As you know, we produced a film about the 1916 flood at its 100th anniversary 8 years ago. The focus of that film was to tell the cautionary tale that we live in a flood-prone and landslide-prone area and that although we cannot control the weather, we can control how we live, where we build and how we prepare ourselves whenever nature shows us her ferocious side.
We brought that film to dozens of communities throughout Western North Carolina, to policymakers in several counties, to emergency responders to help them better prepare for weather events like the 1916 flood and ultimately to PBS so that thousands of people could understand the full extent of what elders who lived through major floods had learned.
I know oral histories and films don't fix roofs or put food on the table, but I truly believe that the better we understand the past and how folks coped with similar situations in the past, the stronger we become and the better prepared we are.
Behind the scenes, we have been working diligently to insure many of the oral histories we produced during film production on Come Hell or High Water, Remembering the 1916 Flood are available to you. You can find them at our Elder Wisdom Oral History Archive here:
https://saveculture.org/elder-...
