Finalist: Staff of The Washington Post

Scenes of destruction and suffering lay almost everywhere in Swannanoa, N.C. — cars in tree limbs, mangled homes, mud-choked roads and people desperate for water and food.

By Brady Dennis

SWANNANOA, N.C. — There was no worship service Sunday morning at the First Baptist Church. No hymns or sermons or Communion. But there were hugs in the parking lot and tears running down tired faces — and, importantly, food and water for anyone finally able to make their way out from the devastation that seems to have swallowed this mountain town.

Pastor Jeff Dowdy and his wife, Melody, spent more than four hours chain-sawing their way out of their neighborhood to help get an aid station up and running, alongside the Red Cross.

“We are just trying to do whatever we can,” said Jeff, 48. “This is not a typical Sunday morning. But this is ministry, too.”

Just down the hill, and in every direction, lay almost indescribable scenes of destruction and suffering. Cars sat high in tree limbs by the Swannanoa River. Homes had been tossed and mangled, then deposited far from their foundations — sometimes upside down, sometimes torn in half — wherever the river left them.

A thick layer of mud covered the town, leaving many roads impassible and many homes and businesses buried, like some modern-day Pompeii. Even as the trees on the slopes above showed their first hint of autumn color, the air smelled heavy with muck and debris.

More than two days after Helene, National Guard troops came and went. Ambulances and police and fire sirens blared by every few minutes, as search-and-rescue missions pressed on. So many side roads remained impassable, the fate of the residents along them a mystery, just as the fate of so many small communities in this verdant corner of western North Carolina remain shrouded amid the lack of contact with the outside world.

Joe Dancy and Jenna Shaw described a scene from early Friday in Swannanoa that would seem almost hard to believe, if so many others here did not have similar tales of narrow, harrowing escape in the face of an unprecedented catastrophe.

Before dawn, they said, they awoke to walk their dog and saw water creeping up the yard. In less than an hour, as the water rose more than 4 feet, they scrambled to flee with their dog and three cats. At one point, realizing they were running out of time, Dancy screamed down the street to where he could see a member of the National Guard. The soldier tried to reach them but couldn’t in the fast-moving current.

“It was so fast,” said Shaw, 29, who was floating on the couple’s bed at one point. “We called 911, and it wouldn’t go through.”

Dancy and Shaw thought about retreating to the attic but realized they would be trapped if the water kept rising. Dancy’s truck soon floated away. Finally, the couple loaded their cats into a plastic bin and went out of their bedroom together into the rising current of the Swannanoa River.

“We thought, ‘If we don’t get out now, we’re not getting out.’”

“We are beyond lucky,” Dancy, 32, recalled. “There really was a moment there when we thought, ‘We aren’t going to make it.’”

Days after the storm struck, only limited supplies had reached this town and others around it. But on Sunday, the First Baptist Church had happened into enough water to hold out for a couple of hours, and peanut butter sandwiches and hamburgers to hand out to the growing line of people filing into the parking lot, which sits on a rare patch of high ground in this deluged place.

“We’re going to be a beacon up here,” said Melody Dowdy, 46.

The man who was grilling the burgers, T.J. Whitt, 43, shared his own story of loss.

“My whole house slid down the mountain about 60 feet with my whole family in it,” Whitt said. “But we made it out, by God’s grace. We’re more fortunate than most here because we were able to go back in and get our clothes, personal belongings, the stuff that’s most important to us — wedding rings, birth certificates. … We grabbed those and got out.”

Whitt, whose knuckles were bloodied from breaking out of his house in a panic, wondered aloud about what lies ahead for a place like Swannanoa, where he has lived for more than two decades.

“It’s never going to be the same,” he said. Swannanoa is not an upscale tourist and retirement mecca like Asheville, just to the west. There isn’t a glut of craft breweries and high-end restaurants. There is no attraction to equal the Biltmore House, the historic home and museum built for the Vanderbilt family. This is a community largely composed of working-class folks of modest means, many who have called this valley home their entire lives.

Each year, Whitt said, he and his wife buy the meat of a cow and freeze it to use over time. On Sunday, he had brought an entire cow’s worth of meat to grill hundreds of hamburgers to hand out to strangers in need. Somehow, in his own moment of trauma, he found gratitude.

“Thank God we were up the mountain, so we didn’t get flooded,” he said. “We have other family members who didn’t make it. … It’s tough. It’s going to be bad. We’re just going to try and do what we can do to take care of everybody.”

Nearby, Melody Dowdy nodded toward Whitt as he turned back to the grill.

“He lost everything, but he’s giving anything he’s got,” she said. “That is the beauty of the people in the mountains.”

By midday Sunday, Dancy and Shaw were shin-deep in the mud that covered the front yard and inside their small home on North Avenue in Swannanoa, trying to salvage part of his large record collection, her houseplants and anything else that hadn’t been destroyed — which wasn’t much.

Even amid the mess and the muck, they also felt fortunate. They were alive. Friends and family had come to help. Looking at the water mark nearly 6 feet high on their wall, they imagined how easily things could have turned out differently.

“Our whole life was here,” Shaw said of both their home and this town they love. “I think it’s not going to be the same for years.”

“It won’t,” Dancy agreed. “But I’m ready to rebuild. I’m not leaving.”

Despite that fortitude, a sense of sadness, desperation and uncertainty loomed above this once-picturesque town on Sunday. Not far away on Highway 70, hundreds of people lined up outside the Pisgah Brewing Company with jugs and bottles in hand, waiting for water that has been so hard to find. Nearby, someone discovered that an 18-wheeler wrecked during the storm was full of bottled water, and dozens of people came to grab cases and hand out cases to others, until police officers arrived and shouted for them to leave.

“You are stealing!” one shouted as the crowd dispersed.

Back in Swannanoa, as the daylight faded on another day with no power, no water and no certainty, parts of town seemed frozen in a time before the storm. The Ingles grocery store sign advertised tomatoes on sale. The Ace Hardware sign said, “Mums, $9.99.” Pumpkins still sat outside Ledford’s Produce.

But the new reality was inescapable.

On street after street, flooded and mangled homes and vehicles bore orange spray paint — a sign that authorities had been there to check for the dead and the living. Search-and-rescue teams pressed on as day wore toward dusk, and on one street by the river, officials murmured about the possibility that a body may have been located in the wreckage nearby. Several people had pitched a tent by a local school. Late in the afternoon, a helicopter landed at First Baptist Church to deliver supplies.

Not far away, Austin Decerbo, 28, stood talking with a friend, Mike Hollie, and pointed to the spot where his mother’s house had sat only days ago. Now there was nothing.

“I watched it float away. All you could see was river,” Decerbo said. “I grew up in that house. … It’ll never be the same. Nowhere near it.”

Hollie, 62, who said he raised his family here and has called Swannanoa home for decades, looked out on a once-familiar landscape.

“All these places are gone,” he said, describing one by one the multiple houses that had once lined the river, but which the river had carried away. “Unbelievable,” he said. “It’s been completely and entirely erased.”

Jesse Barber contributed to this report.

By Simon Ducroquet, John Muyskens, Naema Ahmed, Nicolás Rivero and Niko Kommenda

These inland mountain communities are often safe from tropical storms. The cyclones that batter the U.S. southeastern coasts typically weaken as they come ashore. Many peter out before they reach a mountain town like Chimney Rock.

But this time, something different happened. Helene moved fast and carried its warm, moist air hundreds of miles inland into the Carolinas.

“It was a worst-case scenario for the type of tropical system that could deliver really extreme impacts that far inland,” said Gary Lackmann, professor of atmospheric sciences at N.C. State University.

