On the morning of Sept. 27, 2024, Liz Barker’s phone lit up with a flash flood emergency notification.
Barker, a midwife in North Carolina, knew there had been bad weather brewing; when she finished her clinical shift the night before, she remembers joking with the other nurses that even the impending storm couldn’t stop them from getting home from their long shifts.
But this early-morning alert on her phone was even more urgent: There was a mandatory evacuation in place for her home in Swannanoa, just outside Asheville. Barker quickly packed a bag and piled into the car with her teenage daughter and their dog.
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“I definitely didn’t anticipate things to be nearly as bad as they actually became,” Barker recalls…