A man takes his off-road vehicle down a ruined road in Tennessee. (Photo provided by Ashley Galleher)
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between BPR and Grist , a nonprofit environmental media organization.
Around 11 a.m. most days of the week at an indoor skatepark and warehouse in Trade, Tenn., the garage door rolls open and community members begin to file in.
On one of those days last week, skatepark owner Ashley Galleher and her friend Valentine Reilly sat behind a table stacked with paper – emergency phone numbers and encouraging messages – and Narcan.
“So what’s the condition of your home?” Galleher asked a visitor.
“It was destroyed,” the man, from Mountain City, Tenn., said.
Across state lines, the impacts were the same: deaths and washed-out roads, destroyed homes, and pummeled infrastructure like water systems.
In Trade, which is an unincorporated town just over the state line from Watauga County, N.C., Galleher owns Zionsville Ramp Company, an indoor skatepark. Now, it’s called Stateline Resource Center.