Here’s what fueled Helene and caused so much devastation in the Appalachian Mountains.

THE WATER IN THE AIR

Helene formed above unusually warm water in the Gulf of Mexico. As that water evaporated, it gave the storm the fuel it needed to rapidly intensify into a Category 4 hurricane and evolve into one of the widest cyclones to ever hit the United States.

“Water vapor is weather fuel, and it's controlled by the sea surface temperature,” Lackmann said. “So when you have record warm sea surface temperatures, you have record amounts of weather fuel.”

Climate change makes the freakishly hot conditions that fueled Helene’s growth more common.

“We won’t know the full estimated contributions from climate change until more thorough analysis is done. But this is a pattern we’re seeing around the world. Extreme rainfall events are becoming more common,” said Baker Perry, a professor of climatology at the University of Nevada at Reno, who previously taught at Appalachian State University.

THE RAIN BEFORE THE STORM

Two days before Helene made landfall, record-setting rains were already starting to soak the Blue Ridge Mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina. A zone of low pressure along a front pulled water vapor up from the Gulf of Mexico into the mountains, where it quickly rose, condensed into storm clouds, and dumped heavy rain.

Those earlier rains “guaranteed that a lot of the water that came with Helene was not going to have anything to soak into, and so it was all going to be running down the surface to the nearest low-lying area and then just collect,” said Douglas Miller, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

They also created a wet, swampy environment that allowed Helene to cling to the last of its strength as it moved deep inland. Hurricanes weaken when they move over dry land — but the water vapor rising off the soaked ground in Helene’s path extended the storm’s life. “It’s slowing its demise,” Perry said. “It’s not strengthening, but it’s weakening slower than it otherwise would be.”

THE WATER HELENE BROUGHT

When Helene hit the mountains, it dumped all the remaining water it had collected from the Gulf of Mexico. Across the region, several months’ worth of rain fell between Sept. 25 and Sept. 27.

“This was a one-in-1,000 year event across a fairly large area in terms of the three-day rainfall totals,” Perry said.

THE SURGE DOWNHILL

Unable to soak into the saturated soil, water flowed downhill. Along the way, it picked up dirt, boulders, trees and eventually cars, homes and slabs of asphalt. Solid ground became liquid and slid away.

“Eventually things break, and it just comes down in a muddy slurry of huge boulders, huge trees, and sometimes it can be moving 35 miles per hour down the slope of the mountain,” Miller said.

RIVERS UNLEASHED

The water flowing down the mountains funneled into the lowest ground it could find. Sometimes, it poured into streams and rivers. In other places, it flowed into valleys and hollers that were once bone dry.

“In the mountains, places flooded with torrents that don’t even have creeks. There was never even water there,” Perry said.

“When all this water is just coming down, what used to be a small creek, where you used to go find crawdads, now all of a sudden, it’s 10-15 feet deep,” Miller said. “And gravity and water combined together can really move quite a wall of force, very rapidly.”

Helene has become one of the deadliest hurricanes of the modern era. And now a vast operation is underway to provide relief in this difficult terrain.

About this story
Before and after images are from Nearmap, a location intelligence and aerial imagery provider. Mid-level water vapor satellite imagery is from GOES-16 Advanced Baseline Imager band 9 and processed with Google Earth Engine. Analysis of ERA5 Integrated Vapor Transport data by Ben Noll. Hourly precipitation data is from the NOAA Multiple-Radar Multiple-Sensor system and accessed via the Iowa Environmental Mesonet. National Water Center annual exceedance probability analysis is for the highest three-day rainfall from Sept. 23 to 28 using Stage IV data and NOAA Atlas 14. Terrain data is from USGS.

Editing by Monica Ulmanu.

By Brady Dennis, Scott Dance, Dino Grandoni, Gerrit De Vynck and Brianna Sacks

ACROSS WESTERN N.C.

Anita Crowder stood in the warm October sun, her face weary, her shoes caked in mud, her blue eyes surveying a place she’d known all her life, but one that now seemed so unfamiliar.

“I buried my daddy two weeks ago,” Crowder, 67, said outside the home in Swannanoa her father had shared with his wife, Betty, for more than a half century. Six days after his funeral, on Sept. 27, the storm had hit and the river had swelled, devouring much in its path, including this small white house where Kenneth Crowder’s daughter had spent Thanksgivings and Christmases for as long as she could remember.

“I called him every day. If I didn’t call him, he called me,” said Anita, whose 87-year-old stepmother waded to safety through the floodwaters with the help of neighbors. “It would have made him sick, seeing everything they worked so hard for washed away.”

Now, as she navigated rooms where the water had flipped and mangled furniture, where mud stuck to the walls and sat ankle deep on the floor, she tried to salvage a few old photos and tools and documents. She thought about how so much had changed so fast — both in her life, and in so many lives across this region.

“Two different eras,” she said. “Things will be totally different.”

Barely a week after Helene barreled across the South, leaving a trail of suffering and loss hundreds of miles wide in its wake, its true toll has yet to fully come into focus.

The crisis here in Western North Carolina — as well as in parts of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia — remains far from over, and only the first flickers of recovery have begun. At least 229 people have died, a total that seems destined to climb higher as communities dig out from oceans of debris.

While the level of loss varies from community to community, and sometimes from street to street, almost everyone who endured this unprecedented storm agrees on this much:

In these mountains, Helene will forever mark a dividing line. A before and an after. The end of one era, and the beginning of another that, for now, is full of uncertainty and angst.

Entire towns lie in ruins. Roads large and small are washed out. Search crews continue to scour the mountainous terrain in helicopters, on all-terrain vehicles and even on horseback to check on souls still unaccounted for in rural outposts. Many residents still have no power or cell signal or running water, even as a wave of aid flowed in over recent days.

Already, the storm has changed not only the physical landscape of this region, but the inner landscape of those who experienced this cataclysmic event.

“I’m trying to understand the magnitude of what is happening,” said Adam Smith, who endured the storm with his wife and two kids just outside Asheville, N.C. Smith, a scientist and economist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is also one of the nation’s foremost experts on the costs of extreme weather disasters, but not until this week had his own family experienced such a catastrophe firsthand.

“I think everyone is still in a bit of a state of shock. It’s almost like a dream,” he said Thursday, nearly a week after his own home lost electricity and running water. “Maybe dream is not the right word. Maybe more like a nightmare.”

A week on, there are more questions than answers.

Why was this region so unprepared for a storm of this magnitude? What will happen to the economy here? To the vibrant culture built on art and breweries, on music and nature? How long will it take to reconstruct what’s destroyed, to reopen schools, to house those suddenly without homes, to bury the dead?

Will aid keep coming? When will the world move on?

‘Surprise and shock’

So much vanished in the wake of the storm.

Houses and vehicles. Businesses, and with them livelihoods. But there were also less tangible things that disappeared in the past week.

One was the sense that Western North Carolina, with its high elevation, inland location and mild seasons, is a safe harbor in an age of more extreme weather. This, the thinking went, is a place more and more people are destined to flee to escape rising seas, stronger storms and the crippling heat elsewhere in the country.

Then came Helene.

“For someone like myself who studies these [disasters] deeply over many years and understands them quite well,” said Smith, the NOAA scientist, “they can still surprise and shock us.”

He had spent the Tuesday before the storm working, tracking the latest additions to a list of weather events around the country that cause more than $1 billion in damages — a tally that had already reached 20 as of Sept. 1. A record 28 billion-dollar disasters hit the United States last year.

By the next day, the forecast was so alarming, Smith left work early.

