I had never seen anything quite like it. As someone who lived in Central Florida for years, hurricanes were common, but the worst I'd ever experienced didn't come close to a fraction of the destruction left in the wake of Hurricane Helene. However, Florida is different from the mountains of Asheville, which I've called home for the past decade, and no one here was prepared for what Hurricane Helene would do to our mountain community.
I had just gotten home by the skin of my teeth from a trip out in San Francisco for Meta Connect 2024 on one of the last flights to make it out of Atlanta. It's enough of a miracle that I made it home before the worst of the storm kicked in, but another entirely that the planes were flying at all. I've been delayed by normal thunderstorms on countless trips in the past, and yet, here we were, flying just north of a powerful Category 4 hurricane!
