I'm going to pick on these chuckle****s on purpose because they deserve it.

Notice something -- every one of their "City Council" is a woman.  So much diversity that not one man is on the council.  Not one serious person is on the council either.

I've been there several times.  The homeless issue, many of them drug-addled and aggressive, is significant.  So are many other issues.  Like, for example, the "reclaiming of River Arts" which of course did happen but nobody talks about why the original industrial users there abandoned it: Its in the floodplain and you know what that means.

Or are you a chuckle****?

Apparently most of the people there are, because between there and Biltmore Village, also in the floodplain, it of course did mean exactly that.  Apparently at the same time critical infrastructure is also in said floodplain, including water processing, electrical and communications as all of that got ****ed too.

Now I'm sure some of that (and maybe even the majority) predates these chuckle****s who can't think beyond their pronouns and were elected because they had vaginas instead of brains.  Of course all the tax revenue collected by said chuckle****s had to go to things other than alleviating any of these concerns either, which is proof they were elected for other than their mental prowess.

After all its far more important to be "compassionate" than to protect the safety and infrastructure of your residents, right?

Comms aren't that complicated these days.  Starlink terminals are currently $300 but let's say you pay the full-boat former $600 price for them.  You buy 1,000 of them between the city and county; that's $600,000.  Now add a $300 1kw generator for each and have a rotating fuel supply well away from the floodplain that is part of the rotation for your police cars so its nice and fresh.  Stick all of them in a warehouse against just such a need.  Deputize 1,500 people that can and will operate and protect them, including bringing their own arms and ammunition and pass an ordinance that if in use in an emergency anyone attempting to steal or tamper with them can and will be shot, and the city accepts liability for any attempted civil suit over same.

Now you pay someone with competence (fancy that!) to be prepared to engineer where those go and how they interconnect, if at all, including multiple high-gain directional antennas and external WiFi APs to attach to each, so as to provide coverage to the city and surrounding environs.  Will you hit everyone and everywhere?  No, but you can identify where roads and bridges are likely to be damaged or destroyed and thus who will get cut off, and you can cover the area sufficiently.  Each will support a hundred or so users in this fashion so do the work and the math.  Modern cellphones all support "WiFi calling" so if you can get such a signal into an area people now have limited but functional communications -- SMS and phone calls, specifically.  Blackball all video attempts and similar so you don't have some chucklehead trying to watch Pornhub on it and screw his neighbors.  There's 100,000 people covered which in a community of 3-4x that means basically everyone has something until you can get the regular plant back in full operation.

Is this a perfect solution?  No, but its better than no solution and its cheap by comparison to alternatives and works every time; the hardware costs about a million bucks all-in and the service is zero until you need it, then it has a $150,000 per month cost.  Yes, that's real money, but in the grand scheme of things its small-ball for a county and city.  At the same time you get up the ass of the telecommunications providers and demand they resolve all single-point failures and prove they have or you will revoke their easements and business licenses, which as a City Council (in concert with the County Commission and its administration) you can do.

You also would have analyzed where the water plant processing, pumping and control systems are and remedied those that some former chuckle**** put in the floodplain!  Can you prevent main breaks and such when bridges and roads get washed out?  No, but you can put isolation valves in appropriate places so you can close those and prevent collapse of the entire system.  You can also get up the ass of the electrical providers (Duke in this case) and engage in a relentless pressure campaign so they aren't chuckle****s either.  Can you fix all of that?  No, once again but you can stop impeding things like keeping tree fall lines away from power lines which many municipalities in fact do actively obstruct in the name of being "green" and then when there's a storm they act all surprised that trees fell on the power lines and took them out.

Of course the City Council didn't do any of that and now the entire ****ing thing -- power, water and comms -- is offline and likely will be for weeks.

Oh by the way you can bet all the private wells, when public water came in, were demanded to be capped so nobody's got them anymore even if they used to.  Isn't that special.

You can also make damn sure that one of the licensees for ordinary radio has appropriate redundancy including fueled generators and transmission equipment so that when there is a serious problem you can get information to people on an immediate and continuing basis.

And finally, you can put yourselves at risk of being the first ones ****ed if you get it wrong because you're a chuckle**** by living in the core areas to be protected with no special considerations like your own private police and priority, never mind sharing the same risk in terms of firearms ownership and carry restrictions.  If everyone isn't safe neither are you and thus you have a damned good reason to make sure everyone is.

There's more, of course, but this is a good start.

Did Asheville do any of it?

Not from all appearances.

To those blaming "climate change" they're the reason its happening; rather than spend the time, effort and funds which all wind up with carbon based fuels being expended and available they're virtue-signaling about this and that which has no chance of doing anything useful and as you can now see is getting people killed.

You want to be a chuckle****?  If you're living somewhere that puts pronouns and claims "diversity" when their entire city council is absolutely the opposite of it, and then proves that none of them can think their way out of a paper bag, you get to deal with what is going on right there, right now -- and yes, you too are a chuckle****.

Incidentally if you want to know why FEMA hasn't bought ten thousand Starlink terminals and figured out the logistics of blanketing an impacted area with them you can look right here for the reason:

FEMA is better able to serve the needs of diverse communities when its leadership and staff reflect the communities it serves. Diversity, equity, and inclusion cannot be optional; they must be core components of how the agency conducts itself internally and executes its mission.

Put trust in those chuckle****s and you're going to be dead.