You never know how good you have it, until you don’t have it anymore.
Perhaps those words should be on the minds of all of us as we continue to clean up from Hurricane Helene, which dropped record rainfall amounts and caused widespread damage across the Highlands Cashiers Plateau from Thursday night through Saturday morning.
Items like cell phones, computers, televisions, etc. make our daily lives much easier, but when they are not available reality hits home quickly.
Much of the plateau lost power Thursday night and didn’t regain service until Sunday or later. Meaning in the best of cases, people were without electricity for 3-4 days. Internet service continues to be out across wide swaths of Macon and Jackson counties as crews work to get the infrastructure repairs made.
But the most impactful service disruption of the past week has been the loss of cellular phone service. When cell towers were knocked offline, around 11 a.m. on Friday morning, chaos began to ensue.
For many, the days of maintaining a land line phone are a bygone era. Cell phones after all theoretically work pretty much everywhere, all the time – except when they don’t.
Not being able to connect with loved ones, check on friends, or even call 911 is a helpless feeling many experienced for the first time in more than three decades.
For the most part, everyone did their best to stay home, stay off the roads, and allow first responders to do their jobs as safely as possible. With the number of trees down, power lines on the ground, and roads flooded, there was simply no good way to get anywhere until Sunday morning at the earliest and some more remote locations still remain inaccessible a week after Helene’s arrival.
While Highlands and Cashiers may have been spared the catastrophic devastation and loss of life seen in other Western North Carolina mountain communities where flooding was more prevalent, the impact of Hurricane Helene will not soon be forgotten.
May we always be mindful of how good we have it.