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Hurricane Helene Hits Home [1]

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Date: 2024-10-02

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.

Hear reporter Claire Carlson narrate her column on Keep It Rural, a series from the Rural Remix podcast.

Hey there, Keep It Rural readers. This week’s edition is a little different than normal because of the devastation Hurricane Helene wrought on much of the Southeast United States last weekend.

Rural and urban communities in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee experienced historic flooding that destroyed homes and wiped out businesses. As of October 1, the death toll is at 125 people – and counting.

This hurricane was right at the Daily Yonder’s doorstep: one of our reporters, Sarah Melotte, is currently unable to get to her home in Bakersville, North Carolina. She lives in the western part of the state where roads in and out are completely flooded. I talked to her about what it’s been like to see her community reeling from a hurricane, and what it all means for rural Appalachia.

If you want to hear our conversation instead of reading it, head over to the Rural Remix podcast channel today, October 2, where an extended audio version of this interview is available.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

So Sarah, you’re living in North Carolina. We were actually together in Oregon for a staff meeting right before this hurricane really hit Appalachia, and you flew back during the storm. So I’m wondering if you can pick up the story from there. What was it like to arrive in North Carolina and how were those first few days?

Well, I learned about this storm in the hotel lobby when we were still in Oregon and it was on the news and I was like, “oh, a hurricane, it’s hurricane season. I forgot about that.” I live in Western North Carolina in the mountains, so it’s not usually something that we have to worry about other than a little bit of rain.

So I got texts from people saying that my flight might be canceled, and I don’t know, I get texts like that all the time when it rains. So I didn’t think much of it. I got to the airport in Portland, [Oregon], and I actually ended up changing my flight. So I was supposed to fly into Asheville because I live only about an hour north of Asheville. That’s the closest airport to me. I re-booked my flight to Charlotte instead.

And so Charlotte, North Carolina, is not in the mountains, it’s not in Western North Carolina. It got some rain and I think experienced a lot of power outages, but that was about it. I landed safely, but I haven’t been able to get back up home yet because I’ve been staying in Spartanburg, South Carolina, with my girlfriend’s parents and there’s been power outages and trees down. But we didn’t get the flooding in South Carolina that we got in North Carolina.

So I haven’t been on the ground in person to see all of the wreckage. I’ve seen lots of pictures and videos, and I’ve heard from our neighbor [in North Carolina] that [my house] only had a roof leak and it didn’t destroy everything in our house.

I am considering myself very lucky, and I was just hugging my dog and my partner a lot this weekend and feeling grateful that we were all together and not separated because there were a lot of friends in North Carolina that we didn’t immediately hear from, and we were very scared about if they were safe or not. And so thankfully, I think as of last night – so that would’ve been Sunday night by the time this publishes – we have heard from everyone that we know in Mitchell County, which is where Spruce Pine is.

Tell me about Spruce Pine a bit, and then if you wanted to talk about Penland, that could be very interesting.

So I live in a rural county about halfway between Boone and Asheville. I live in a town called Bakersville in Mitchell County, which is about 20 minutes outside of Spruce Pine. Spruce Pine got hit really bad. The entire downtown on Lower Street, which is the street closest to the Toe River that flooded so badly, was totally underwater. A historic walking bridge got totally swept away, and there’s a lot of local efforts on the ground to do things about it.

My partner works at the Penland School of Craft, which is an internationally-known folk craft school, and they have a big campus with lots of lodging, so they’re currently a shelter right now. And we know a few of our friends who are kind of doing on-the-ground relief work and hiking through the woods with chainsaws and stuff, trying to knock on doors and find and check on people.

This sounds eerily similar to some of the floods that the Daily Yonder has covered before, like the East Kentucky floods.

Yeah. Western North Carolina is considered closed, like lots of road closures and stuff. I had a [reporting] trip planned that I’m on right now. And so I feel torn because part of me feels like I should go back, but I don’t even know if I can get up there right now. And I guess [when I’m back] I’ll spend most of my energy volunteering with recovery efforts.

But it’s really devastating to see all the videos and I just, yeah, I’m definitely losing sleep over it. I can’t even imagine what other people who’ve actually fared a lot worse than me are feeling right now. It’s really scary.

Do you know when Western North Carolina will be open? Has there been any information given or is it just closed for the foreseeable future?

There’s not a lot of information. It’s closed for the foreseeable future as far as I know. And at the local level in my county, at least as far as the updated information that I have, people are very irritated that they haven’t heard from local government officials yet. And I don’t know if that’s because [the officials] don’t have power and service and can’t put anything online, but people are very desperate for reassurance from their local government officials and they’re silent.

That’s not [to say] anything disparaging about them at all. It’s just that the situation is made worse by the fact that people don’t have the information that they desperately want because they either don’t have access to cell service or just because there’s so many unknowns about how long it’s going to take to recover. I mean, I don’t have any authoritative source on this – these are just estimates I’ve seen online: Some people are saying it’s going to be two months before we have power again, and I don’t know, I haven’t heard when we’re supposed to get power again. I just can’t imagine that it would be anytime soon.

Obviously you’re worried about Mitchell County. Are there any other communities that you’ve been paying close attention to that you feel like folks need to remember as we’re thinking about hurricane recovery in the months to come?

I think places like Marshall, which is also about 45 minutes to an hour outside Asheville, it’s another rural community. It’s on the French Broad River. So all of these small towns right on these major Western North Carolina rivers…These places look like huge sand pits now that some of the water has receded. It’s crazy. Whole businesses have been washed out.

And I think there’s a little bit of concern that because bigger places like Asheville got hit really hard, they’re dealing with their own recovery efforts. And then places like Chimney Rock, which is a rural place, but it’s also extremely heavily touristed and is a beloved location by lots of different people. People are a little bit anxious because these sorts of places are getting a lot of attention and they’re worried that towns like Spruce Pine or Marshall might be forgotten in the national coverage just because they’re smaller and because there’s not as heavy of a tourism industry there.

I think the final question I wanted to ask you, as someone who grew up in South Carolina and now lives in North Carolina – has this level of storm ever been on your radar of possibility? I read that Asheville is 300 miles from the coast. It’s over 2,000 feet of elevation. Yet it has been devastated by flooding, and that’s a risk that people talk about a lot for coastal communities, but it seems that with climate change, that is a risk for communities farther inland as well.

So I’m just curious if you ever thought you would see this as someone who has spent a lot of time in both Carolinas?

No, this is so shocking. I’ve never lived near the coast, I was in the foothills of the southern Appalachian mountains in Spartanburg County growing up. I didn’t grow up on the coast with bad hurricanes. I remember just, “oh, there’s a hurricane hitting Myrtle Beach. We’re going to get some rain.” And then that was it. And the times that we did have power outages, they were like ice storms for a few days.

But yeah, this is so shocking. I have two sisters that live in Charleston, South Carolina, so they’re down at the coast and they didn’t get anything and they didn’t have to go anywhere, and they stayed at home while we [up in the mountains] got the hurricane effects. That’s mind-blowing to me.

Do you have reporting ideas to share about Hurricane Helene and its aftermath? Email Sarah Melotte at [email protected].

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