How Helene devastated western North Carolina and left communities in ruins

CNN
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On the last Thursday of September, as Hurricane Helene began its path of destruction from Florida to the southern Appalachians, Kim and Rod Ashby stopped by the house they were building in Elk Park, North Carolina.

It was raining lightly, but the Ashbys “felt safe there,” recalled Kim Ashby's daughter, Jessica Meidinger, with columns building their second home about 20 feet above the ground near the Tennessee state line.

Days before Helene made landfall in Florida, the National Weather Service in North Carolina warned of a historic combination of heavy rain, life-threatening flooding and catastrophic landslides along the mountains. A system that entered the area before Helene had already flooded the ground and rivers.

More than 10 hours before the hurricane would make landfall hundreds of miles away, the Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina weather forecast office predicted, “This will be one of the most significant weather events to occur in the western portions of the area in modern times.” .”

On the morning of September 27, the Ashbys were eating breakfast when their home was swept away by the flood-prone Elk River. A neighbor took a photo as it floated away. Rod Ashby immediately grabbed his wife and their three dogs. At first they clung to an old mattress. Then there was a section of the wall that eventually fell apart, separating them in the fast-flowing, debris-strewn water, according to Meidinger.

“That was the last time he saw my mother. “The last time anyone saw my mother,” Meidinger said of her stepfather. He survived and told his family that he grabbed a tree branch to pull himself out of the water and then ran up and down the riverbank calling for his wife.

More than a week after Helene leveled much of western North Carolina, Kim Ashby is among the hundreds of people still missing. More than 100 deaths have been recorded in the state. In total, Helene killed more than 200 people across six states, one of the deadliest hurricanes to hit the U.S. mainland in the past 50 years.

“He wants to find Kim,” said Lauren Meidinger, Rod Ashby’s daughter-in-law.

Hurricane Helene hit Big Bend, Florida, on September 26 as a Category 4 hurricane, leaving a 500-mile path of destruction with catastrophic flooding, devastating winds and power outages.

A week after the storm, the smell of death overwhelms the cool mountain air over the remote, winding roads of devastated rural western North Carolina.

“You drive by towns and you can smell the bodies,” said Jazmine Rodgers, 32, a nonprofit consultant who volunteers to help neighbors in the hardest-hit city of Asheville.

Asheville is in Buncombe County, where at least 72 deaths have been reported, the most in the state. According to Buncombe County spokeswoman Lillian Govus, the county coroner had to stop updating the death toll and was waiting for a state support team to arrive to assist. Hundreds of county residents are either missing or stranded after the hurricane, Govus said Saturday.

“I remember people talking about the smells during Hurricane Katrina,” Rodgers told CNN, her voice breaking. “You know, the smell of decay and the smell of loss of life. That’s something I’ll probably remember for the rest of my life.”

Asheville sits in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which meant the city became a “catch basin” for rain that flows 4,000 feet down, Asheville Fire Chief Michael Cayse told CNN. The city of 95,000 sits at the intersection of two major rivers, the French Broad and the Swannanoa, making it vulnerable to flooding.

Large parts of western North Carolina, hundreds of miles from the coast, are no longer recognizable. The emergency response was complicated by hundreds of decimated roads and collapsed bridges and complicated by ongoing communications outages.

“My hometown basically doesn’t exist anymore. I grew up in western North Carolina outside of Lake Lure and spent every summer at Chimney Rock. It’s completely gone,” Rodgers said.

“I was in denial for a few days as I drove around. I was convinced a tornado had come through. I couldn't imagine that our river would swell so much that it would take everything with it. It’s just the power of water.”

The flooding in Chimney Rock left areas full of debris and overturned cars.

In Chimney Rock, a village about 20 miles southeast of Asheville, no building or home was spared from the raging floods. With a population of less than 200 people, the once idyllic mountain enclave is named for the towering granite cliff that dominates it.

“Everything you take for granted has literally been washed away,” Mayor Peter O'Leary told CNN affiliate WSOC-TV.

“Every single business, every single building was destroyed or severely damaged,” O'Leary said.

Rodgers and others said locals were using pack mules to help rescue people and deliver food, water and other essential supplies to residents in areas where roads remained impassable. Some of those stranded scribbled their names on tarpaulins in the hope that the images posted on social media would be seen by worried relatives. Some communities can only be reached by helicopter.

“Now Asheville is getting so much attention, even though there are smaller communities outside of Asheville that also need attention,” Rodgers said.

The number of people still missing remains unclear. FEMA worked with state and local officials to confirm the total, Administrator Deanne Criswell told CNN.

“If you talk about the actual landscape in western North Carolina, there are small towns and larger towns, but if you live on a mountainside you might want to have a way in and a way out,” Rodgers said. “And when a bunch of big trees fall on your main street, people are trapped.

“We are talking about entire mountain slopes completely disappearing. We can't really explain how many people are missing because there are small cries (or valleys), small settlements, and small trailer parks all over western North Carolina. And if you don’t have family in these areas, you’ve probably never heard of them.”

In the resort town of Maggie Valley, North Carolina, about 35 miles west of Asheville, Joseph Franklin McElroy said Wednesday his 6-year-old twins were coping with the disaster by seeing it as a “big adventure” but still knew nothing about their favorite die The teacher drowned – “like a second mother” – during the storm.

“I mean, they really love this teacher,” he told CNN. “Now we must tell them that this great adventure has killed their beloved teacher.”

McElroy lamented what he called poor communication between local authorities and residents.

“You know, if the internet goes down, we have nothing,” he said. “Many people still miss their loved ones and do not know whether they have been saved. There’s some kind of psychological trauma here that people don’t know about and it’s real.”

A resident of a small town in North Carolina talks about the hurricane's impact on her family

Kim Ashby, who taught in North Carolina schools for 20 years, is described by her daughter Jessica Meidinger as “the glue that holds everyone together.”

Kim and Rod Ashby have been building the Elk Park home for about two years and come in regularly to put the finishing touches on the home. The couple lives in Sanford, about 45 miles southwest of Raleigh, but went to their second home Thursday to check on it ahead of the storm.

Lauren Meidinger said her in-laws were having breakfast the morning of Sept. 27 when Rod noticed something was wrong. “He heard a crack. He went back outside and saw the footer of the house was gone,” Lauren said.

He stormed back inside. “Hey, we need to get dressed. We have to evacuate,” he said to his wife.

Within seconds the house was swept into the river. Rod Ashby grabbed Kim Ashby and the dogs and they desperately clung to a section of wall until it fell apart.

He paced up and down the bank, screaming for his wife, before finally crawling to a neighbor's house and asking for help. Jessica and Lauren Meidinger brought him to their home on Tuesday evening.

“He wants to be back up there and keep looking,” Lauren Meidinger said.

“She is a fighter. You know, Kim fought and beat breast cancer, and she fought her whole life,” Meidinger said of her mother-in-law. “We know she’s alive when she comes out of the water.”

Search parties with helicopters, drones and dogs have not yet been able to locate them.