Today they are calling it “Appalachian Strong”. Two words that sums up the historic response by individuals and small groups that organized within hours of a 5,000-year flood in September 2024. Hats off to rugged individuals who headed toward danger with a chain saw aboard their four wheelers or leading a pack of mules to rescue those along riverbanks or hidden communities on mountaintops with stranded babies, moms, and grandmas. These feats of heroism will be part of Appalachian lore for generations ahead. Thanks to all.

For Creative Energy the flood awakened the muscle memory of a past response to the COVID pandemic. Relegated to a dusty folder that had been dumped to an external hard drive from my laptop and part of our agency’s history had to be reloaded to the laptop.

In 2020, an extraordinary car dealer named Andy Dietrich called me to leverage agency resources to join a loose confederation of entities to help regional small business owners’ recover from the last great disaster, COVID. Some were competitors in business or economic development who forgot their nature for a greater cause. The result was more than $250,000 in grants that helped save dozens of small businesses. At its conclusion, Andy thanked us and said, “We hope we don’t have to do this again.” On the morning of September 28^th with flood waters still raging, I got a phone call from Andy saying, “We’re putting the band back together.”

Nothing close to the heroic feats of so many of the past month aboard four-wheelers and horses, our organization became another rapid response force for small business owners who hoped their business would somehow recover. Our agency team dusted off old creative files and built new ones. We had TV and radio PSAs on the air and billboards along highways within days and donations began to surge. A dusty old website was reborn literally within hours of the first call with a new message flood recovery. 

In 18 days, our group raised more than $500,000 and quickly began receiving grant applications, some with bone-chilling stories.

Like a retailer who had to break his storefront glass to escape raging flood waters from his business. Another, a woodworking business owner, who escaped in a canoe but rescued an elderly neighbor in that canoe before paddling them both to safety. Or a cab company owner who was sleeping in his cab stand with no hope of finding his cab that had been washed away. One whitewater rafting company who had received a COVID grant from our organization and survived has applied again. Today, his business is scattered along the riverbank miles away from his precious campground.

We will pump hope into so many small businesses and the jobs they represent quickly and without government red tape. Just a helping hand to a neighbor. It’s just a small example of so many of how we do things in a frequently forgotten corner of extreme Northeast Tennessee. I guess “Appalachian Strong” says it all. If you want to help, go to RegionAhead.com and donate to save small businesses here.