After Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina on Sept. 27, two alumni of the College of Engineering at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) answered separate calls to provide supplies and services to Asheville residents. The city had lost power and water, and record flooding had damaged and destroyed buildings and roads, making travel difficult.
Tolli Grisham (B.S., mechanical engineering, 1992; M.S., industrial engineering, 1994) collected donations ranging from diapers to pet food after talking with friends and members of the UAH community. UAH is a part of The University of Alabama System.
Taylor Reed (B.S., mechanical engineering, 2016) provided showers and laundry services through his involvement with Shower Up, a nonprofit organization that ministers to homeless residents in seven cities across the country.
UAH alumnus Taylor Reed, chief operating officer of Shower Up, a nonprofit organization that serves homeless residents, helped transport shower and laundry services to Asheville, N.C., when the city lost power and water after Hurricane Helene struck the city on Sept. 27, 2024.
Courtesy Taylor Reed
Grisham lives in Asheville but spends much of her time in North Alabama checking on her father, who lives in Florence.
“We have a pretty good network of friends and family in the North Alabama region,” she said. “I could see some of my friends, one of my old professors, in fact, posting on social media about how they just visited Asheville and they want to do something. I told a few people, ‘If you want to send supplies, we’ll be happy to take them.’ It’s kind of grown, so we’re renting a trailer.”
Grisham has been working with the UAH Foundation on an endowment. A conversation with Tammy Eskridge, senior planned giving officer, led to a UAH donation drive. Grisham and her partner, Bob Michel, stopped by campus on Oct. 11 to load those supplies into their U-Haul for the trip home to Asheville.
“We’re going to share the supplies with members of our church, the National Guard and other organizations, like BeLoved Asheville, that are taking donations,” Grisham said. “Just so much of Asheville is gone now, but when we’re ready, we need the tourists to come back.”
Reed didn’t have a direct connection to Asheville before the hurricane, but he definitely does now. When Asheville is ready for visitors, he plans to be one of them.
Emergency workers in Asheville, N.C., wait to take a shower in a trailer provided by Shower Up Huntsville. Shower Up, a national nonprofit based in Nashville, also sent a Laundry Stop trailer to help residents who lost power and water in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which hit Asheville on Sept. 27, 2024.
Courtesy Taylor Reed
Shower Up is not a disaster relief agency, but when calls kept coming from individuals, churches, even police and fire stations in Asheville, Executive Director Paul Schmitz at Shower Up headquarters in Nashville called Reed to discuss options. Reed started the Huntsville branch in 2020 and was named chief operating officer early this year.
“Disaster relief is not something we’re budgeted to do,” said Reed, noting that Shower Up is funded completely by donations. “But the need was so great. Within the hour, we threw some stuff in a bag and hooked the trailers up and started rolling.”
The men took one of Huntsville’s two Shower Up trailers plus one of the nonprofit’s Laundry Stop trailers from Nashville. They set up shop in an Asheville church parking lot on Oct. 1. Reed remained in Asheville until Oct. 6. During those six days, they operated from 7:30 a.m. to 3 a.m. Reed left the trailers with trained volunteers when he returned to Huntsville.
“We gave 2,000 showers and did 2,000 loads of laundry,” he said on Oct. 9, describing those six days. “We’ve surpassed that now. We’re doing almost 400 showers and 400 loads of laundry a day.”
Reed saw a strong connection between the people they met in Asheville and those he encounters in Huntsville.
“In Asheville, we’re serving a whole different population than we typically serve, but they have lost their houses and lost everything. Time and time again, people walked out of the shower and said, ‘Wow, I feel human again.’ That’s something I hear daily in Huntsville from people who are experiencing homelessness. It just shows you that humanity has a commonality, and everybody wants to feel good, clean and human.”
