An open letter to Asheville leaders: We need Water and Food Plans for Long Outages

A letter to our leaders

After Helene, we saw the power of this community and its public servants, but also how much depended on help from outside Asheville. Helene was a regional disaster with national support. The next one could be a national disaster with little or no national support; cybersecurity, electric grid, water supply attacks are at a greater risk now more than ever.

We ask our leaders, and everyone running to lead, to commit to forming a plan.

Experts warn of new risks we're not ready for

• Foreign hackers are already positioned. U.S. agencies found Chinese state-sponsored hackers inside U.S. water, energy and communications networks, positioned “for disruptive or destructive cyberattacks.”¹
• AI is making attacks cheaper. Federal agencies warned in August of “AI-generated exploitation scripts” aimed at water and power controls.² OpenAI rates its newest model “Critical” for cyber risk.³
• Attacks on many targets at once have begun. In July, water utilities in several states reported intrusions within days of each other.⁴ Most attacks still exploit weak passwords; AI makes those cheap to find at scale.
• The military is preparing. The Army requires bases to sustain critical missions for 14 days without utilities,⁵ and the Pentagon is working to make major bases independent of the civilian grid.⁶ We rely on that grid.
• Outside help is weakening. FEMA lost about 17% of its workforce in FY2025.⁷ North Carolina’s Helene review warns of having “to compete with other states for limited supplies.”⁸

The gap: local water and food access

After Helene, much of our water and food was shipped in: the county’s main warehouse alone received over a million MREs and nearly 600,000 gallons of water.¹⁰

In a disaster that hits many regions at once, that help will be stretched thin or gone, and we could find no public plan for keeping water and food flowing without it.

• Water runs on diesel. With the grid down, pumps and treatment depend on generators, and diesel reaches Asheville by truck. The county’s Helene review found “gaps in fuel contract/plan.”¹⁰
• Food runs on trucks. Grocery stores and the food bank restock by truck, and the county’s review found its distribution plan “not scalable.”¹⁰

Without a plan, a long outage could become a public-health and public-safety emergency within days.

Questions every leader should be able to answer now

1. With the grid down for a month, how does diesel keep reaching our water plants and pump stations?
2. If few trucks reach the region, where does food for 400,000+ people come from, and who distributes it?
3. Has the city or county ever exercised an outage lasting weeks, across many states, with little outside help?

Go on the record by 5 PM Monday, November 2

We are sending this letter to every sitting official and every candidate for Mayor and City Council asking them each to reply to plan@avlgo.com with:

Yes or no on each of the six commitments below, with an optional comment or statement

Every response, and every non-response, will be published unedited at AVLGO.com/plan.

The six commitments

1. Name an owner for water and food resilience by January 31, 2027, with public updates every six months. The owner's first step: an initial assessment of the water and food capacity we have today, the gaps, and the assumptions current plans rely on.
2. Lock down water controls by February 28, 2027: CISA’s free scanning, and control systems off the open internet.
3. Write a fuel plan for water by March 31, 2027: how the city will secure, store and deliver diesel to run water plants and pumps for 30 days without outside resupply.
4. Convene the food system by March 31, 2027: grocers, distributors, MANNA FoodBank and growers, to map how food reaches residents with no grid, internet or outside trucks for a month.
5. Write and test a 30-day water and food plan by June 30, 2027, using a public tabletop exercise.⁹
6. Publish the emergency plans, redacted as needed, by March 31, 2027. After Helene, partners used an outdated plan.¹⁰

We are grateful for the work since Helene, and we are ready to help as volunteers, technologists and neighbors.