people come there to party. Asheville's not like that. Asheville is tourism is based on art and craft and culture, music, food, outdoors. Of course, outdoors. If God forbid, somebody decided to turn Asheville into a party town, I mean, it'd just be altogether different, and it would ruin it forever. It would not be the same.

I think, too, anytime something gets leveled by flooding, there's always a worry of like, what's go-ing to be replacing it? What's going to return in replacement of that? I know I've had that thought process. I've had a couple of times where I've thought and been like, what's really going to hap-pen around here? It worries me. I shouldn't say that I'm not worried. It definitely does. Because I am worried. Who's going to come back here? How long is it going to take for us to get back to a sense of normalcy? It's going to take a lot of time getting the word out that things are different now, once they do become different. Because we have such an affinity to disaster and the exploi-tation of the disaster that trying to switch mentalities instantaneously is going to be really tough.

In terms of the artists that you know, I mean, I've been to the River Arts District, it's my under-standing, hundreds of artists live and work as, or certainly work in the River Arts District, if not lived. I mean, if you could speculate numbers, how many artists do you think have been impacted by Helene? How many artists do you think, if you could help quantify the numbers, like help us understand the impact, quantify the impact for us in terms of the artists that have been damaged and hurt by Helene.

I heard yesterday, a figure that came out. The River Arts District is home to more than 300 studi-os and galleries. That's including anybody that has a booth. From the number I heard yesterday, they say roughly, 80% to 90% have been impacted. That's huge. I mean, the building marquee that just – there was a story that I was shooting photos at. There were 200 people in that one building. That building is, the shell still there. You walk inside, you're just like, you don't even rec-ognize it. It used to be such a pretty, so well lit. Everything was real clean. You go in there and you're just like, it looks like a warehouse that's been dilapidated for 20 years.

Right outside that to the south of that building was the Plebe Urban Winery. It was a wine maker that brought grapes and stuff from all different areas around some of them, actually being in my home county where I'm from. That building doesn't even exist. When I see it’s gone – I mean, that building, I had to ask, had they done demo to it? They're like, “No. Nothing was done.” Just the force of the water took the center blocks and just, they're gone. There's not even really corner stones. Still, and you're just like, what?

I mean, you had to have been on the downtown side of the railroad tracks that go through River Arts District, so that's Depot Street and up. Those people, they're okay. Some of them did get some flooding, but not as bad as everybody else. If you're on the river side of the railroad tracks in River Arts District, it's gone. It had 10-plus feet of water in it, wherever you are.

The Marquee building alone had 200 artists in it. The River Arts District has multiple buildings with so many studio artists, studios, artists, businesses working.

I think what they say is 26 total buildings with open studios and gallery. I'm looking at their web-site right now. It says, over 300 artists work in the River Arts District in 26 buildings. I would say, those 26 buildings, it almost feels like, 15 to 20 were affected. I mean, even New Belgian Brewing who's on the other side of the river had flooding in their first down stairs. That's insane, because they sit up higher on the thing. The amount of water and how deep it got and how forceful it got, I still haven't wrapped my head fully around it.

Out of those 80%, 90%, 80% to 90% of artists impacted. Let's just, I don't know. Let's just say, let's just make up numbers, round numbers. 300 artists, roughly.

I’d say, 150 to 200.

Right. 200 artists certainly impacted, roughly, if not more, whatever, more or less. What percent-age of these artists do you think will actually be able to come back and rebuild and reestablish their practices there? If you had a crystal ball, what do you predict? What do you speculate that these artists – will these artists be able to come back and rebuild? Will they leave and not come back? What do you think?

That's hard. I would say, definitely more than half won't. That's just my thought process, because here's the thing, they need to have a studio. Most of these places, it's going to take six, seven months before they're inhabitable again.

At least. Yeah, that's best-case scenario. Yeah.

I know the owner of a couple buildings. One of the buildings’ owners, I know for a fact she didn't have flood insurance, because she told me it was $42,000 a month. She's like, “I wouldn't have tenants. I wouldn't have artists in my studios. Who's going to rent from me?”

Wait, it was $42,000 a month, or $4,200?

She told me it was $42,000 a month.

Oh, my God.

That's insane.

Nobody can afford that. That's insane.

I'm one of those people that likes to Google things as I talk about it. If you go typical commercial, typical monthly commercial flood insurance cost for North Carolina would be $754. There's no way that's even close. Because homeowners are paying an average of $916 per year for a policy from one flood insurance thing. I mean, for her, I would say – it says, Asheville, the annual rate just for a person's own home is $2,000 a year. Maybe she said it was 42,000 a year. I don't know.

It’s a lot. Whatever the number is, we know that natural disasters, whether it's California where I live, or Florida, I mean, these insurance companies are pulling out. They're not covering people. If you are able to get coverage, you're paying out the nose for it. But a lot of these insurance companies are deciding to leave markets, because the risk is too high. If people could afford in-surance today after Helene, I'm guessing the insurance will only go up if not leave the state en-tirely.

