In late September 2024, Hurricane Helene tracked north from the Gulf of Mexico and Florida and dissolved into the Southeastern states. The amount of rain it dropped in the Western North Carolina region was unprecedented. A comprehensive Hurricane Helene Map was nowhere to be found. We all sat by and watched as reports came in about flooding, destroyed bridges, crumbled roads, obliterated homes and businesses, power outages, downed trees and more.
Well, many of us sat by. But some organizations, like Footprint Project, went directly towards the catastrophe. This is something they do, again and again, watching news reports and weather radar to determine where they can deploy equipment to help. Footprint specializes in building resilient communities using clean solar energy to power their recovery after disasters like this.
A New Kind of Disaster
Of course, nothing had ever really been like this, not even for Footprint Project. Typically, after a disaster, Footprint might deploy solar trailers, power pacs, charging stations and solar-powered generators to up to 20 sites. After Hurricane Helene, they set up over 65 sites spanning over 1,200 square miles deploying 150-300 total pieces of equipment. Sites spanned as far south as Mill Spring, NC all the way up to Poplar, NC, near the Tennessee border.
Months before this all began, Footprint had hired me to create visualizations of their process to better communicate their work. They don’t just show up with a solar charger. They establish bases in disaster-prone areas so communities can build and maintain their own systems. This helps reduce their dependence on dangerous and costly gas generators. Footprint creates hubs they call “Beehives” that serve as a safe place and point of departure for nearby communities in need.
Communicating Disaster Work in Maps
Power availability is important after a disaster. People need it for communication, refrigeration, lights, heat, medical devices like oxygen tanks, water pumps and more. Footprint Project needed a way to make this complexity, and their work, visible. After making previous maps for Footprint, they found that the information organizing process was incredibly useful. They could use these maps to communicate their work with potential supporters and use the process to better understand the focus of their work. In our initial scope of work, we outlined maps, flow charts and illustrations that could help further this goal. When Hurricane Helene landed, we canceled our meetings as they navigated a complex and vast disaster zone. Like many others, I searched online for information about what was happening. Me being me, I looked for maps and data.
Finding a Hurricane Helene Map
After a few weeks it became clear to me that either information wasn’t getting out of the disaster zones or there wasn’t any one source that was providing a full picture of Helene’s impact. People were saying it was bad but I had questions. HOW bad was it? WHERE was it bad? HOW was this event, in particular, so catastrophic? What kind of perfect storm of weather and geography converged? I researched sources online that could help answer my questions.
I found sporadic answers via USGS, NASA, NCDHHS, DriveNC.gov, CNN and The New York Times. Most used dotted lines to track the path of the storm, enhanced radar and satellite imagery and dramatic videos of storm surges and floating houses. It was all here and there, forcing me to look up town names to understand where they were situated along the path. But a dotted line was not explaining to me WHY this particular storm was so destructive.
I restarted meetings with Footprint Project while they worked in Western North Carolina and suggested that we put some of the other map ideas on hold. Instead, I wanted to focus on a map that incorporated information about the communities they were serving, shown in tandem with weather data, landslide information, terrain, flooding and stories about how these areas were impacted. I wanted it to be the comprehensive Hurricane Helene Map I’d been looking for.
Clarifying Info in Maps
Fortunately, Footprint Project was already using Mapping Sheets, an app that plots data from a Google Sheets to a Google Map. I had never used this app but I immediately fell in love. I already use Google My Maps for nearly every map I create. It helps me plot out the relationships areas have to each other, especially when I’m not creating a contiguous map. Many of my “Life Maps” include locations across the country and sometimes, across the globe. I will resituate them into a condensed space to maximize my ability to draw details, while allowing for the proper orientation to each location. For instance, I won’t draw New York below Kansas. Instead, I would situate it to New York’s lower left, even if I don’t draw the states in between.
Mapping Sheets plotted all of Footprint Project’s sites, their status, equipment used and on-the-ground stories about how communities were struggling with infrastructure that had all but disappeared. By this time, NOAA had gathered post-Helene satellite imagery of many affected areas. (As of February 2025, if you look up some of these areas on Google Maps, you’ll see the most current post-Helene satellite views.) This allowed me to zoom in and see a before and after of roads and rivers redrawn by the force of this storm. It was chilling to view entire rows of structures obliterated from the removed perspective of a satellite, especially knowing the real-life trauma occurring to people on the ground. Views like this only drove me to gather as much information as possible. I pulled info from local North Carolina news, drone operators on YouTube and small businesses’ Facebook pages.
Layering a Complex Story
I knew from the beginning that this Hurricane Helene map would be complex. I was taking information from so many sources that on their own could create a complex map. In meetings with Footprint Project, we discussed setting up this map in layers so that they could share appropriate imagery, depending on the story they were trying to convey. After taking multiple screenshots from multiple sources, I stitched them together to see how the information converged. You could see how areas inundated with landslides had the most complex terrain and a higher number of equipment deployment. I created layers for Footprint sites, terrain, rivers, landslides, storm stories, roads, rainfall amounts and city names.
Working at a high resolution, I created the map entirely digitally using my Wacom Cintiq Screen so that we could zoom in to areas to tell specific stories. Locations like Chimney Rock, Bakersville and Asheville stood out as some of the hardest hit. But, it was bad all over. From the DriveNC.gov site, I saw that almost the entire Blue Ridge Parkway was closed. Recent estimates put repairs to that highway at over $1 billion. With tourism typically bringing in over $1 billion along the Parkway, you can see how dramatically this will affect the area.
As the team at Footprint Project continued to work in North Carolina, I filled in the map with details. We emailed, texted and had video calls to clarify information on locations and equipment. The team did an amazing job at providing details amidst long days and exhausting months. After a few final revisions, we were able to share the final piece with their supporters and community. Many have commented on how this put things in perspective for them or how important it was to see all this information in one place. We intended the initial impact of the map to be overwhelming but not to the point that you couldn’t decipher it. I think it worked!
Mapping Complexity
Beyond its current use, I imagine the layers of this map will be used to show the interconnected problems precipitated by a disaster. It can be used to communicate how important it is to build resilient communities in the face of more complex climate-driven disasters. This area of North Carolina is not one typically affected so strongly by a hurricane. But with increasing storms and longer storm seasons, this is perhaps a harbinger of things to come in other unassuming areas. Much of the solar-powered equipment deployed to the Western North Carolina region will stay where it is. Footprint Project doesn’t just drop in when they’re needed, they work with these communities to build a more resilient future. Thankfully, my passion for research and organizing information was able to play a part in sharing what happened to these communities.