IIn the days before Hurricane Helen hit Carolina, Ziska Maria tried to stock up on her 5-month-old son's formula at nearby stores, but no one had it. “We said, 'OK, we'll get it [the storm],'” says Maria, who lives in Black Mountain with her partner, a three-year-old, and a baby.
But after the morning of September 27, the family quickly realized they wouldn't be making grocery runs anytime soon. “We have no water, we have no power, we have no cell reception, we have no internet, all the roads are blocked and we can't get out,” Maria says.
Maria's son was born with a cleft lip, which was surgically repaired, but had feeding problems. After months of trial and error, Mariah finally lands on the perfect combination of bottle and formula, and provides frozen breast milk donated by another mom, which she mixes with formula.
But after Helen, Maria is left with a dwindling supply of formula, a small backup of formula her son is intolerant to, and a freezer full of breast milk now in danger of thawing.
A few days later, the nearby highway was cleared. And desperate for formula, Maria and her partner stuffed the babies without a goal in mind. Three hours outside of Asheville, they found a store that stocked the perfect formula. “They told us that everybody was going to come in and get everything and bring it to Asheville,” Maria says.
The family eventually found formula for their son and a place to stay temporarily. But not all families could be evacuated due to the storm. Instead, without clean running water, sometimes without electricity, and with no access to the outside world, many feed the baby.
For families like Maria's who rely on formula, Helen has created a crisis within a crisis; Breast milk or formula are the primary sources of nutrition for the first six months of a baby's life. The powdered formula, which is non-sterile, must be prepared with clean, boiled water – but in some parts of western North Carolina, running water isn't expected to return for several weeks.
Other families have had to throw away hundreds or thousands of ounces of stored breast milk that was no longer safe. Lane D, an Asheville-based mother of a four-month-old, was able to continue breastfeeding, but lost a month's worth of frozen breast milk she had stored in preparation for her return to work. She is trying to figure out how to clean the breast pump parts when she goes to work next week. “It's just a lot of extra logistics,” he says.
Without clean water, bottles and breast pump parts are difficult to clean, increasing the risk of infection. Jayne Carpenter, an international board-certified lactation consultant and infant feeding specialist, says local pediatric practices have already seen an uptick in gastrointestinal and diarrheal admissions in the past week. “It's the first thing we see in children when this happens,” says Carpenter.
To reduce this risk, Carpenter and other lactation consultants collect and distribute safe cleaning kits so parents can safely clean bottles and prepare powdered formula. The tools have instructions in both English and Spanish. “At times like this, if everyone is formula fed, we need to make sure they're being educated,” Carpenter says.
In the days after the storm, Jackson County resident Carpenter and her fellow lactation consultant Brandi Harrison set up four depots to collect and distribute human milk donations. Carpenter has personally provided supplies and support to families, including two who gave birth at home unassisted during or after the storm. “It took a couple of days for everybody to make their way down” to their homes in Weaverville, he says.
The North Carolina Breastfeeding Alliance is now supporting these efforts, with 30 to 40 volunteers a day assembling cleaning kits, processing milk donations and assessing needs.
It's formula, not diapers that a diaper bank rushed to distribute immediately after the North Carolina storm. Michelle Schaefer-Old, the company's CEO, describes the demand as “terrible,” especially for low-income families who can't afford to stock up in advance. “Right off the bat, we started getting requests for formula and hearing stories of families who couldn't feed their baby for 14 or 24 hours,” she says.
Donations helped the company purchase formula plates directly from manufacturers; In about a week, the bank distributed more than 5,000 containers of formula in 28 North Carolina counties affected by the hurricane.
However, he adds: “I would say we are meeting only 50% of the demand [the demand] We are looking in western North Carolina.
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At this point, meeting that need does not mean collecting additional supplies, but distributing them to the most remote and isolated communities. “What's happening in Asheville right now is that we have a lot of things,” says Roxy Robbins, an Asheville doula who co-founded The Flow of Life Yoga and maternal health nonprofit Perinatal Health Connect. “The core of what we're looking at is how to get beyond the city center and support rural communities that can't go into the city.”
Similar coalitions faced the impact of Hurricane Milton. Melissa Butler, a St. Petersburg native and postpartum doula, said birth workers began spreading the word about relief efforts. “What many of us are doing is sharing resources so they reach more people,” he says; A birth center serves as a hurricane shelter, and a pelvic floor therapist collects and distributes baby supplies.
Organizations such as Mother's Milk Bank of Florida collect and distribute 8,000 ounces of pasteurized human donor milk to 78 hospital and community partners each week. Earlier this week, they asked people in unaffected parts of the state to consider donating surplus milk to meet post-storm demand. These donations “will help ensure that babies cared for in Florida NICUs have the nutrition they need to thrive if they don't have access to their own mother's milk,” says Leanne Keith, Director of Community Engagement.
After Helen, Robbins, her business partner Sue Ann Fisher, and other birth workers soon established the Maternal Health Mutual Aid Center in Asheville. They now help evacuate families, connect them with care providers in other states, and raise funds to subsidize travel for those who cannot leave.
“People want to protect their home, they want the community to support them – that's what they know and want,” says Melissa Poole, a nurse-physician at the collaborative. “But many of them have to make the difficult decision that this is best for their children.”
Maria and her family, now staying at a family member's vacation home a few hours from their home, have not decided what their long-term plans are. He says most of the families he knows with young children have left. Some tried to go back and left again. She thinks it will be months before water returns to her area.
“It's not clear how and when we can get back to normal, what will be safe for our babies, and when we will be able to get formula for him,” she says. “How do we imagine what the future will look like?”
