Desi Connor. Courtesy of his mother, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Connor lives in a state of hyper-vigilinace. Her 6-year-old son Desmond, affectionately known as Desi, requires a suction machine — a device that keeps his airway clear — to survive.
“There are times where we suction his airway every 10 minutes to keep secretions from building up. It enables him to breathe. But the suction machines don't hold a charge for very long,” she says. Connor brings Desi’s oxygen and ventilator with them everywhere they go.
She explains that “You’re just kind of always in that emergency planning mode…His oxygen would crash just playing in the living room, the alarms would go off and we'd have to grab a [manual resuscitator] and basically bring him back to life.”
When Hurricane Helene hit Asheville, North Carolina, in 2024, the family’s apartment lost power. Connor and her partner had an emergency plan: If the battery runs low on Desi’s equipment, they will go to a hospital where they can charge it.
Everything changed when roads to the hospital became impassable due to power lines blocking roads, huge trees that came down, widespread flooding and plenty of debris, Connor recalls.
With Connor’s partner back home after he attempted — and failed — to reach the hospital, the couple started to panic. Because there was no internet, power or phone service, they went in desperation on a walk in the hopes of meeting someone who could point them in the right direction.
Eventually, they encountered a couple that told them the local fire station had a generator. Of equal importance, they also said that they thought the roads to the station were clear.
With gasoline running low, Connor and her partner loaded their van with all of Desi’s medical equipment that needed charging. Driving carefully past fallen power lines and trees, the panicked couple made it to the Avery’s Creek Fire Station.
Getting out of their van, Connor felt like she was holding her breath. If the fire station didn’t have a backup generator, Connor wasn’t sure how they would keep Desi alive.
“I almost started crying when one of them came out,” Connor says. The firefighter told them they could charge Desi’s equipment as much as they needed to. “I wanted to give him a hug.”
“If that fire station, if we couldn't get to it, I honestly don't know what we would have done,” Connor says.
At the fire station, they encountered a family sleeping there after their home had been destroyed.
In fact, many homes had been removed from foundations, leaving only slabs and stilts, according to the National Hurricane Center. Entire homes had been “picked up by the storm surge,” according to the report from the Center.
Connor has long seen her city of Asheville as something of a climate haven given how long it had been — about a century — since the last great flood there, even though the worsening trend of such natural disasters made Connor concerned. “I knew that this day was coming…but it was really the first time where we were really feeling very terrified,” she says.
“I think everybody here was completely caught off guard.”
Connor thinks her fear of her son dying was avoidable — if her family had been able to buy a generator through their insurance. “Knowing we could charge Desi’s equipment and wait it out, would have been the absolute safest thing, and would have prevented a lot of stress and anxiety,” she says.
Even when lives are at stake, the rules remain inflexible. “When I inquired about it, they said that the state of North Carolina only provides generators to people who are on a ventilator at least eight hours a day,” she says. “We don't meet the criteria.”
Before moving to North Carolina, their family lived in Chicago where the University of Illinois’ Division of Specialized Care for Children notifies utility companies and first responders about where medically fragile individuals live. That way they can prioritize such homes during a power outage or natural disasters.
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