He texted friends a dire warning the National Weather Service had issued, making clear Helene’s flooding would likely surpass that caused by tropical systems that passed through here in 2004 and 2021, and perhaps what had been the area’s historic flood of record in 1916.

Then he stepped out into his yard Wednesday evening and felt the ground — it was already saturated. The storm’s eye had not even made landfall in Florida and yet he began to dread how dramatic the flooding might become.

He found himself feverishly hunting for portable pumps and other supplies to protect his basement, which had flooded in 2021 when the remnants of Tropical Storm Fred brought deadly rains. He visited four stores that were sold out before he found the pumps, and he also grabbed sandbags and waterproof tape.

Like so many, Smith and his family had to navigate a world with no electricity, water, internet or cellphone connection after the storm. His children, in sixth and 10th grades, kept themselves entertained playing outside with neighbors. As families gathered to grill food that would soon spoil, he wondered how dire conditions were in so many communities that weren’t as fortunate as his own.

He finds himself in the fog of recovery. In the past, so much of his work on disasters was confined to spreadsheets, rather than the world outside his door.

‘A looming sense of panic’

It seems almost callous, amid so much loss, to consider what October might otherwise have looked like in the communities that dot the Blue Ridge Mountains.

But amid the immediate suffering here, there is a quiet but unmistakable grief — not only for what has happened, but for all that will not, no matter how trivial.

The autumn leaves will come and go without the usual hordes of tourists clogging the Blue Ridge Parkway and filling up the inns and restaurants that help fuel the local economy. The woolly worm caterpillar race won’t happen at the Woolly Worm Festival in Banner Elk. The famous Biltmore Estate sits closed.

Driving out of the region earlier this week, Canda Molinari despaired as she saw how many local landmarks had been claimed by the raging waters.

“Places where we used to go shop or eat were replaced with the French Broad River,” said the retired teacher from Weaverville.

For Liam Brown, this place once brimmed with opportunity.

He landed a job managing the taproom at Archetype Brewing in Asheville over the summer, and things were starting to click in the days before Helene. So many people flocked to play trivia the Tuesday before the storm that one of the 19 teams had to sit outside. The 24-year-old Brown stayed long past the end of his shift to help.

Two nights later, rain started to pour as Helene made landfall in Florida. Crowds packed the bar inside for “hurricane beers,” with no sense of what lay ahead.

In a place known as “Beer City USA,” with dozens of breweries, it can be hard to stand out as a small neighborhood taphouse. But the packed house had Brown optimistic that October would be a busy month. “We had some good momentum,” he said.

Helene has now upended life for workers like Brown, who keep the region’s tourism engine humming. Even for businesses that didn’t wash away, pipes that deliver much of Asheville’s water have been destroyed, and until the taps work again, much of the industry has ground to a halt.

Sky Warren, 23, worked at a bed-and-breakfast in Black Mountain until Helene nearly destroyed it.

“The only money we have is what’s in our pockets,” Warren said. “There is a looming panic about the future.”

She had just moved in with her partner, McKenzie Malone, who cooks at a restaurant next door to Archetype. They got the initial $750 from FEMA for households in Helene’s path, but otherwise, have no current way to pay rent. The basement of the old house they share was so damaged by flooding, their landlord told them they’ll need to find a new place to live by early next year.

A week after everything changed, life at the brewery also looked very different.

Brown and his small team managed to reopen, with enough cans of free water and beer to last a while. Stir-crazy customers filed in, some newly out of work, looking for a place to charge phones and get out of the house.

The effort was wearing on Brown, on top of the stress of getting by in a city with no running water. He planned to leave town for a few days, to visit his parents and hopefully, to take his first hot shower in a week.

On Thursday, though he learned the brewery would be closing for now, he said: “I hate that we’re shutting down. … But it is a little bit of a relief.”

He, too, would be headed for the unemployment rolls soon.

‘Mom, what about the house?’

A week after Helene, the skies above Western North Carolina buzz with constant traffic from private planes and small helicopters bringing in donations.

In one Black Hawk high above Ashe County on Wednesday, National Guard members scanned the mountainsides and valleys below. The radio crackled with requests for help: A woman had run out of food and water and wanted to leave. A man with diabetes needed to be evacuated.

The ground has shifted under so many people in a swath of the South, from the streets of Augusta, Ga., to the mountains of East Tennessee.

Before Helene even battered Valdosta, Ga., Rhiannon Abrahamian and her husband, a butcher, had gotten used to living without power for a few days or more. It’s already happened three times in the last year because of hurricanes and a tropical storm.

“I used to be able to buy formula and diapers” for their toddler and 8-month-old, Abrahamian said. The reality now feels more dire — “everybody’s babies were running out of diapers at the same time.” Wipes were gone too.

In this area, where more than one in five people live below the poverty line, “you have to drive three hours out of town to find something,” she said this week. They had half a tank of gas.

Two weeks before the storm, the main street in the small North Carolina town of Marion was shut down for a huge festival organized by Latino Unido, a nonprofit supporting the region’s Latino community. Performers traveled all the way from Mexico, and people came out to eat and celebrate.

But on Friday, the group’s offices were busy with volunteers organizing food and supply drops. Others helped Spanish-speakers navigate the FEMA application process. The Mexican embassy sent staff and money.

Maria Guadalupe Garcia Rodrigues sent her 14-year-old daughter to her aunt’s house ahead of Helene.

Garcia Rodrigues got ready for work the following morning and realized she couldn’t get out or reach anyone because cell service was down. She was rescued — she believes by police — and her brother-in-law was able to pick her up amid the driving rain and flooded roads. But for two wrenching days, she did not know whether her daughter was safe.

“When I finally talked to her she said, ‘Mom, I’m okay.’ And I said, ‘Thank God, this is finally over,’” Garcia Rodrigues said.

“And then she said, ‘Mom, what about the house?’ And I said, ‘We don’t have a house anymore.’”

A ‘slice of paradise,’ lost

Surrounded by massive loss, Monnie Roten also was thinking about family.

Only days ago, she had hosted her granddaughter and friends for dinner before a homecoming dance. They ate pasta and meatballs, and sat on the sprawling back porch overlooking her large goldfish pond. When would that ever happen again?

For more than 50 years, their home in Boone, N.C., has been a haven for Roten and her family, the spot where she raised two sons, who later built homes next door to raise their own children.

Living alongside a creek, Roten has seen these waters rise before. Floods have come and gone. But nothing like Helene, which sent a propane tank crashing into her porch and destroyed much of her bedroom and den. “This was a hundred times worse,” she said, “because when it really let loose, you knew it was going to take lives, homes.”

Not far away, Joseph McGinnis lived in a serene creekside apartment. When his girlfriend came to visit from Raleigh, they spent weekends cooking and watching movies. In the evenings, he walked his Siberian husky, Romeo, around the complex and sat outside to listen to the trickle of the water.

“This was like a little slice of paradise right here,” said McGinnis, a car mechanic.

After Helene’s torrents arrived, that idyllic trickle turned into a raging torrent that swept five feet of water through McGinnis’s home.

“Watching everything I’ve worked so hard for just be destroyed in minutes,” McGinnis said as he examined the damage Wednesday. He held Romeo from entering the apartment as he fought back his own tears.

“No, bubs,” McGinnis told his dog, “we’re not allowed in there anymore.”

‘Suffering will come in this life’

Back in Swannanoa, at the First Baptist Church, Pastor Jeff Dowdy and his wife, Melody, had witnessed kindness and sadness, tragedy and fortitude at their doorstep day after long day over the past week.

They felt certain, like many here, that Helene would reverberate in these mountains long after they were gone.

