After keeping vigil all night, Jason Fesperman, 32, decided it was finally safe to sleep. By 6am last Friday, he figured that the worst of the rain from Hurricane Helene had passed. Jonathan Creek, the normally ankle-deep stream that runs through his backyard in Maggie Valley, North Carolina, had stayed within its banks – though barely.
Just over two hours later, his wife Dan woke him in a panic. Heavy rain continued past 9am in Maggie Valley, and by 8.30am, floodwaters were rising fast. Their home was underwater up to the windows.
“Water was filling up, I would say, probably about an inch a minute,” he said. “I mean, it was pouring in, from the toilets, the windows, both doors.”
Blindly stuffing clean laundry into a bag, he joined his wife and seven-year-old son outside and somehow managed to start the Jeep, which was underwater to the hood. Now, the family is staying at an evacuation shelter with 30 other storm survivors, wondering what comes next.
Fesperman and his family are some of the lucky ones – they made it out with their lives. More than 200 people have now been confirmed dead, both in Florida where the hurricane first made landfall and across a five-state region in the southern Appalachians that includes North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia. That number continues to rise as search and rescue efforts remain ongoing. The disaster has destroyed towns, inflicted billions of dollars in damage, and prompted Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump to visit the stricken region.
The catastrophe has unfolded in an area that was not meant to bear the brunt of Helene’s power, unleashing effects worse than the fabled flood of 1916. But the climate crisis has upended traditional models of hurricane season – generating storms that are faster, wetter and more powerful.
Already a powerful storm on its own, Helene’s impact was bolstered by record-setting rains in the days preceding its arrival. Western North Carolina, which saw some of the worst effects, had been grappling with drought for over two months before the storm’s arrival. But heavy rains on Wednesday and Thursday saturated the soils and swelled the rivers. A weather station at the Asheville airport reported nearly 10 inches of rain over that two-day period.
Helene made landfall on the Florida Gulf coast as a category 4 hurricane and moved rapidly north. Hurricane-force winds and tornadoes swept through many of the affected communities, toppling trees and power lines, but water was by far the more destructive force.
Average rainfall varies widely within the mountain region, but in many places it falls somewhere between 40in and 100in annually. Between 8am last Thursday and 8am on Monday, rainfalls north of 10in were common across western North Carolina. Hendersonville and Spruce Pine saw more than 20in, and Busick, an unincorporated community an hour north-east of Asheville, recorded an unprecedented 30.78in. These totals are in line with the forecast, said Steve Wilkinson, meteorologist-in-charge for the National Weather Service forecast office in Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina. But it was difficult to comprehend the scale of devastation such a storm would unleash.
“When you start talking about really specific impacts, it’s hard to have imagination ahead of time that something this extreme could have the impact it did,” he said.
When rain falls on the coast, it’s able to spread out over flat land, absorb into coastal marshes, and eventually drain back into the ocean. But in the mountains, water must follow topography, searching for the path of least resistance as it charges downhill. Heavy rains in the upper elevations gather force as they descend, converging with runoff from other swollen tributaries to turn creeks and rivers into roaring oceans.
The water rushed through with devastating force, realigning riverbeds, ripping out roads, and obliterating entire communities. Wind gusts, in many places between 50 and 70mph, toppled trees and power lines already unsteady in the saturated soil. High flow on the Broad River combined with heavy local runoff to all but wipe the tourist town of Chimney Rock off the map. Just over the state line in Erwin, Tennessee, a raging Nolichucky River destroyed the town’s hospital and industrial park, also tearing out part of nearby Interstate 26.
“We’re just a mourning community,” said Erwin’s mayor, Glenn White. “We are just heartbroken that our friends lost their lives. That’s the biggest issue for all of us.”
It’s been a week since the storm hit, and the scale of damage is still unknown.
The death toll continues to rise as first responders search for the missing and make their way into communities rendered unreachable. Helene caused near-complete cellphone and internet outages throughout the region, and some services have yet to be restored. Many people remain without power or potable water – in many cases with no definitive timeline for restoration. Some neighborhoods are accessible only by air.
