| By Eric Roston When I visited Asheville in May, eight months after Helene ripped through the region, debris and destruction still lay everywhere. I walked an industrial strip on Riverside Drive, which runs along railroad tracks and the French Broad River. Businesses there sell — or in some cases, used to sell — auto parts, fuels, clays and ceramics, and rubber and gaskets. The devastation was a lot to take in. As I was surveying the wreckage, though, one new thing in my field of vision suddenly caught my attention: the gravel under the railroad tracks.  Asheville’s River Arts District is still recovering from Helene’s damage. Photographer: Mike Belleme/Bloomberg The most mundane of materials jumped out not because of what it said about the destruction that left more than 108 dead in North Carolina and caused $60 billion damage in the state, but what it said about recovery. I’d come to Asheville armed with research conducted by Bloomberg Intelligence’s Andrew John Stevenson, showing that 36% of US economic growth this century can be linked to spending on recovering from disasters or preparing for the next one. My job was to come back with a story that showed how what we’re calling the disaster industrial complex works in action, bringing civilization back to a place instantly stripped of it during cataclysmic events like Helene. Standing there on the side of a road staring at gravel, it all came together. Helene had cut off Western North Carolina from the outside world for a time. No telecommunications, power, water or transportation. But if there was new gravel under the tracks, that meant trains could come back. If trains could come — and Norfolk Southern announced that week it started service to and from Tennessee again — they could bring in construction materials and carry out felled trees. Trains on new tracks and trucks running over rebuilt highways could bring in food, grain and malt. With the latter, Asheville’s famous beer economy could start brewing again. And where there is beer, there is civilization. The disaster industrial complex, it turns out, is a network of supply chains that help people and governments reboot after catastrophes. Dozens of interviews revealed how a single brewery relies on a world of invisible global partners — on top of its own heroic efforts — to fill kegs again. When I explained the disaster industrial complex research to economist Matthew Kahn of the University of Southern California, he brought up Milton Friedman’s famous explanation of how a pencil is made: Nobody knows. “Literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil, people who don’t speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met,” Friedman once said. As with pencils, so it is with beer: It takes a global village. There are customers of customers of customers and suppliers of suppliers of suppliers — the disaster industrial complex. From now on, when anyone asks where stories come from, I may just answer, “Sometimes the gravel under the tracks is new.” Read the first story in our series on the disaster industrial complex, a series that looks at the business of defending against and rebuilding from climate disasters and how it increasingly drives the economy. | 