“A hundred years from now, they’ll be talking about this flood,” he said.

Before the storm, they had been planning for the church’s annual fall festival, with a bounce house and face painting for kids. There were sermons to plan, hospital visits to make, Wednesday morning prayer gatherings to prepare for.

After the storm, the couple and a handful of volunteers had set up a makeshift aid station with the few supplies they had, handing out peanut butter sandwiches and limiting visitors to two bottles of water per person.

Only a few days later, as help poured in from around the country, the church’s gym was brimming with supplies — table after table of canned goods, stacks of diapers and dog food, mountains of bottled water. There was a medical tent and place where people could get clothing, and volunteers directing traffic that seemed never to stop coming.

“Now, people can take all they want,” the pastor said.

There had been one humbling moment after another. The day Melody Dowdy had to shop through the donations, after realizing they too no longer had food at home. The day they gave a donated tent to one family whose home had washed away, and the mother said in Spanish, “It’s small, but it’s enough.”

Jeff Dowdy was determined there would be a Sunday morning service over the weekend, even if it had to take place in the parking lot. Already, he was thinking of what message he might deliver to the battered and worn.

“The Bible talks a lot about going through hard times,” he said. “Suffering will come in this life.”

There had been plenty of that in the days since Helene. But scripture, he planned to remind them, also says to hold out faith for better days, to remember that “they can make it through this, because other people have,” he said.

Outside, in the sky above, the president and the governor were circling in helicopters, surveying the aftermath of the storm, sprawling and still unfathomable. Generators hummed. The engines of dump trucks and bulldozers roared, as workers cleared heaps of debris by the river.

Just down the hill, Anita Crowder was wrapping up another visit to her father’s house, where mud now covered the site of so many memories. She had fished out her stepmother’s checkbook, her father’s Social Security card and some antique lamps from the muck.

She planned to head to her own storm-ravaged town a half-hour away to get some rest. Then she would come back tomorrow, through the broken world around her, to see what else could be saved.

Sacks reported from Valdosta, Ga. Nicolás Rivero in Washington and Molly Hennessy-Fiske in Houston contributed to this report.

About this story
Editing by Paulina Firozi, Katie Zezima, Dominique Hildebrand, John Farrell, Joe Moore and Gaby Morera Di Núbila. Design and development by Emily Wright.

Over the course of 11 days, a supermarket parking lot became a snapshot of the chaos that can unfold in some corners of post-disaster America.

By Brianna Sacks, Scott Dance, Will Oremus, Samuel Oakford and Jeremy B. Merrill

LAKE LURE, N.C. — It started with hot coffee.

Hurricane Helene had just cut off this already isolated foothill town from everything: power, water, information. Paralyzed, the only thing that residents Carin Harris and Hilary Yoxall could think to do was post up outside their Ingles supermarket and hand out something warm. Soon, donations began to pour in, and a makeshift supplies distribution center emerged from a parking lot off the main two-lane road.

Then everything got more complicated.

A group called Veterans on Patrol showed up in Rutherford County late on the night of Oct. 11, just four people with no supplies. But their leader, Lewis Arthur, came with a lot of promises and a big vision, which he said was sent from God: a three-year plan to help this lakeside community and others around here bounce back, according to Yoxall and Arthur.

At first, it did seem like a godsend, Yoxall, Harris and other residents said. They started organizing the piles of diapers, boxes of canned food and mounds of winter clothes. But as soon as Yoxall, a retired Army nurse, and Arthur got to talking, and he started telling her about his work fighting cartels at the border, about his need for armed security, she got a bad feeling.

“There’s something wrong here,” she told another longtime resident and fellow organizer.

What she and others didn’t know yet was that Veterans on Patrol is an anti-government group steeped in conspiracy theories and that it has a well-documented history of embedding in communities to launch missions related to migrants or purported child trafficking, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Western States Center, two watchdog groups.

And that the group was motivated to come to this small town because its members believed that the government was using the hurricane to move people here off lithium-rich land and stop them from getting it back, according to the group’s posts on Telegram, the messaging service.

“Hurricane Helene was an act of war perpetuated by the United States Military”; a “land grab” responsible for “murdering hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans,” the group said on Oct. 3. That same day, it launched its disaster deployment operation, stating that it was “coming to the aid of those who will not sell, have stolen, or be restricted their property” and to replace the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Over the course of 11 days, this makeshift hurricane supplies depot in a supermarket parking lot became a snapshot of the chaos that can unfold in some corners of post-disaster America: Residents came together to help their community because local officials were unable to. People came searching for critical supplies because the federal government does not give those out as part of its disaster response. An extremist group motivated by anti-government beliefs and conspiracy theories was able to show up, wield influence and become a source of help for some and fear for others.

And in the mix of all that, an armed man from a town over, also fueled by viral, anti-government misinformation, joined the fray. He showed up right when Veterans on Patrol did, Yoxall and two other volunteers said, joining their Sunday prayer circle. Then he talked about “hunting FEMA,” she said. Police eventually arrested and charged him with “going armed to the terror of the public.”

“What is happening in my backyard?” Yoxall said last week. “I don’t know these people, and if they are trying to get a foothold here in my community, they are getting a good start.”

Helene was historic for many reasons. It was a hurricane in the mountains that spurred massive floods and landslides, destroying thousands of homes and killing more than 200 people. Researchers also said it led to an unprecedented amount of misinformation directed at FEMA and its workers, often amplified by figures such as former president Donald Trump.

In addition to Veterans on Patrol, members of more than a dozen other extremist, white-nationalist and militia organizations also came to some hard-hit western North Carolina towns for disaster response, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which studies extremism and disinformation, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“Misinformation has always been the bane of disaster response,” said Andy Carvin, managing editor of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, but with Helene “we’re seeing this additional layer of craven politicization about the federal disaster response itself.”

And it’s had consequences. Armed threats at the Ingles parking lot and elsewhere caused snags in FEMA’s work and that of other federal agencies on the ground, according to federal officials. For at least 48 hours, workers and contractors doing an array of jobs such as clearing trees and inspecting homes stopped working. FEMA adjusted its security practices, for example, not going door-to-door in certain locations. The agency, already stretched thin, has had to divert time and resources away from helping people to combating misinformation, according to a FEMA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely on the situation.

“We are used to dealing with threats, but the unprecedented piece we have is it’s part of the political climate we are in,” the official said. The worst part, though, is that “this rhetoric may be discouraging people from applying for assistance.”

In Lake Lure, Veterans on Patrol showed up to take over logistics, the head of the group, whose full name is Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer, told The Post in one of several interviews. (Arthur is not a veteran.) Its members put up a big, colorful circus tent. They hung an American flag and shirts on hangers that declared, “Try this in a small town,” and, “Let’s go Brandon,” referring to an epithet targeting President Joe Biden. They brought in big trucks full of water and generators and promised they had a lot more coming.

Arthur, who says he is guided by his Christian faith, said he diverted from a mission in Chicago hunting Salvadoran cartels and an “Iranian cell” after seeing reports that authorities threatened to arrest a volunteer pilot trying to rescue people in the Lake Lure area. Journalists verified much of the story, which became fodder for the right wing: evidence that the government was not helping but hindering private citizens’ relief efforts.

Arthur said he was acting without political motive. Disasters like this, he added, are “our only opportunity to get everyone to put aside the politics and BS and come together.”

That was a far different tone than his online posts. Beneath photos of donated aid on Telegram, the group said that “people are very angry at FEMA” and that it had intel on “FEMA pulling a dirty trick on good people.”

