In the midst of the turmoil following Hurricane Helene, farmers and others continue to display resiliency and camaraderie. Sofia Lilly is a fruit grower and winemaker at Overmountain Vineyards in Polk County, North Carolina, and says her farm was simply overwhelmed by water.
“At our farm, we received over 12 inches in the course of like six hours. I’ve got neighbor farmers that had cornfields that were totally covered in water. Can’t even see the ears. The rivers around us were over overflowing, and we’ve heard reports of 40 feet of water that were just totally coming down from the mountains. Total towns have been lost.”
Lily tells RFD-TV her goal now is trying to help her neighbors.
We’ve just finished picking our entire grape production right as this started happening, and which means we got vats and tanks that need to be in temperature control. We’ve got vats and grapes that need to be pressed and without power, basically, we were at a standstill on our farm. We were able to use incredible connections that we have to get a big trailer generator from Sunbelt Rentals to keep the winery production going. But at that point now, we’re able to connect to Starlink. So big shout out to Elon Musk for getting us going out here, and now we’re using that Starlink to connect to everybody else in our community and start raising money.
One of the biggest challenges in the mountains now is clean drinking water. Lily says they’re working on a solution.
“We converted a dairy operation that’s currently bottling milk to transition to bottling gallons of water and pipes of water. We’re taking as many donations as possible, because packaging is expensive and so is trucking. So we are mobilizing as many volunteers that we have, which is a lot. We’re bottling water every single day and trucking it to the distribution centers. We’re also getting it into vehicles that can get to smaller communities. Just now, as we’re talking we’re up to $24,000 right now. It’s coming in through Venmo. If you can Venmo ‘Overmountain10’ and send us cash. We will get that sent out to purchase, packaging, diesel trucking. All of the funds that are coming in are going towards this project.”