CNN —
On the last Thursday in September, as Hurricane Helen continued its path of destruction from Florida to the southern Appalachians, Kim and Rod Ashby stopped by a house under construction in Elk Park, North Carolina.
It was drizzling, but the Ashby family “felt safe” because of the stilts built about 20 feet above the ground near the Tennessee state line, said daughter Kim Ashby. Jessica Meidinger recalls.
Days before Helen 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 in which Helen had already left the ground and moved into the region before the river was saturated.
More than 10 hours before the hurricane made landfall hundreds of miles away, the Greenville-Spartanburg Weather Forecast Office in South Carolina predicted: present day. ”
On the morning of September 27, the Ashby family was having breakfast when their home was washed away by the flood-prone Elk River. A neighbor took a photo of it flying away. Rod Ashby quickly grabbed his wife and three dogs. At first I was clinging to my old mattress. Meidinger said part of the wall then eventually collapsed, separating them in fast-moving debris-strewn waters.
“That was the last time he saw my mother. It was the last time anyone saw my mother,” Meidinger said of her stepfather. He survived, telling his family that he reached for a tree branch to pull himself out of the water and ran up and down the riverbank, calling for his wife.
More than a week after Helen leveled vast swathes of western North Carolina, Kim Ashby is one of the hundreds of people still missing.
“He wants to find Kim,” said Loren Meidinger, Rod Ashby’s daughter-in-law.
More than 100 deaths have been recorded in the state. Overall, Helen killed at least 231 people in six states, making it one of the deadliest hurricanes to hit the continental United States in the past 50 years. More than 300,000 people remained without power Sunday night in Georgia and the Carolinas, and more than 140,000 customers were affected in North Carolina alone, according to poweroutage.us.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has ordered an additional 500 troops to be sent to western North Carolina to support ongoing recovery efforts as hard-hit areas continue to struggle in the aftermath of Helen.
The deployment comes after Biden directed 1,000 troops last week to support response and recovery efforts. The White House said more than 6,100 National Guard troops and more than 7,000 federal personnel were on the ground supporting recovery efforts.
Hurricane Helen made landfall in Big Bend, Florida on September 26th as a Category 4 storm, creating a 500-mile path of destruction with devastating flooding, wind damage, and power outages.
A week after the storm, the smell of death overwhelms the cold mountain air above an isolated winding road in the devastated countryside of western North Carolina.
“When you drive through town, you can smell the dead bodies,” said Jazmine Rogers, 32, a nonprofit consultant who volunteers in hard-hit Asheville to help neighbors. said.
Asheville is in Buncombe County, where at least 72 deaths have been reported, the most in the state. Buncombe County spokeswoman Lillian Gorbus said the county coroner was forced to stop updating the death toll pending the arrival of a support team from the state. The governor announced Saturday that hundreds of county residents are missing or stranded as a result of the hurricane.
“I remember during Hurricane Katrina how people were talking about smells,” Rogers told CNN, her voice breaking. “You know, the smell of decay and the loss of life. That will probably stay with me for the rest of my life.”
Asheville is located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which meant the city became a “receptacle” for rain gushing down from 4,000 feet above sea level, Asheville Fire Chief Michael Casey told CNN. . The city of 95,000 people is located at the intersection of two major rivers, the French Broad and the Swannanoa River, making it vulnerable to flooding.
Much of western North Carolina, hundreds of miles from the coast, became unrecognizable. Emergency response efforts have been hampered by hundreds of destroyed roads and collapsed bridges, and complicated by persistent communications disruptions.
“My hometown basically doesn’t exist anymore. I grew up outside of Lake Lure in western North Carolina and spent every summer at Chimney Rock. That’s completely gone,” Rogers said.
“For several days, as I was driving, I was in denial. I was convinced that a tornado had come. The fact that our river had swollen so high that it swallowed everything went through my head. It was the power of water.”
Chimney Rock flooding left the area filled with debris and overturned cars.
