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Moss Brennan knew there was a storm coming. Brennan is the editor in chief of the Watauga Democrat and the executive editor of Mountain Times Publications, serving three rural counties in Western North Carolina. In the days leading up to the arrival of Hurricane Helene last week, he was preparing for what he imagined would be some flooding and structural damage—possibly a handful of dramatic rescue missions—to report on. But he never anticipated the breadth of devastation and destruction that Helene would ultimately bring.
This week, Brennan spoke to CJR from his newspaper’s office, on high ground in the town of Boone, in a conversation interrupted by breaks in internet service and power outages, as well as the general chaos of getting out a paper. At just twenty-five years old, Brennan splits his time between running the paper, with its staff of nine, and volunteering as a firefighter and emergency medical technician. For the first day after the flooding, he focused on rescues and saving lives, before turning back to his duties as a reporter. “If there is somebody that is hurt or their life is on the line, that comes first, before the story,” he said. Balancing the two roles can be tricky (“I’m human, so it’s not perfect”), but Brennan also recognizes the responsibility that comes with his newspaper job. Thousands of residents were still without power when he and his team distributed the paper on Wednesday; it was the first news that some of them had received since the storm.
His account has been edited for concision and clarity.
A couple of days before the worst of the flooding came, I was just driving around getting pictures of places that had flooded and letting people know about the conditions. It was already starting to flood pretty badly in certain areas—roads were closing down—but the actual storm hadn’t gotten there yet. So we were just keeping people informed—telling them that we’re still staying in communication with our emergency services and getting out any information they needed to share for the community.
Around 5:30 in the morning on Friday, I did a swift-water rescue story, and I was thinking that we’re probably going to have, like, five or six swift-water rescues to report on. I thought I would just do a story for each one, just to kind of highlight each individual rescue. Well, that was not the case—we had hundreds of rescues.
When it became clear how bad the destruction was, I took off my reporter hat and put on my rescue hat and joined the swift-water teams that went out and got people out of some houses. At that point, to me, safety and helping people survive was more important than letting people know what was going on. We couldn’t get anything out anyway because the service was so bad. The first rescue we did was a house that had flooded, with a group of college kids in it. So we had to cross a bridge that had been compromised and had fast-moving water running over it to the other side of the road. Then, once we got to the other side of the road, we put in and searched houses to see if there was anybody in there. And we found seven people that we had to ferry across the floodwater. The water came up chest high.
Then on Friday night, when the immediate aftermath kind of slowed down a little bit, that’s when I put my reporter hat back on and started to let people know what was happening. I couldn’t get in contact with anyone on the team in Ashe or Avery counties until Saturday, and some people still don’t have service, so it’s hard to stay in contact with them. My main goal was to make sure everybody was safe.
For the most part, we have been focused on social media, because the most important thing is telling people what’s happening currently. I’d ask myself, If I had no knowledge of what was going on, what do I need to know? I oversee the papers in Ashe, Watauga, and Avery counties, and during the week, we were the only outlet able to offer regular updates and reports to those communities. We also had a hit-and-run on Saturday night which is a fatality now. So, you know, there’s stuff that continues to come out about that, and we are reporting on it.
Finally, on Saturday, our reporters started to be able to get out into the community. I gave out assignments to my reporters, and I also went myself to the different distribution sites, and started reporting out stories from the community. We have a reporter down in Wilkes County who had good internet service, and so if we couldn’t get a story up online over here, we sent it out for him to look over it and post it. I wasn’t even able to edit everything—I was just so busy that I said to my team, “Trust your instincts, do what you think is newsworthy, what you think the community needs to know. Read over your story a couple of times before posting, then post it and keep going.” Because it was just kind of bang, bang, bang. You just wanted to get as much information out there as possible. It was more about getting it out there than it was about it being perfect.
I’ve also had talented local photographers reach out and say, “Hey, I wanna help document this.” We don’t have full-time photographers, so to have that has also been great. There’s just been a great community response to document this and also just to help people recover.
There are communities that we still haven’t been able to access to see what’s going on. There are places where there were reports of structural collapses with multiple people injured or dead—but with trees in the way, with floodwaters raging, no one could get to them.
On Sunday, I had a meeting with all the higher-ups in our company to talk about whether we would print a physical paper this week. We weren’t sure if the post office would even be open to deliver it. We were initially going to do just a small paper, like an eight-page special-edition type of thing, that was going to be the same for all three counties. But the post office opened, and we also felt that as a paper of record we have a duty to get the full paper out, including the classifieds. So we decided to do all three papers as normal, and print a bunch of extras to give out for free, along with disaster recovery tips.
On Wednesday, I jumped in my CRV to distribute the papers myself in the western part of the counties, where we couldn’t reach before. I took them out to all the fire departments out there, and I would just ask them how the roads were until I got to the next one. I met people who told me that this was the first news they had gotten since last week.
The Watauga County emergency services also asked for a bunch of papers so that their own damage assessment teams could give them out to people who lost everything and had no information about what was going on. And, of course, a lot of the first responders and the staff wanted a keepsake paper as well. This is a historic event for our area, and we’re the paper of record. We’ve been here since 1888. This is part of our history now.
You know, we’re very young staff here at the Democrat. None of us are over thirty. They did an amazing job—and still are doing an amazing job—of getting vital information out. I’m also very thankful for all the support we’ve had from other papers and people in our publishing group that reached out offering to help.
As this gets worse, I think all reporters should have some basic rescue knowledge, basic medical knowledge, because we’re going to—I know reporters have to stay out of the story, but for me, if there is somebody that is hurt or their life is on the line, that comes first, before the story.
We’re just going to continue covering this story. This weekend, I’m going to put my rescue hat back on and go do a few missions to comb the river looking for, unfortunately, people who didn’t make it—hopefully we don’t find any. Then on Monday, I’ll put my reporter hat back on and go from there.
Lauren Watson is a CJR fellow.