Arthur made similar comments to locals, Yoxall said. Yet, she added shortly after they arrived, she could not deny that his group was helping.

“It’s complicated because a lot of people still don’t trust him, and I am in that group, but the man is doing good work,” she said.

She wouldn’t always feel that way.

How one tweet can mobilize

In the immediate aftermath of Helene’s devastation, residents in hard-hit towns began sharing shocking images and videos of what they were having to do to survive. The federal government wasn’t there, people said. In many places, they were right. North Carolina received its federal disaster declaration on Sept. 29, but the mechanisms needed to trigger those massive response operations were just getting started.

Their shock, anger and pleas for help caught fire, though, especially with big right-wing voices. On platforms like X, algorithms wove real stories alongside full-blown conspiracies.

On Sept. 29, an X user suggested that the supposed presence of lithium provided a motive for someone to “modify” the storm, to steal access to the mineral. Prominent voices amplified the theory to millions of people.

Groups such as Veterans on Patrol soon picked it up. “Isn’t it ironic how much lithium is available in the areas targeted by Helene?” the group asked in a Sept. 30 Telegram post.

(There is, in fact, a lithium mine in the North Carolina foothills about a 60-mile drive from Lake Lure. But that area wasn’t as affected, and the government cannot control a hurricane’s path. In an interview, Arthur said he did not want to talk about conspiracy theories, just his mission.)

The theory deepened. Chris Martenson, a right-leaning, conspiracy-minded author and influencer with more than 200,000 followers, published on his verified X account that he had heard that residents in nearby Chimney Rock were told that their town “was being bulldozed, bodies and all and the land was being seized by the federal government,” possibly to mine lithium. (Martenson didn’t respond to requests seeking comment.)

This rumor exploded online thanks to a spate of X accounts known for promoting conspiracy theories, according to Connexions Global Matrix, a nonprofit that works on disinformation and media literacy, and NewsGuard, which monitors media credibility and misinformation.

Social media messages like these help conspiracy-driven groups establish their authority, said Cody Zoschak, senior analyst at the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

“A tweet like that creates an atmosphere where they can mobilize, as we saw them do in North Carolina, and to find and identify people who might be sympathetic to their cause,” said Zoschak. “Then the militia can step in and say, ‘We’re the solution.’”

Amid this swirl of suspicion, Trump also started casting doubts on FEMA. On the morning of Oct. 3, he took to Truth Social and shared that “FEMA is largely MIA because it has diverted resources for immigration resettlement.”

That same day, Veterans on Patrol decided to head straight toward Chimney Rock with a disaster response mission titled “OPERATION STEER IT BACK.” They did a callout, writing “if you are willing to mobilize with North Carolina families and remove FEMA from North Carolina.”

While it wasn’t Veterans on Patrol’s first disaster mission, Helene was a pivot from its usual focus. Arthur started the group in 2015 with the stated goal of helping homeless vets. Based in Arizona, extremist researchers say they quickly became vigilantes, feeding off Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracies to pursue child and sex traffickers along the border. He developed a criminal record and was convicted in Arizona of assault, records show.

This past February to March, Veterans on Patrol embedded in the small town of Washtucana, Washington, because Arthur believed the town was the center of a child trafficking operation. Then, they relocated to Spokane.

In the early days of the Helene disaster, Veterans on Patrol doubled down on anti-government sentiments. It said FEMA “has billions in untapped resources designated for the 6+ million more Migrants, terrorists, and criminals being brought up RIGHT NOW.”

“FEMA IS THE PROBLEM, NOT THE ANSWER!”

In some hard-hit mountain communities of North Carolina, some people didn’t know what to believe. Residents here “don’t trust and have felt abandoned by the government,” said Chris Malcolm, a disaster response volunteer who also lives in Rutherford County.

In four local Facebook groups spanning three rural counties, as well in massive Helene-focused ones with 30,000 members, posts echoing misinformation became sandwiched between requests for helping stray dogs, finding generators for one needy family or another, and updates on power being restored.

Four locals said they’ve had to persuade friends and neighbors to sign up for FEMA assistance, combating falsehoods that the agency is trying to steal their homes and personal information.

Still, Malcolm said, some people have told the agency, “We don’t want you here.” He can sympathize, since trusting them has been hard for him, too. “We don’t know if FEMA will help,” he said. “We are hopeful that they will.”

‘The standoff in Lake Lure’

On a recent sunny, crisp afternoon, about a dozen people, some wearing fatigue-style pants and others in camouflage hats, buzzed around Veterans on Patrol’s distribution site. It had been about a week since they arrived. Members of the group unloaded garbage bags and boxes filled with supplies from the packed bed of a pickup truck into the circus tent.

Nearby, a FEMA motor home was set up where agency officials were helping residents fill out paperwork and answer questions.

Derrik Staley, a manager at the Ingles supermarket, said that he was happy to host Veterans on Patrol’s relief efforts, noting “how they’ve gotten bigger and bigger.”

“We appreciate them being here in peoples’ times of need,” he said.

Allen Hardin, a recently retired lieutenant with the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office, sat in a patrol car. He said that since the threat against FEMA, the sheriff would probably keep an officer posted in the parking lot as long as the Veterans on Patrol operation remained. But there have been no issues for officers to get involved in.

“They’ll talk your head off,” Hardin noted of the group, “but that’s it.”

By this point, Yoxall had read a lot about Arthur and his group online and said she was “afraid for her community.” She didn’t understand why they had picked her tiny town or why they wanted to stay here for three years, which Arthur never explained.

“I’m not sleeping,” she said Friday night. “It’s getting scary.”

She and five other volunteers also began to doubt Arthur’s glowing social media posts about his group’s assistance, which he used to call for more donations. They said they grew suspicious that supplies might not be reaching the churches that were supposed to receive them; one person surreptitiously filmed a truck on its supply journey.

Harris and Yoxall decided to confront Arthur directly. “We appreciate what you’re trying to do here, but you’re not part of this community, you can back off the supplies,” Yoxall said she told him.

And that’s when he snapped, they said.

“He was threatening me,” Harris said Saturday morning. “Then it turned into people calling me last night, like, be careful. Be careful. Really, he’s talking a lot about you.”

After that, they decided to walk away.

On Monday morning, they went back, again telling Arthur to pack it up, showing the encounter on a video call with a reporter. The Ingles supermarket chain had also gotten involved, the women said. And the people who lent him the giant circus tent and massive trailers no longer wanted to be a part of this.

At one point, Arthur started running, blocking some people from picking up goods.

“Those are for the people,” Yoxall and Harris yelled. “Those are donations for people, for our community. Hey, that’s donations you cant touch that!”

“This is nuts,” Yoxall, stepping off to the side, exclaimed into her phone. “You can call this the standoff in Lake Lure.”

Soon enough, Veterans on Patrol started packing up, and Arthur disappeared for most of the day. Lake Lure police officers at the scene said that they were not filing charges and that the group was leaving on its own volition.

Amid the chaos Monday, people were still coming to the big striped tent for supplies, a new routine that for some residents had become like therapy. Yet there was tension all around.

Eunice Gonzalez, who came to the depot before to get clothes, wipes and water, had been looking for blankets when, she said, suddenly someone accused her of stealing supplies meant for struggling mountain communities. They pointed at her and said they had seen her there the night before, asking if she was part of the group sending supplies elsewhere. She knew nothing about it.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I don’t want to know, either.”

Arthur said that he is the victim, making a range of accusations against the women who had confronted him. As of Tuesday, he said he was posted up next to dumpsters at a nature park across the street. He said his group would next find private land, he said, and continue their “humanitarian work” but would have license plate readers so he “can see everyone who is stealing.”