Entire sections of Interstate 40 through the Pigeon River Gorge, a critical commercial corridor connecting Tennessee and Haywood county just west of Asheville, have been ripped away. I-26 is impassable where the Nolichucky blasted through it at Erwin. There is no estimated timeframe for rebuilding these roads, but it will take months, at least.
For many, it’s hard to imagine a way forward. But this is not the first time Zeb Smathers, mayor of the town of Canton, 15 minutes west of Asheville, has had to find the path. In 2021, catastrophic flooding from Tropical Storm Fred ravaged the tiny upstream community of Cruso before ripping through Canton. Smathers worked hard to convince Canton businesses to stay in town and help the community rebuild from this “once-in-a-lifetime” storm – which came just 17 years after another extensive flood, delivered by hurricanes Frances and Ivan. The town was still recovering from the onslaught when Helene arrived.
“Going to the businesses in this district, three years ago, there was an expectation of, ‘Hey, this is once in a lifetime. We’ll get you back up,’” Smathers said. “I’m not doing that this time. If they want to leave and say, ‘This is too much. We can’t do this time and time again,’ I’ll support them. If they want to stay, I’ll support them. That’s different this time, but it’s also reality. We have to operate and lead in the world that is, not the world we wish that was.”
As Jonathan Ammons, 39, surveys the wreckage of his home town of Asheville, he finds recovery hard to fathom. Asheville, a popular tourist destination known for its food, beer, music, art, and idyllic mountain setting, has been transformed. Music venues, breweries, restaurants, artist studios – all ravaged by the flood.
“It’s hard to imagine an environment where this city recovers in a year, even five,” Ammons said. “The landscape isn’t the only thing that’s been changed. All of the independent businesses have been crushed and wiped off the map. All of the small towns people would visit when they are coming here are just gone. I did aid work after Katrina in St Louis and New Orleans, and this is on that level of destruction.”
Ammons and his girlfriend Claire Winkler, 51, count themselves lucky to be alive. They left Winkler’s apartment along the Swannanoa River – “the most beautiful and idyllic place you would ever see”, as Ammons described it – at 4.30am on Friday, wading through waist-deep water to ensure they would be able to make it out to feed a cat owned by Winkler’s daughter, who was out of town. They weathered the rest of the storm at her house, safe from the floods, and were not prepared for the sight that awaited them when they returned to the apartment later that day.
As the river rose, most people in the apartment complex moved their cars uphill to the nearby Root Bar for safekeeping. But that building was demolished, a tree shoved through the middle of the two walls and roof that remained.
“We hiked up the hill and walked across that lot, and we could kind of see it rising up on the horizon of the apartment, and there was an entire building gone,” Ammons said.
The missing building had smashed against a bridge, reduced to little more than a pile of sticks. The couple waded through the 6in of mud coating the stairwell to Winkler’s third-floor apartment, which looked “as though you just put an entire living room in a washing machine and turned it on”. Winkler, a bartender, is out of both a job and a home. Ammons, a freelance food journalist who supplements his income managing catering and craft cocktail events, is missing out on the busiest months of the year. But these hardships feel small compared with the suffering of others.
The day after the flood, Ammons saw a woman standing to the side of the rubble. He remembered seeing her two small kids around the apartments. The woman said she was looking for her ex-husband, who lived in the complex’s first building.
“I pointed to the bridge, and I said, ‘That is the first building,’” Ammons recalled. Cadaver dogs were sniffing through the wreckage as he spoke.
In the face of such tragic loss, it’s hard for local leaders to even think about the logistics of rebuilding infrastructure, economy, community. But, said White: “We know that issue’s coming and coming fast.”
“We have to keep going,” said Smathers. “What’s the alternative? Do we abandon home, or do we fight for it?”
For Smathers, White, Ammons, and so many others who call the southern Appalachians home, the answer is clear.
“I have no intention of leaving,” Ammons said.
