‘The power of water.’ How Helene devastated western North Carolina and left communities in ruins

A week after Hurricane Helene roared through, the smell of death overpowers the cool mountain air over the isolated twisting roads of devastated rural western North Carolina.

On the last Thursday of September, as Hurricane Helene was setting out on a path of destruction from Florida to the southern Appalachians, Kim and Rod Ashby stopped at the home they were building in Elk Park, North Carolina. A light rain was falling but the Ashbys “felt safe there,” with pillars raising their second home about 20 feet above the ground near the Tennessee state line, Kim Ashby’s daughter, Jessica Meidinger, recalled. For days before Helene made landfall in Florida, the National Weather Service in North Carolina warned of an historic combination of heavy rain, life-threatening flooding and catastrophic landslides along the mountains. A system that moved into the area before Helene had already left the ground and rivers saturated. More than 10 hours before the hurricane would make landfall hundreds of miles away, the Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina, weather forecast office predicted: “This will be one of the most significant weather events to happen in the western portions of the area in the modern era.” On the morning of September 27, the Ashbys were having breakfast when their home was swept away by the flood-prone Elk River. A neighbor snapped a picture as it floated away. Rod Ashby immediately grabbed his wife and their three dogs. They clung to an old mattress at first. Then, to a section of wall that eventually broke apart, separating them in the fast-moving, debris-strewn waters, according to Meidinger. “That’s the last time that he saw my mom. The last time anyone has seen my mom,” Meidinger said of her stepfather. He survived, telling family he reached for a tree branch to pull himself from the water and then ran up and down the riverbank calling out for his wife.