Harris said she and the other women are looking to send the remaining clothes, bottled water and other supplies to another hard-hit town. She’s still working to feed her community, but doesn’t know how long she’ll be able to keep it up.

Asked whether she will still to be involved, Yoxall said “that’s a hard question.”

“My heart says yes, God to me says yes, but the human part of me?” she said. “I don’t know how it exploded like this. I really don’t.”

The storm killed in harrowing ways — and left a trail of heartbreak

By Sarah Kaplan, Matt McClain, Brady Dennis, Scott Dance, Naema Ahmed and Dino Grandoni

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Death came in many ways, and in many places.

The raging waters came for those who lived in valleys, alongside once-peaceful rivers and streams. The landslides came for those high on the hillsides above. It came for people who had lived here all their lives, and for those who had only begun to call these mountains home.

When Hurricane Helene tore through the Southeast in late September, it carved a trail of loss from the coast of Florida to the southwest corner of Virginia, killing at least 226 people across six states. It was the deadliest storm to strike the mainland United States in almost 20 years.

But it was here in western North Carolina that Helene exacted its greatest toll.

After more than four weeks of painstaking searches and harrowing recovery efforts, the North Carolina health department has identified at least 98 victims in 22 counties, spanning more than 9,000 square miles. That tally could continue to grow as the search continues for dozens of people yet to be accounted for.

As more details emerge about North Carolina’s victims, it has become clearer why the storm was so deadly here. Helene unleashed extreme downpours on steep slopes that already had endured days of heavy rain. The deluge filled isolated mountain valleys with unimaginable floods and caused mudslides that consumed much in their path.

The Washington Post’s accounting of the toll so far comes from state health department data, as well as interviews with victims’ families and friends, local authorities, and witnesses to the storm’s catastrophic impact.

Nearly a month after the storm, many homes lie in shambles, communities remain shattered. Even as the sights and sounds of recovery slowly replace scenes of devastation, people here are only beginning to grapple with the depth of loss.

This week, mourners lined the main thoroughfare in Fairview, a tight-knit community southeast of Asheville, for a procession honoring Tony Garrison, 51, a local fire battalion chief who died while attempting to rescue others. The father of two loved woodworking and fishing, and according to his obituary, was known throughout the area “for his humility and warmth.”

As Glenda Nesbitt paid her respects, images of the floodwaters that had gushed through Fairview remained vivid in her mind.

She thought about Garrison’s mother, a friend since the two were in grade school, and recalled chatting with her in a Burger King the day before Tony was born.

Now he was gone, along with so many others.

“We’re beginning to realize what has happened,” the 80-year-old Nesbitt said. “We’re in such shock.”

Lisa Peeler Brady came to southern Appalachia seeking peace. After her parents died and a series of health crises left her with debilitating back pain, the 53-year-old moved from South Carolina to her family’s mountain home in Chimney Rock, where she could spend her days on a screened-in porch listening to the Broad River meander past.

Then came Helene.

Its violent winds took out power lines and telephone poles here. Water raced down mountain slopes, triggering mudslides and wiping out the few roads connecting this tiny hamlet southeast of Asheville to the outside world. Trucks were tossed into trees.

One of the last people to see Brady was likely her next-door neighbor, Danny Holland. The night before Helene’s arrival, he ran to Brady’s house and pleaded with her to evacuate. But she insisted on staying put.

“I could have picked her up and carried her out because she doesn’t weigh anything,” Holland said later. “But none of us knew what was going to happen.”

Holland and his wife retreated to a nearby hotel. From there, they witnessed the Broad River’s waters rise higher than they have ever seen, rushing through their neighborhood and sweeping away Brady’s beloved home.

When her childhood friend, Christy Winstead Knight, tried to call the next morning, Brady’s phone went straight to voicemail. She did not respond to the flurry of anxious messages posted to her Facebook page.

That’s when Knight became frantic. She reached out to Brady’s brother, her neighbors, any official she could track down. “Can you please find out if she is in a shelter somewhere?” Knight wrote in an email to Chimney Rock’s mayor, Peter O’Leary.

“She is not accounted for, and we fear the worst,” he responded.

For weeks, Knight agonized over the fate of her missing friend. She hated to think of Brady lost forever in the floodwaters, denied a Christian burial beside her parents.

Rutherford County officials finally recovered Brady’s body near Lake Lure in early October. The news prompted an outpouring of emotion that Knight wishes her friend could have seen.

“She was loved, you can see that without a doubt,” Knight said. “And that brings me a lot of comfort.”

The painful process of accounting for the dead has unfolded over weeks — prolonged by the difficulty of searching for the missing throughout this region’s rugged terrain.

With no phone service and many roads impassable, some survivors were simply trapped with no way to let their families know they were safe. Meanwhile, the raging floodwaters carried many victims far from the spots where they were last seen, leading crews to discover bodies in other towns or even neighboring states.

Those factors added to weeks of confusion about the storm’s true death toll. Officials in Buncombe County, where Helene caused the greatest damage, initially reported that 72 residents had perished during the storm. But the county this week revised its official count to 42, saying the earlier number had been inflated by uncertainty about the victims, how they died and whether Helene ultimately was to blame.

Meanwhile, Helene has continued to claim lives long after the rains ceased. According to state reports, at least three people died from “lack of basic necessities” after enduring days without access to food, water and shelter. A 78-year-old died after missing essential medical treatments because of the storm. And on Tuesday, almost four weeks after Helene tore through these mountains, another man was killed while trying to remove fallen trees.

Many of the deaths are a testament to the increasingly violent power of inland flooding, said Michael Brennan, director of the National Hurricane Center. Whereas storm surge from the oceans used to be the primary danger from tropical cyclones, Brennan said that since 2012, water from heavy rains and swollen rivers has accounted for 57 percent of all hurricane-related deaths.

This shift may be in part because officials have gotten better at communicating storm surge risk and evacuating coastal areas, Brennan said. But he said it has likely been exacerbated by the warming oceans and atmosphere, which are fueling bigger, wetter hurricanes than scientists have ever seen before.

“What was unusual about Helene was the scale on which it happened,” Brennan said.

Early research suggests that Helene’s rainfall was between 10 and 20 percent greater than it would have been in a world without human-caused climate change — and all of that water fell on a region already deluged in the days before the storm.

“Freshwater flooding is an equal-opportunity hazard,” Brennan said. “It can happen anywhere it can rain.”

No one imagined that the trailer, perched on a knoll above the town of Swannanoa, might be at risk. Early on the morning of Sept. 27, as the remnants of Helene blew through, Bruce Dockery called to check on his parents, James and Judy. The couple wasn’t worried; in the 60 years the family had lived on the property, flooding had never been a problem.

But just hours later, a neighbor, Jessie Bryant, noticed pictures from the couple’s photo albums floating in his yard.

Bryant would later recount to Bruce how he ran the three blocks to the Dockerys’ house, following a trail of broken furniture, baseball cards and other debris. He arrived to find their trailer torn apart, its pieces scattered by a torrent of water and mud. James and Judy were nowhere to be found.

Bryant summoned another neighbor, and the two began searching for the missing couple. They soon found James pinned between two trees, barely conscious. They carried their injured neighbor through knee-deep floodwaters to the only medical facility they could reach, at a nearby minimum-security prison.

By this time, someone had managed to get in touch with Bruce, who lived about five miles away in Black Mountain. The Dockerys’ son tried road after road to get to Swannanoa, only to find every route blocked. Finally, he abandoned his truck, clambered over a tree and across a broken bridge, and started walking through the woods toward his parents’ home.

