After the Storm: How a Community of GE Aerospace Employees Turned Disaster into Unity

It is a truth universally acknowledged that water runs fastest when it runs downhill. On September 27, after the remnants of Hurricane Helene dumped unprecedented amounts of rain on western North Carolina, which had already been doused earlier that week, that truth was made abundantly clear.

Over the following days, weeks, and months, GE Aerospace site leaders and employees were forced to respond to an unforeseen disaster of massive proportions. They rallied quickly, focused on making sure their colleagues and their families were safe, and then set about helping their community grapple with the enormity of the damage. What follows is an account of that effort, and the work they've put in to help their communities heal after the storm waters receded.

Water, Water Everywhere - and Then the Power Went Off

GE Aerospace operates two facilities in an industrial park about five miles south of downtown Asheville. On a normal Friday, the two plants - which produce rotating parts and compressor airfoils (RPCA), as well as ceramic matrix composite (CMC) components, for a host of commercial and military aircraft engines - would be buzzing with activity. But this was not a normal Friday. At about 3:30 a.m., the power went off. Within a few hours, recalls Ryan James, RPCA site leader, "we lost everything - cell phones, internet, power, and water."

"Asheville lies in a mountain valley, so there's limited places for water to go when it comes," says James. As the creeks and rivers overflowed their banks, streets in town and roads that wind up through the surrounding hills, ravines, and ridges were washed out. Trees and power lines were down seemingly everywhere, and both the French Broad River and the Swannanoa River flooded a significant portion of downtown. Twenty-four hours after the storm ended, "there was no way in or out of Asheville," he says.

With local grocery stores closed, a supply distribution hub was set up on the Asheville campus to distribute water, food, and personal hygiene items to GE Aerospace employees and their families. Images credit: GE Aerospace

That same Friday morning, Stephen Harris, site leader for GE Aerospace's machining factory in West Jefferson, about 120 miles northeast of Asheville, started getting calls. West Jefferson sits 3,000 feet up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Heavy rains had pelted the town - at one point registering 20 inches in an hour - and now Harris, who was attending an off-site meeting in Wilmington, was hearing from colleagues about power outages, people stranded in their homes, and a number of employees stuck inside the plant itself.

"Because of where the plant sits on a hill, the roads around it were pretty much underwater," says Harris. "So our first challenge was, how do we get this handful of employees somewhere safe? And that progressed into the weekend. With all the rain and water coming down from the mountains, it just continued to get worse."

Safety First: Finding GE Aerospace Employees and Ensuring They're OK

Over the weekend, James was able to make contact with his colleagues Seth Sanert, the CMC site leader, and Sarah Hutcheson, the campus human resources leader, while Harris stayed in touch with his team in West Jefferson and plotted his route back from the off-site meeting. The first priority was making contact with every one of GE Aerospace's employees and making sure they were safe. Considering the state of the communications in the region and the number of employees - 650 in Asheville and 360 in West Jefferson - this was not an easy task.

By Monday, September 30, the Aerospace Response Center (ARC), which is based out of GE Aerospace headquarters in Cincinnati and helps coordinate emergency response plans for the company around the world, had been able to establish a text alert system for both Asheville and West Jefferson. This enabled the teams managing the emergency response at both sites to reach out to their employees - as long as the employees could get a signal.

In the initial weeks after the storm, cars lined up to receive thousands of gallons of unleaded gas and diesel fuel trucked into the Asheville site.

"I just remember Monday being a blur, but in a good way," says James. While Hutcheson dug up emergency contact information for their entire employee roster, James worked his phone for 10 hours straight. Over the next three days or so, they were able to account for 100% of their employees. By midweek, with internet and power restored, Sanert set up a daily site-wide call that helped the team spread and gather information. They kept that call going for two weeks until the plant was back up and running.

In West Jefferson, which is smaller and more remote than Asheville, Harris and the team had decided to close the plant over the weekend but still didn't know how many employees were OK. In an effort to gauge the whereabouts and safety of their colleagues, they asked anyone who was receiving the emergency text messages to come in to work that Monday.

"The best communication link is word of mouth," says Harris. "Everyone has a neighbor. Everyone looks out for each other. So initially it was, let's bring everybody in for an hour just so we can see how many people we're reaching and get a count of all our employees."