It'll go up. The crazy thing is they won't be able to give a full amount on it. Somebody might get a policy now, but their policy is going to probably double, because FEMA and NOAA will come in – National Oceanic Atmospheric Association, ocean and atmospheric. NOAA and FEMA will come in and they'll do a new flood zone map. It'll be based on these totals, which everything already was in a flood, probably in flood zone X. It's probably going to be in XX now, which means, that probably means it's not insurable. The sad thing is a lot of the new building was taking in account the updated flood levels that they had after the 2004 floods. Who knows where it's going to go now?

The last time I was in Asheville was May and I stayed at The Radical. That was down on the river.

They had water come up to their basement that was down there, come inside their basement. They’re on the other side.

Because they were high up on the slope there. But I've seen photos from that area, your photos you took. You're saying that now, all that will probably be XX, and uninsurable.

If you look at how homes, and I'm basing this off experience in Florida. I know in Florida after Ir-ma, it became really hard to get flood insurance.

Right, right. I want to talk a little bit about some of the politicalization of our times. I heard yester-day on CNN that there's so much misinformation about FEMA. We already mentioned people that live off the grid, because they don't want to deal with the government. Then I heard yesterday on CNN that there was an armed militia that faced off, or approached FEMA on some level. I don't know what's true. I don't know what isn’t. Tell us what you're seeing and hearing in terms of some of this political stuff going on.

Yeah, the whole issue on the militia ended up being, there was a report given that they had seen two armed trucks and militia members. That goes back, they arrested a 44-year-old man, which it comes to find out that he was doing it by himself, that people saw him get in a truck with other people. That made it become the armed truck.

Yeah, right.

There was a gentleman who was saying, he was threatening to harm FEMA workers, because he, I don't know. I mean, I heard one thing. He was saying it for Chimney Rock and for Lake Lure, which has been speculated, been the center of a lot of this. One of the misinformation that I heard was that FEMA was going to seize the land, bulldoze it, and then mine it for lithium.

First and foremost, FEMA has no way of doing land grabs. They don't have a judicial law en-forcement area of their administration, so they can't even arrest people. This is what happens in disaster areas. Anytime somebody that doesn't live inside the disaster area and hears anything that they think might remotely be true, they post it as if it's true. I saw FEMA here. Like I said, they were here during the storm. People don't know what FEMA is either, which makes it even worse, because FEMA really, they're in administration. They're admins. They direct people what they're supposed to do.

If the National Guard shows up, it's because part of FEMA, they get reimbursed by the federal emergency management administration. If the US Army, like I saw them in high water vehicles, they're here, they get done. The New Jersey task force, swift water rescue team, who was here on Wednesday before the storm, who I saw Friday during the storm. They had FEMA patches, because even they're part of the New Jersey task force that's a state, which they're firefighters that become part of a task force, they're still sent out by FEMA. FEMA has disaster centers set up where they're helping people. It's always faster to do it online, but the problem is is now it's going to take time, because also, with Milton coming through, so they're inundated.

The biggest issue that I've seen with FEMA is they've gone a little bit slower than they did during Hurricane Irma. I can say that. Their application in the way that it determines sense of need, I think, is wrong. I've had my application in for over a week and a half and I still have got nothing. I can't get through to them. I've actually reached out to my US Senator's office and had them sign the power of privacy thing power, so that they can inquire about it and get me answers, because I'm trying – Every little bit of money helps in this situation for anybody, whether it's a $100 stipend here, or a $750 stipend that everybody thinks that you have to repay, which you don't, that helps. There's grants that are out that come from small business associations.

I think it's just, we live in such a politically charged society that there's going to be misinformation, because one person doesn't want one administration to look good, so all that takes is them start-ing a false rumor and then it's snowballs and then political candidates pick it up and start running their mouths on national stages about things that they don't know about and that aren't true, which then in turn, like they said, it makes it harder for the recovery. Well, why does it make harder? Because you got to pull your caseworkers out of an area, because they're being threat-ened, potentially with violent harm. People need to stay off the Internet. It just shows you who should have access to the Internet and who shouldn't.

It's sad to say that. It's the most uneducated. I hate saying this. But the most uneducated people, unfortunately, live out in the sticks. They live out in the most rural areas. That's why they want to live out there, because that's the way they want their life. Well, they could be highly educated, but they're also easily brainwashed, because when they don't see government working every single day like you do when you live inside a metropolis, or a metro area – I can't go a single day without seeing the water department working somewhere, because they're redoing the infrastructure right now in the city of Asheville, so I always see them working. So, I know they're working.