“I have to get to Mom and Dad,” he recalled telling himself.

Then came a phone call: The prison medics weren’t able to resuscitate James. And another: Judy’s body had been found several streets away, buried in the mud.

When he was finally able to return to the place where they had died, he found in the debris their beloved blue couch. It was perched in front of a fragment of the trailer, “like it was waiting for someone to sit on it again,” Bruce said.

Everyone who knew the Dockerys knew about that worn old couch — a resting place for anyone who needed somewhere to crash. If you broke up with your girlfriend or lost your job, James would make you a cup of coffee and Judy would stuff your pockets full of Little Debbie cakes, and the couple would spread some blankets on the blue couch and tell you everything will be alright in the morning.

But when Bruce came back a few days later to try to salvage some of his parents’ belongings, he saw that workers had come through with a track hoe and cleared the debris so the water department could repair damaged pipes.

The blue couch was gone.

They had left the war to find safety, Ryan Wiebe said with a sigh on a recent evening. “That’s what really gets me the most.”

He was talking about his wife’s mother, Tetiana Novitnia, 73; his sister-in-law, Anastasia Novitnia-Segen, 42; his brother-in-law, Dmytro Segen, 41; and his nephew, Yevhenii Segen, 13.

As the war in Ukraine raged in 2022, the family had left their home in Kherson, a port city near the Black Sea.

“They spent months in a war being bombed at, and at any time a missile could hit your building when you’re sleeping,” Wiebe recalled. “They would have to run to the basement … They went through terror for months.”

After a perilous journey that led them through Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and eventually to Miami, they settled on land owned by Wiebe’s family near Burnsville. They rented a blue, three-bedroom, single-wide trailer along the banks of the South Toe River, near Wiebe and his wife, Anna.

Life seemed mostly tranquil.

Dmytro Segan found work in construction. Anastasia, warm and friendly, helped her sister clean houses in the area. Yevhenii went to a nearby school, was a whiz at engineering and loved his 3D printer. Tetiana, who was battling cancer, knitted and cooked and gardened.

“We would go fishing together for trout in the Toe River,” Wiebe said. After so many years of trips back and forth to Ukraine, it was “paradise” to have extended family together in one place, he said.

On the morning of the flood, water steadily engulfed the house where the Wiebes and their two teenage sons lived. They fled to a home further up a hill to escape the rising water.

“It was like a nightmare,” he said. “The river just kept coming up and up and up.”

As the storm subsided, Wiebe and his wife ventured out to check on their family. They arrived to find that the field where their relatives lived roughly a half-mile away looked more like an ocean. Their trailer was gone.

With no way to contact 911, no outside cell service and no first responders in sight, the coming days were excruciating, as they and others searched in vain for the missing family.

Search crews eventually located the body of Dmytro Segen more than a mile from his home, Wiebe said. Days later, they found Anastasia’s body roughly nine miles downriver.

As of Friday, Tetiana and Yevhenii’s bodies had yet to be recovered, though they are presumed dead.

Wiebe thinks often of Anastasia’s easy smile, of Dmytro’s friendliness, of Tetiana’s fortitude, of how Yevhenii told him he hoped to move to New York when he grew up.

“Probably about 15 times a day I have a little flashback to them,” he said. “It’s still just disbelief. Four people, gone in a minute.”

At the hour-long vigil in Asheville’s Pack Square this week, city leaders and neighbors steeled themselves for all that lay ahead. They lit candles to honor those lost, embracing friends many hadn’t seen since before the storm.

"It's like every minute there's a different emotion," said Asheville native Andrea Johnston. "I don't think that anybody's really had the chance to really sit down and take it all in. There's just so much still to do.”

The scope of the tragedy feels akin to the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, said Scott Groce, an owner of Groce Funeral Home in Buncombe County.

But this time, questions persist for many people about how their loved ones died, and where their bodies are.

Stubborn challenges with spotty communications, a lack of utilities and wrecked bridges and roads mean relatively few families have been able to hold any kind of funeral, Groce said. They couldn’t be sure everyone who wanted to attend could make it to a service — if they could even find out about it.

“These are really hard to deal with in a different way,” said Groce, a county native who has been directing funerals for two decades. In all that time, he never has held services for someone whose body remains missing, and might never be found.

For some families who want to touch their loved one just one more time, he said, "There's nothing to put your hand on."

In Winston-Salem, Shalana Jordan hadn’t heard from her parents, Nola and Robert Ramsuer, since receiving a text on the morning of the storm: The power was out and it was raining at their home on the banks of the Swannanoa River, but they seemed fine at the time.

The day after the storm, she began posting on Facebook, asking if anyone had seen or heard from them. “I’m really trying not to freak out,” she wrote. Friends checked shelters. Jordan scoured drone and news footage for any sign of their home.

“My dad is turning 70 years old today,” she posted more than a week later of the man who took her fishing so often as a child. “I should be getting on his nerves, calling him an old man. But instead we’re searching for him.”

Jordan and her mother had, in recent years, worked to repair a relationship that had long been strained. Nola Ramsuer rarely ventured far from her home in Swannanoa, but on the weekend before the storm, she traveled to visit her daughter and grandsons.

Jordan said she and her mother mostly stayed in their pajamas, and talked more than they had in years. Ramsuer also brought a bag full of presents for Christmas and for several upcoming birthdays in December and January.

Jordan wondered why her mother had planned so far ahead.

“I don’t know, I just felt like I needed to,” Ramsuer told her daughter.

“That still sends a chill down my spine,” Jordan recalled on a recent afternoon.

Finally, more than two weeks after Helene and multiple trips to search for her parents, Jordan received a call that authorities had located bodies that fit their description. Confirming that would require a DNA sample from Jordan, but there seemed little doubt that it was the couple — high school sweethearts who had married in 1978.

“At least it was an answer. I feel like a lot of people aren’t going to get an answer,” Jordan said. “Not knowing would have been so much worse.”

In the days before the storm, Knox Petrucci and Alison Wisely were finalizing plans for their wedding. They had dreamed of an outdoor ceremony, with North Carolina’s Mount Mitchell at their backs and Alison’s young sons from a previous marriage, Felix and Lucas, by their sides.

But Helene made deadly rapids out of the river that had always burbled gently past their house in Green Mountain. The young couple, along with 9-year-old Felix and 7-year-old Lucas, were swept away in the floodwaters while trying to evacuate.

Now, on the day that Knox and Alison were supposed to be married, their families will instead gather for a funeral.

“They were just so immersed in being good stewards for the Earth,” said Knox’s sister, Briana Yarbrough. “It’s such a cruel irony that they were taken by this storm.”

Sometimes, Yarbrough is overcome by the awfulness of the family’s last moments. How harsh the water must have felt. How afraid they must have been.

But she wants her brother and his family to be remembered for the beauty of how they lived, not the horror of how they died.

She wants people to know that Felix was thoughtful and inquisitive, always astonishing his parents with new scientific facts. Lucas loved adventure – splashing in the river, camping in the forest, running along a trail to see what was around the next bend.

She wants others to understand how Knox and Alison — who met while working at a local beekeeping company — blended their families with the same generosity and gentle patience they used to coax honey from buzzing insects. How they filled their cozy brick house with music, laughter and rescue animals. And how they were equally at home in the outdoors, treating birds and insects, trees and rivers, with as much care as they did their human friends.

The funeral next month will be held at the green cemetery where Alison was an operations manager, in a pollinator meadow the young woman had already selected as her final resting place.

“She had a way of talking about how healing it can be to just go back into the Earth,” Yarbrough recalled.