About 70% of the employees showed up. "We were shocked," he says. "And then we found out most people had to drive somewhere just to get cell service to get the text messages."

Thousands of Gallons of Water and 3,600 Chicken Dinners

With massive power outages, washed-out roads and bridges, and hundreds if not thousands of trees down, society ground to a halt. Grocery stores, schools, and childcare facilities were initially closed for days. "It was the closest thing I've seen to the Stone Age," says James.

But as the outreach campaign progressed, the GE Aerospace site in Wilmington began shipping supplies to both Asheville and West Jefferson. Starting the Tuesday after the storm, trucks arrived for the next week in Asheville - and for the next two weeks in West Jefferson - with fuel, water, food, dry goods, and cleaning products, including baby food, dog food, diapers, hand sanitizer, toothpaste, toilet paper, bleach, antibacterial wipes, dehumidifiers, generators, and tarps.

"At the same time, we realized how bad the water situation was in Asheville," says James. "A lot of the supply and distribution piping for our water system, some of which was buried 20 feet underground, was washed away. This was not going to be restored in a matter of days. We're now talking weeks to months."

Some of the hundreds of boxes of home supplies prepared for distribution.

With the help of the facilities team in Cincinnati, they set up a sustained water system to get the plants operational. At one point, both sites were receiving more than a dozen pallets of drinking water a day. And Asheville in particular received thousands of gallons of non-potable water each day for plant operations, along with thousands of gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel for cars and generators.

What's more, through individual donations from employees around the world and a significant grant from the GE Aerospace Foundation, the company pledged more than $770,000 to aid disaster response efforts in North Carolina and neighboring states impacted by the storm. (The contribution from the GE Aerospace Foundation will be divided evenly between the disaster logistics nonprofit Airlink and the American Red Cross.)

At both Asheville and West Jefferson, laundry, shower, and bathroom facilities were trucked in and set up for employees and their family members to use. Harris had one employee whose daughter was forced to move back home, along with her children and pets, after losing her house. "You could tell he was just kind of going into overload," he says. "And we were like, 'Well, what else do you need?' And he goes, 'Laundry.' So we googled 'laundry trailers' and found this service, and we had, within four or five days, a trailer brought in with six washers and six dryers."

Ingenuity took many forms. In Asheville, they set up a telephone tree to track down employees. "We had a kind of script to ask: 'Are there additional supplies that you need? Do you have a safe place to stay? Are you still in the area?'" says Hutcheson. "Just to be able to provide that personal touch, that really gave us a very detailed sense of what our employees needed that we hadn't yet provided."

In West Jefferson, Rick Farmer, a lean practitioner for GE Aerospace who also does a lot of cooking for charity events, spent a week outside of work making and distributing 3,600 chicken dinners to people in the community. Another employee who serves in the fire department volunteered on a swift boat crew to help rescue fellow citizens trapped by floodwaters. "The attitude of the employees was not of self, but of others," says Harris. "It just speaks to the culture of the people at GE Aerospace."

Of Resilience and Community

While both sites are back to full production, neither is out of the woods yet. The water is back on in Asheville, for example, but as of mid-November it was still not running completely clear. (In fact, according to Sanert, until shortly before Thanksgiving the CMC building was still receiving 6,000 gallons of water a day for its manufacturing operations.) On top of that, Harris notes that many employees have taken advantage of the $1,000 grants GE Aerospace has made available to help reduce the cost of their property damage.

GE Aerospace employees Erin Paparazzo and Tanya Yambor put the finishing touches on a chalk-drawn message for the whole Asheville team.

But the site leaders have noticed something else. Whether it's jumping in a four-wheel-drive vehicle to take supplies out to co-workers or cleaning up downed trees and debris on someone's property, the general attitude has been: How can I help? Also: "a lot of gratitude," says James. "I've had people coming to me saying, 'Thank you for everything GE Aerospace has done. The company has gone above and beyond.'"

"There's two words that stick out to me to describe the people here through this," he adds. "One is resilience. I mean, talk about people that take one on the chin and just keep going. And then the sense of community, just really leaning in to support each other. It's been truly impressive."

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