In Chimney Rock, a village about 20 miles (32 kilometers) southeast of Asheville, no buildings or homes were left unscathed by the intense flooding. With a population of fewer than 200 people, this once idyllic mountain enclave is named for the towering granite outcroppings that overlook it.
“Everything we took for granted has literally been washed away,” Mayor Peter O’Leary told CNN affiliate WSOC-TV.
“Every business, every building was destroyed or seriously damaged,” O’Leary said.
Rogers and others said local residents are using pack mules to rescue people and deliver food, water and other necessities to residents in areas where roads are impassable. Some stranded people scrawled their names on tarpaulins in the hopes that images posted on social media would be seen by worried relatives. Many communities can only be accessed by helicopter.
“Asheville is getting a lot of attention right now, even though there are smaller communities outside of Asheville that need attention,” Rogers said.
In nearby Black Mountain, North Carolina, where about 450 people were rescued, authorities have shifted from search and rescue operations to recovery efforts, Black Mountain Fire Chief John Coffey said at a Buncombe County news conference Sunday.
Ryan Cole, Buncombe County’s assistant director of emergency services, said crews were conducting a targeted search in the area where homes were destroyed.
“We have to go through piles of rubble and utilize specialized equipment,” Cole said at a news conference Sunday.
“It will take more time because it requires a systematic approach to do it,” he says. “You’re taking it up one piece at a time.”
The number of people missing remains unknown. FEMA is working with state and local officials to confirm the total, Director DeAnn Criswell told CNN.
“When it comes to the actual landscape of Western North Carolina, you have small towns, you have larger towns, but if you live on the side of a mountain, you might want one-way, one-way traffic,” Rogers said. said. “And when a bunch of big trees fall down on the main street, people get trapped.
“What we’re talking about is entire mountainsides completely gone. Western North Carolina has little screams (or canyons) all over the place, little pockets of communities, little trailer parks. We can’t really tell you how many people are missing because of that. And if you don’t have family in the area, you probably haven’t heard of it.”
At the resort town of Maggie Valley, North Carolina, about 55 miles west of Asheville, Joseph Franklin McElroy said Wednesday that his 6-year-old twins are dealing with the disaster as an “epic adventure,” but they are He said he hasn’t discovered his favorite thing yet. The teacher, who was “like a second mother,” drowned in the storm.
“I mean, they really love this teacher,” he told CNN. “We are now faced with having to tell them that this epic adventure killed their beloved teacher.”
McElroy lamented the lack of communication between local officials and residents.
“If you lose the internet, you get nothing,” he said. “There are a lot of people who are still missing, not knowing whether their loved ones were saved or not. There’s a kind of psychological trauma that’s happening here that people don’t know about, and it’s real.”
Residents of small North Carolina town talk about hurricane’s impact on their families
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 had been building a home in Elk Park for about two years and would stop by regularly to add finishing touches. The couple, who live in Sanford, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) southwest of Raleigh, went to their vacation home Thursday to check on the situation before the storm.
Loren Meidinger said Rod noticed something was wrong on the morning of Sept. 27 while his in-laws were having breakfast. “He heard a crack and when he went outside again he noticed the footer of the house was missing,” Lauren said.
He hurried back. We have to evacuate,” I told my wife.
Within seconds the house was washed away by the river. Rod Ashby grabbed Kim Ashby and her dogs and held on desperately until the wall gave way.
He ran up and down the embankment screaming for his wife and eventually crawled to a neighbor’s house for help. Jessica and Lauren Meidinger drove him home Tuesday night.
“He wants to get back out there and keep looking,” Lauren Meidinger said.
“She’s a fighter. You know, Kim fought and beat breast cancer, and she’s been fighting her whole life,” Meidinger said of her mother-in-law. “When she comes out of the water, we’ll know she’s alive.”
Search teams using helicopters, drones and dogs have so far been unable to find her.