That thought brings Yarbrough some measure of comfort. The family will continue to nourish the bees they cared for in life.

They will once again be a part of the landscape they loved.

About this story
Editing by Katie Zezima, Paulina Firozi, Dominique Hildebrand, Monica Ulmanu, Nicki DeMarco and Brian French.

See how Helene wiped out North Carolina’s forests.

Story by Simon Ducroquet, Scott Dance, Niko Kommenda and John Muyskens
Photos and video by Ted Richardson for The Washington Post

There’s a tranquility to western North Carolina’s forests. The quiet here is part of the reason Leo Temko and Janice Barnes chose a hillside northeast of Asheville as an escape from New York City, where they spend half their time.

Mountainsides draped in the green of tulip poplar, oak and hickory lure people by the thousands: retirees and campers, naturalists and adventurers. But serenity was shattered when Hurricane Helene blasted through with extreme winds on Sept. 27. Days of rain had soaked the soils, which made trees on steep slopes more vulnerable when Helene arrived.

Helene caused catastrophic damage across about a fifth of the region’s million-acre federally protected forests, according to the North Carolina Forest Service. Satellite data analyzed by the U.S. Forest Service’s Southern Research Station shows damage extends for more than 200 miles through the southern Appalachians.

Estimating the full scope of the consequences for the forest remains challenging, according to Steve Norman, a member of the Forest Service team that conducted the analysis. “Some trees lost their foliage early because of the wind, others lost a significant part of their crowns, and some were completely uprooted,” he explained. And some impacts may only become evident over time.

Long-term consequences may include threats to the wildlife habitat, invasive species and elevated wildfire risk. This region is already facing a massive loss of tourists who would normally be flocking to peep leaves from the Blue Ridge Parkway and hundreds of trails now strewn with debris.

Such dense forests, hundreds of miles from the coast and a few thousand feet above sea level, are usually safe from the fury of tropical storms. But Helene was different. Unprecedented heat across the Gulf of Mexico helped it carry record-setting rainfall and wind gusts into the heart of the southern Appalachians.

“It was a worst-case scenario for the type of tropical system that could deliver really extreme impacts that far inland,” said Gary Lackmann, a professor of atmospheric science at North Carolina State University.

For Temko and Barnes, it has been a challenge thus far to process how much the landscape has transformed.

“It has been hard to consider the forest when there is so much devastation elsewhere around this region,” Barnes said.

When the storm came, the devastation built up over a matter of hours, said Jennifer Flint and Rocky Morris, who live next to Temko and Barnes.

When Morris left the house for work around 4:30 a.m. on Sept. 27, he thought he could clear the path with chainsaws. As he tried to cut through one fallen trunk, three more fell before he could even leave the driveway.

He returned to the house, where Flint was already huddled in the basement. For hours, they sheltered in terror, listening to snapping branches, thudding trunks and wind that sounded like a freight train.

When it was safe to venture out hours later, they found a landscape transformed. Their home was unscathed but for a tree resting on one of their gutters. All around, barely a tree remained standing. The ground was covered in leaves that were so shredded, they looked like parsley.

That level of damage to the vegetation suggests the winds exceeded 100 mph — and in some cases, “well over” that speed, said Tony Lyza, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Severe Storms Laboratory.

Helene’s path and rotation determined where the strongest winds hit.

In the northern hemisphere, tropical systems spin counterclockwise. So as the center of the storm moved over land, it carried intense winds into the region from the east.

The same rugged topography that sent floodwaters racing through valleys compounded the wind’s destructive power. Ridges acted like the walls to a funnel, allowing winds to concentrate and strengthen. As they hit east-facing slopes, they were then pushed uphill, accelerating as they converged at the top of each peak.

The region’s elevation, from 2,000 feet to 6,600 feet above sea level, also meant winds were far more intense than they might have been closer to the coast, explained Addison Alford, another research scientist at NOAA's severe storms lab. Wind readings included 106 mph atop Mount Mitchell, the second-strongest ever observed at what is the Appalachians’ highest point, and 87 mph at Fryingpan Mountain, a record observation, said Kathie Dello, the North Carolina state climatologist.

“We can get some really windy days up there,” Dello said of the western North Carolina mountains. And yet Helene’s winds were, in a word, “remarkable,” she said.

Those winds hit trees that were hardly prepared for such an intense storm. While coastal pine forests have evolved to anchor themselves against hurricane-force winds, such extreme conditions rarely reach so far inland. They have hit Himalayan mountain forests hundreds of miles from the coast, for example, but otherwise usually only affect coastal landscapes and mountain ranges, said Bill Platt, a professor emeritus at Louisiana State University.

In the devastated forests of western North Carolina, many trees were rooted in soil that is relatively shallow — only so much of it can accumulate before eroding down steep hillsides. The broad leaves of the region’s dominant deciduous species easily catch wind gusts. Their roots had grown to brace them from falling downhill, but had built little defense to withstand gusts blowing in the opposite direction.

In some cases after storms, many felled tree trunks can be salvaged for lumber. But in this case it’s unlikely there is much to be gained, said Jesse Henderson, a research economist with the U.S. Forest Service. The rough terrain and other transportation challenges make it difficult to recover any wood. The hardwoods that dominate these forests have fewer uses in construction or furniture, and even in normal times they only account for about 7 percent of North Carolina’s timber harvest, Henderson said.

Instead, the most valuable resource may be the way the forest draws people in, a place to enjoy the environment and find peace within it. That has been interrupted. Already, the damage has translated to a massive loss in tourism for the Asheville region. In Buncombe County, tourism officials said hotel revenue dropped by half in the immediate aftermath of Helene and is forecast to remain below normal for months to come.

The storm did not just leave mountain trails blocked by massive tree trunks, but in many cases took chunks out of them when it pulled tree roots from the ground or triggered landslides.

“We’re being tested now like never before,” said Paul Curtin, Appalachian Trail supervisor for the Carolina Mountain Club.

The volunteer group helps manage hundreds of miles of trails across the region, and its members spent 43,000 hours helping the U.S. Forest Service and other forest managers maintain them last year. After Helene, the effort needed to get trails reopened is far greater.

It could take decades for the forest to grow back to its pre-Helene state. Many downed hardwoods can resprout and grow back, though that is less likely for older trees, said Jeffery Cannon, a landscape ecologist at the Jones Center at Ichauway, a research facility in Georgia. In the meantime, all the sunlight now reaching the forest floor can allow invasive and non-native species to thrive. It’s both a risk and an opportunity, Cannon said — manage the regrowth, and the forest could, in time, end up healthier than it was before.

The effort to replant trees could be a decades-long undertaking on its own. Arbor Day Foundation CEO Dan Lambe said the organization recently pledged to plant 10 million trees in states affected by Helene and Hurricane Milton, which struck Florida two weeks after Helene; meanwhile, it’s still helping to rebuild tree canopy destroyed by Hurricane Katrina 19 years ago.

Now residents like Barnes and Temko are left wondering how long it could take for the forest they call home to recover.

As she looked across the now barren landscape, Barnes recalled how this forest used to look, and how, on hot summer days, it was some 10 degrees cooler than nearby Asheville.

She worries she may never see the same forest again.

“You come in and you see complete devastation and realize that in your lifetime it will never be back to what it was,” Barnes said.

About this story
Editing by Monica Ulmanu and Paulina Firozi. Additional editing by Dominique Hildebrand and Alice Li.

Vegetation health analysis from the U.S. Forest Service’s Southern Research Station uses Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) change (October 2023 and October 2024).

Hotel and lodging tax revenue forecasts were sourced from Buncombe County’s tourism development authority.