Twenty-one days without running water. A week before any cell service or internet. Hospitals closed, and thousands of houses swept away. Not long after developers started trumpeting the city of Asheville, North Carolina, as a “climate haven” from coastal storms, the area experienced catastrophic flooding. Upland Tennessee and North Carolina were the hardest hit by Hurricane Helene on September 27. For restaurant workers, the crisis is still getting worse, says Miranda Escalante, a hotel bartender and co-chair of Asheville Food & Beverage United, an organization of restaurant workers.