Nearly nine months after Hurricane Helene walloped much of North Carolina, details of a stunning joint effort to deploy emergency solar power to affected residents in Weaverville are emerging.
Helene made landfall in North Carolina on Sept. 27, washing entire downtowns and neighborhoods away.
Extended power outages are not uncommon after bouts of extreme weather, and they're not merely inconvenient — power loss impedes safe food storage and the use of medical equipment, and exposure to extreme temperatures places affected residents at further risk.
In mid-October, CNN spoke with some of the "tens of thousands" of people "still dealing with the intense stress of not having electricity" almost three weeks after Hurricane Helene struck. Residents reported pooling resources and relying on their vehicles for limited power in the interim.
Weaverville was hit hard, but in the aftermath, resident Mindy Barrett formed a mutual aid initiative called United Ambassadors of Hope. Barrett had returned to Weaverville after "surviving Hawaiʻi's wildfires," and in the wake of the hurricane, she "transformed her late mother's woodworking barn into a full-scale response hub."
According to a press release published on June 2, a protracted period of power loss severely hampered day-to-day life in Weaverville, and the "need for reliable, uninterrupted power was urgent."
Solar energy saved the day, Barrett said.
The use of solar panels as a reliable source of clean energy in hurricane-outage-prone areas isn't entirely novel, as a city in Florida created a 77-home community solar microgrid to become "less susceptible to grid outages" during hurricane season.
However, Weaverville was without power after the devastating storm swept through, requiring planning and execution to provide interim solar power to residents. The press release stated that Weaverville can serve as "a scalable model" for communities "to boost resilience, reduce fossil fuel dependence, and put the power of recovery in local hands" after a natural disaster.
Barrett's mutual aid organization partnered with solar storage and technology company Sol-Ark and the Footprint Project, a non-profit focused on deploying solar power to communities upended by natural disasters.
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I'd pay for it myself 💪 As a result, Weaverville gained access to a "robust solar setup," enabling residents to safely store food and medicine and to charge devices. Barrett described the emergency solar setup as integral to her community's recovery.
"Community-led disaster response works best when everyone has access to the power and tools they need. The solar solution gave us exactly that — reliability and peace of mind when we needed it most," Barrett said.
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