Well, somebody that lives 10 miles outside the city limits, up in a down a dirt road, they don't see this, because they leave their house, it's like when I lived at home, growing up in my town, you go into town one time and it's usually every couple days. You go into town, you handle what you need to do and you go back to your farm, or your area. Whatever you see that period of time while you're out, that's what you see of what goes on in the city. It makes it easier for these people to develop these false senses of things, I think.

Michael Freas, I am so grateful that you're safe. I'm so grateful that you are able to help. You have been giving and contributing to your neighbors, to your community, to your home. You, un-fortunately, have a lot of experience with these kinds of things, which gives you a level of, I think, calm and maturity and thoughtfulness that you wouldn't have had otherwise, so that's a gift that you can bring to your neighbors and to your community. People do look for the calm in the storm, and you are incredibly calm in this storm.

I've seen a lot of my neighbors that totally resonates and tracks, because I have seen a lot of my neighbors where they were going to start doing updates, so they would carry it live on the radio. I would listen to the updates. I would be the one with the information. It was like, I'm never going to forget this one time where I was explaining to everybody in my community, we're having our little community cookout, we had those every day at 4.00, the first four or five days, where we didn't have power. Everybody, clean out your fridges, or freezers. It’s like, oh, man, we ate so good those first. You always do. The first few days of a disaster, a hurricane, you always eat really well, because you're trying to get rid of all that stuff in your freezer that you had saved for a spe-cial occasion. Meats and all that.

I'm never going to forget that I was explaining to people how it usually works with seeing aid come in and stores in opening and how you have to ration certain days, and how you – I don't care how big your house is. You got to suck your pride up, because if you got no water and you got no food, you need to go through these food distribution lines. I'll never forget this one lady, mother and daughter that lived together. She just turns and looks at me and she was like, after I'd said what I had heard on the briefing, she goes, “What I want to know is when are they going to bring the organic food back in. When will they start delivering that?”

I just turned and looked at her and I said, “Months.” She was like, “That's not a good answer.” I said, “Well, why are you turning to me for the answers?” She says, “Well, you seem to know eve-rything.” I said, “Yeah, because I just turn on the radio and I listen.” I looked at everybody and I said, “This highlights what I've been saying to everybody is, you will learn a lot about people, be-cause one of the biggest things that you can do in these disasters that can be more helpful than anything is just to listen to other people.” You give other people the opportunity to vent, other people the opportunity to be therapeutic and talk about what they went through. But when you do that, it turns you into a person that listens to understand, versus listens to reply. Then, you're lis-tening because you're getting these things. I turned back into my old reporter days. I was a photo journalist. I didn't write big stories, but I worked side by side with the journalist. You take notes about the things that you hear. So, I take these notes.

Like, this morning, prime example, I got up and they said they were pumping water into the West Asheville, too. Well, I told everybody. I’ve sent out an email to my community and was like, “Hey, where did you see this? Where did you hear this? How do you know this?” I'm like, “I've told you guys for the past two weeks, there's a briefing at 11.00 in the morning and 4.00 in the afternoon every single day.” One of the biggest things that always stands out in disasters is how dependent we are on others to do things for us, versus learning how to be self-sufficient.

Self-reliant. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that can go into maybe an entrepreneurial thing with creatives, because we are our own bosses. We have to figure out things for ourselves.

Well, and we're critical thinkers and we're all of that, right? Discerning, yeah.

I think the hardest thing is just going to be like, a lot of these people who have never had some-thing like this happen to them before so they never thought it could happen. Whereas, I'm more of a realistic person going, it's going to happen at some period of time. Maybe that's why my gut told me on Wednesday, I needed to have – I think I had 20 gallons of water ready to roll, and not a single person in my community, like not many of them were ready. I had, camp stoves were out, the MREs were ready to roll. I've started eating MREs on day one, because I know it's like, we're going to have the cookouts in the afternoon. My lunches and breakfasts are going to come out of a foil pack.

I don't mean to make light, but in these situations of natural disasters, it actually helps to have been a camper, backpacker, hiker, right?

1000%.

Because we have a level of self-reliance and independence, and appreciation for nature.

Because we have the tools. We're used to being in that primitive mentality. Any person that's ever done primitive camping, even car camping gives you a sense of preparedness. But especially any person that's ever off-grid camped, primitive, where you hike in, you set up camp, you take in what you got with you, I've used some of those resources knowing where natural springs are, or knowing that I can go to a natural spring, go to the headwater, if I got to hike up a little bit and take a LifeStraw, or a Sawyer filtration system and I can filter water when I need to filter it.

That's right. That's right. Michael Freas, I'm so grateful. As we wrap up today, I just want to thank you for taking time. I know you've got so much going on. I'm so grateful that you took time to sit down and share your story and share the story of what's going on there in Asheville and the sur-rounding counties of western North Carolina. It's so important for us here to make sure that we're amplifying artist stories and helping artists tell their stories and promote their work. Artists need us now more than ever in western North Carolina, making sure that the story gets out, because the national mainstream media is going to, unfortunately, move on as they already have done.

