As on any other rainy late summer morning in Southern Appalachia, the sun rose over densely wooded, knobby green peaks cloaked in a thick downy mist.
At a large, nondescript warehouse off Swannanoa River Road just outside downtown Asheville, it may have looked like any other day — workers bustling about, trucks coming in and out — but for MANNA FoodBank, which fights food insecurity in a historically poverty-stricken region by serving up to 190,000 people a month, this day would be unlike any other for perhaps the last thousand years.
“We moved our entire fleet of vehicles to higher ground, and we took care of sandbags and things like that, anticipating there was a chance that there could be some flooding,” said Mary Nesbitt, chief development officer for MANNA. “We lifted everything up off of the floor, which is our typical procedure in disaster preparedness. Every single bit of food, lifted three feet off the floor.”…