Insights from Katie Myers, Climate Reporter for Grist & Blue Ridge Public Radio
Posting: Tuesday, March 11, 2025
Katie Myers covers climate issues in Appalachia through a collaboration between Blue Ridge Public Radio (BPR) and Grist. Her freelance work has been featured by the BBC, NPR, Belt Magazine, Scalawag Magazine and other publications.
Katie Myers reports on climate issues in Appalachia through a partnership between Blue Ridge Public Radio and Grist, focusing on the environmental and economic impacts of climate change in western North Carolina. She previously served as a climate solutions fellow at Grist, covering fossil fuel transitions in the region. Myers has also reported for Ohio Valley ReSource and WMMT 88.7 FM in Whitesburg, Kentucky.
Her freelance work has appeared in the BBC, NPR, Belt Magazine and Scalawag Magazine, among others. In addition to journalism, Myers is a playwright whose works have been featured by Tiger Lily Theatre, Tennessee Playwrights Studio, and Cattywampus Puppet Council.
To hear more about her experiences, we reached out to Myers to share her thoughts.
Katie Myers
Climate Reporter
Q. What has been the most impactful story you've worked on so far, and what response did it get?
I think my most impactful story was probably a story centering on public housing after the storm (Hurricane Helene), one in a line of stories about the public health impacts of the floodwaters. At the time, there was no running water or sewer in Asheville and many other towns, and hundreds of boil water notices throughout the region. I collaborated on this story with Laura Hackett of Blue Ridge Public Radio, going into an Asheville public housing complex with a crew called the "Flush Brigade" who were helping the elderly and disabled haul water to their homes to flush their toilets, fending off the potentially disastrous public health consequences that arise from lack of water, even as the public was beginning to condemn the local housing authority for conditions inside the apartments. Conditions were truly grim: pieces of the ceiling peeling off, years of grime on the floor, a clear lack of sanitation
I spun this out into a story for Grist, another collaboration with Zoya Tierstein, about the public health risks from the flood, which proved to be helpful as volunteers navigated an uncertain information environment and unknown risks.
Q. Hurricane Helene hit just weeks after you started. How did that affect your climate reporting?
I don't recommend or advise reporting through a natural disaster if you can avoid it. It's funny, because a lot of people build their career on this kind of work, but quite frankly, the day-to-day experience of it is miserable, draining and sad. I was grateful to be part of an incredible team with the vision and energy to see this time through and serve their community through it.
Destruction post-Helene in Barnardsville NC
It's a moment where the differences in mission between local and national reporters really come into play. As a national reporter, my focus would have been on winnowing down and digging deep into a few precise angles. However, as a local reporter, my role was urgent: I had to fill desperate and vital information needs, like, where to get water, where to get gas, when are the lights and internet coming back, which roads are open. It blew open the idea of what a climate reporter is: suddenly everyone on staff was a climate reporter in one way or another. With my prior experience in flood reporting (also not by choice), I found myself helping the newsroom understand some steps in the response and recovery process. When people were confused about FEMA's role in the community, I was able to provide some clarity; I knew through my experiences with the Kentucky flood that the timeline for recovery runs in not just months but years, so I tried to help my colleagues avoid burnout as best I could.
All through it, I've tried to keep my eye on the long-term implications of decisions being made right now, given that as a climate reporter, a lot of the story you're really telling is about time; the way fossil fuel burning heaps the industrial activity of the past upon the present, the assumptions that are made about the frequency of disaster and when we might expect to see the next one, the way a thousand years' worth of risk is all of a sudden collapsed into fifty years, or ten, or one or two years. If I've reported on two thousand-year floods in the same region and I'm thirty-one years old, well. That speaks for itself.
Q. Blue Ridge Public Radio was a real lifeline for Western North Carolina after Helene. Say more about how that was for you in your day-to-day reporting.
It was a mad dash every single day for a couple of months. We kept a liveblog running that we updated several times daily, and we each gradually fell into niches that we tracked. In the first weeks, we just drove and drove, going as many places as we could to see what was going on as the hosts stayed live on air throughout the day, coming back at the end of the day to report back on what we'd seen.
Over time, the things we were reporting on solidified, but due to Helene we were really a climate newsroom. There were a couple of people tracking water service restoration, somebody tracked FEMA housing, et cetera. I often reported on DEQ and EPA visits, on grid infrastructure repairs, and on public health issues that arose from the floodwaters; lately I've covered the debris removal process and its environmental complications, and the way that the recovery can be environmentally disastrous if not done carefully, and how that conflicts with the urgent need for human life and commerce to continue as before.
I was grateful to be performing an essential service for the communities around me, to the point where literally anywhere I went, the conversation invariably turned to Helene, and then, if I mentioned I worked for BPR, I'd get such an incredibly positive response. From a plumber I talked to on the phone, to baristas and teachers and grocery store clerks and climate scientists, I heard so many incredible stories about how radio was a lifeline as people searched for information, a candle in the darkness. It was mine, too, a way to be useful and do something good with a terrible and confusing event.
A church service in Swannanoa immediately after Helene.
Q. How have collaborations with Grist and other outlets helped amplify your work?
Grist is amazing for not only its big-picture climate perspective, but the wealth of knowledge among its editorial team. As we've muddled our way through understanding FEMA, floodplain zoning, and other complex issues, I really relied on the connections at Grist to help me understand what was happening and point me to incredible expert sources. Grist also is special because it gives a platform to important local stories with national resonance and ensure that the disasters that so often get lost in the news cycle aren't forgotten.
It's also helped us get vital information out to the community. As Lyndsey Gilpin, Grist's community engagement manager, and I worked on service journalism around FEMA applications, our syndication network was able to send that work out to local newspapers, such as one of our frequent syndication partners, widely read Asheville alt-weekly Mountain Xpress.
Q. What do you hope to accomplish in the coming year?
We're going to see the clock set back on a lot of major climate legislation from the past few years, and that's going to trickle down into the community level. I'm already hearing about climate resilience research postponed, and issues accessing grant funds for conservation and community solar, and of course, the people who administer and work for federal programs are being fired. I'm planning to follow what happens closely and trace the impacts of federal decisions on the ground, while also not getting too distracted by the pace of events as they unfold.
This is also the time to start really paying attention to the accountability stories that emerge from Helene. As debris removal contractors ramp up their work and communities make plans on where to rebuild, we'll be following the progress closely, and thinking about what Helene means for the future of housing in a region that's long been in a housing crisis. Long-term disaster coverage is a vital function of local news and I'll be doing it to the best of my ability.
About Grist: Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change. Since 1999, we have used the power of journalism to engage the public about the perils of one of the most existential threats we face. We seek to document the often unequal impacts of climate change on communities in the United States and globally — as well as to show the promise of equitable climate solutions. Read online: www.grist.org
About Blue Ridge Public Radio: Blue Ridge Public Radio creates and curates content that informs, inspires, connects, and reflects the people and places of Western North Carolina. BPR cultivates a more engaged, curious, and empathetic public by listening deeply and embracing diversity. Read online: www.bpr.org
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Media Contact: Rusty Coats, Executive Director | rusty@jfp-local.org | (813) 277-8959