Which they already have. Yeah. There's something that I saw that Visit Asheville is doing right now, that I'm going to plug this. I know there's some other things coming soon. But there's a thing that came up. It's called Love Asheville from Afar, that Visit Asheville is doing. They're doing it with Explore Asheville, the Asheville Downtown Association, Love Asheville Local, the Asheville Independent Restaurant Association, Arts Asheville, Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce, Made by Mountains, Mountain Bizworks and JD Co. They put up a new page, it's called al-ways.exploreasheville.com/loveasheville. They're doing a basically thing that's just like, it's a full-blown business listing. I got involved with it. I saw just the other day. It's for arts. You can put it. You're an artist, perfect. All right, if you were impacted, they're giving you a link that will take you to your Instagram, or Facebook, it'll allow you to go straight to an artist’s shop.

I'm based down in the services part of it. For services, it's got photography. It'll take somebody straight to my website. But you can go and find artists now that were impacted and go and sup-port them by buying a print, buying a mug. Somebody that is a potter, you buy some of their pot-tery. People want to know how they can help right now. We're in between phase one and phase two recovery. Phase one is what we're seeing right now where everything's just completely – all the warehouses are so full. They're actually turning donations away, because people flood dona-tions and literally, you just see them go clean their closet out and that's what they send. It's a bunch of unuseful stuff.

People right now need brand-new cold weather gear, because if you give somebody a jacket that's 10-years-old and you don't treat it the proper way when you wash it with certain things, like you can wash the water repellency off of something. I think it's really important to go and visit art-ist website. I think it's important to go and visit photographer websites, know that photographers like myself, I travel. I'm not just stuck to Asheville. I'll get in a car. I'll get on a plane. I do it all the time. That's something that helps.

River Arts District Foundation's got a link on here where you can donate money to that. I know that money is going to get dispersed to either help rebuild the area, but also help artists. We're starting to see more local stuff push about supporting local businesses from afar and that's huge.

That's great. That's great. Well, we'll be sure to amplify that, and thank you for sharing that for sure. Please, come back. Well, we'll have you back. I want to keep this story going. Obviously, we're going to be working together to tell these stories via our sister company, artsvilleusa.com. Michael Freas, take care my friend. Just know we're thinking of you and we're going to do all we can from afar to support you. Take care.

Thanks man.

Well, Louise, that was quite something, eh?

You know, I'm here just back from being a refugee that went to other areas. I've been back in Asheville as of this recording, four days. I am only now realizing through this podcast just what we have ahead of us here. I should mention, I'm from New Orleans, so this is not my first rodeo with this.

Nor was it Michael Freas’s first rodeo, right? In terms of six hurricanes he's lived through.

Right. He's covered six of them. I would like to say, as part of our assistance to artists, please go to the artsvilleusa.com website and you will see photo images on an ongoing basis from Mi-chael, and you will be able to both read and access our podcast there if you prefer listening, on ongoing stories that we will be airing and writing about and cataloging and archiving to keep this story alive. There is no other organization, arts organization in our area that first of all, reaches the 23 devastated counties here. All the other ones are really in their own communities. We are the only ones here with that reach to all the artists. We are the only organization that serves marketing, mentoring and media to tell the stories of the artists.

The arts organizations in our community are overwhelmed trying to just get basic assistance for studio space and living to these artists. We are serving a very unique role. Please, subscribe to artsvilleusa.com and certainly, open your hearts to what is happening here in one of America's most major arts and crafts community and go to our donate page, and we will greatly appreciate it.

Yes, and let's remind people that every dollar donated is tax deductible. Artsville USA is part of the 501(c)3 nonprofit Arterial. Every dollar donated is tax deductible, so please consider sup-porting this important work.

Thanks again, Scott, for all you're doing and for this ability for us to work together from one side to the other side of America to let people know about artists and the arts and in our region, the crafts capital of America, what is going on here and what we have ahead of us.

All right, my friend. Well, you take care and we'll talk soon.

Thanks for listening to the Artsville Podcast. Please be sure to like this episode, write a review and share it with your friends on social. Also, remember to subscribe, so you get all of our new episodes. Artsville is produced by Crewest Studio in Los Angeles. Artsville is property of Arterial Incorporated, a 501(c)3 non-profit arts organization on a mission to amplify art and artists in the world. Our theme music was created by Dan Ubick and his team at DanUbe Productions. Arts-ville is recorded at Echo Mountain Recording, edited by We Edit Podcasts, and hosted by Capti-vate. Thanks again for listening to Artsville. We'll be back soon with another inspiring episode celebrating American contemporary arts and crafts from Asheville and beyond.