When Hurricane Helene made landfall on the evening of September 26, I was visiting Asheville, North Carolina, a town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with a population of just under 100,000 people. The story below is my account of my experience of the days leading up to and after the storm. For local accounts and factual information, Blue Ridge Mountain Radio and Asheville Citizen Times have been indispensable sources of on-the-ground insight.
BEFORE THE STORM
I was at the tail end of a leisurely, week-long trip to Asheville, set to leave town on Saturday. This was a last-minute trip, spurred by a friend’s offer to crash in their temporarily empty rental house. Earlier this year I had fallen in love in western North Carolina while on a reporting trip, and, by chance, I’d met several wonderful people in the music world who were from North Carolina. So I flew into Durham and drove out to Asheville to relax, write, explore, and enjoy the fall.
On Wednesday, it poured torrentially. I was meeting a new friend at a cocktail bar and came in soaking wet after spending just 20 seconds outside. “Is this normal?” I asked the bartender. “Nope,” he responded. And that was not Helene. That was an entirely different weather system that came and went. On Wednesday people were talking about heavy rains, not hurricanes.
When the tropical storm and flash-flood warnings came through on Thursday, I began texting local friends, asking them “Hey, how seriously do you take a tropical storm warning like this?” The unanimous consensus was: “Expect heavy rain, but we don’t get, like, crazy floods and hurricanes. We’re in the mountains.” It seems conservative, but I decided to cancel my dinner plans.
By the evening, restaurants and businesses had started closing and I realized that the scraps of the week’s groceries—a piece of toast, a tomato slice, an end of a block of cheese, a quarter of a cucumber, two Thin Mint cookies—should be my meek little-girl dinner for that night. I thought I’d use up the last of my groceries since I was leaving town in 36 hours anyway.
FRIDAY
I awoke at 6 a.m. to the sound of 60-foot-tall trees falling, crushing structures, and snapping powerlines. Asheville is wonderfully verdant, leafy…and just crammed with enormous old trees. The power was out by then. A fallen tree, 60 feet tall, narrowly missed the roof above my bedroom by 20 feet or so, and a massive branch fell three stories, flattening the neighbor’s car. I had read in the forecast that the wind was predicted to be 40 to 50 mph but later learned they were more like 80 to 90 mph. I couldn’t update the weather app; my data was too slow. I took my dog and hid in the basement, away from the windows, to ride it out from about 8 a.m. to 11 a.m.
