ASHEVILLE. N.C.—Tunnel Road is a major thoroughfare between Asheville and the Swannanoa Valley in western North Carolina. Before Hurricane Helene, hundreds of cars would cross a bridge en route to Downtown Asheville, cottages in the Blue Ridge Mountains, or Interstate 40 headed East or West.
That bridge is now blocked. The wreckage of an entire house is on top of it, deposited by the swell of flooding.
“You see a house on top of a bridge. That picture speaks a thousand words,” said U.S. Army physician Col. Alan Queen, an assistant incident commander of military personnel deployed for disaster relief, at the scene of the bridge.
Queen, whose hometown is Asheville, told The Epoch Times that the floods caused by Hurricane Helene were the worst in more than 100 years. “Even the Great Flood of 1916, which killed 80 people, was not as bad as this.”
The bridge is just one of many scenes of destruction visible in Western North Carolina—storefronts have been blasted open as if from an explosion, cars are upturned in ditches of muddy water, and tractor-trailers are mangled across roads and railways.
Helene, a major Category 4 hurricane, dumped 40 trillion gallons of water on several southern states between Sept. 24 and 29, with wind speeds reaching 140 miles per hour. There is no clear fatality count, though it has reached more than 200, with hundreds of people still missing.
The Water Shortage
Perhaps the greatest irony of Helene is the dire lack of potable water after the floods. The storm completely destroyed Asheville’s water supply system. Water mains and underground pipes were swept away as the ground itself was removed by the torrent. Not a single building in town can access running water, and citizens survive by the thousands of gallons of water being shipped in every day.“We need portable water ... nobody can flush their toilets, nobody can take a shower, nobody can do laundry. We have no water and the infrastructure for that water is totally destroyed,” Dr. Carly Brown, a primary care physician in Asheville’s River Arts District, told The Epoch Times.
“I haven’t had a shower since last Wednesday. I’m hearing horrible things about [others],” Wendy Feinberg, a 77-year-old retired schoolteacher in Asheville, told The Epoch Times.
“There’s no running water in all of Asheville,” Ryan Austin, an Asheville local and disaster relief worker, told The Epoch Times. “Plenty of people are bringing in bottled water for drinking but there’s no way to use water for [anything else].”
The lack of water has been particularly dire at hospitals and shelters, where many injured and homeless citizens are taking refuge. Mission Hospital, a level-2 trauma center with 1,200 beds in downtown Asheville, was reportedly digging wells to find water for essential services, Brown said.
“There was feces piled up in the toilets, and people had buckets next to their rooms, and they were flushing their toilets that way... [Doctors] couldn’t do procedures because there was no way to clean their utensils,” Brown said.
Access to water is the top demand from Asheville’s citizens.
“The biggest thing right now is that we definitely need to fix the infrastructure for the water. Water is the major need here,” said Rev. Micheal Woods, the pastor of Western Carolina Rescue Ministries in Asheville, whose facilities have become a staging point to accept donations and distribute them to the community. Woods told The Epoch Times he wants President Joe Biden and Gov. Roy Cooper (D-N.C.) to make water restoration their top priority.
“I’m down to four water bottles,” said Yoshida Mills, a resident of Asheville who came to collect free water bottles and supplies at a community center. “Give me everything.”
Crime and Looting
The post-flood destruction has birthed another fear: crime. Several citizens reported incidents of looting to The Epoch Times, claiming that looters are targeting damaged and/or abandoned properties—motivated by desperation amid shortages, and opportunity, given many residents have fled.Many fear they will be victims of a home invasion and are taking steps to defend themselves.
“I actually own a gun. I have it loaded and sitting by my bed, and I have a butcher knife and a can of wasp spray. I am afraid at night,” said Feinberg, the retired schoolteacher. “It’s totally dark, and nobody’s around, so just in case the looters decide to venture out, I’m there ... We’re a little nervous about looting.”
Authorities have surged the police and military presence in Asheville to deter looting, with armed peace officers coming from across the country to provide assistance. Police officers from Louisiana were present in the area, The Epoch Times observed.
“We’re here to keep people out of the unsafe areas and to try to be a deterrent for looting,” said Officer C. Kostel, a North Carolina Probation Officer, who was deployed at Tunnel Road. “They pulled in everyone from the other coast, all the way through.”
Queen described the U.S. military presence in the area as “a combination of search, rescue, and avoidance of people doing stupid stuff, like looting.”
Beyond looting, authorities have warned affected residents to be wary of disaster relief scams, where they may be prompted to pay for emergency services that do not come.
The Newly Homeless
After the flooding, many citizens returned to Asheville to find that they had lost everything—homes, cars, and all possessions. Many businesses remain closed; their employees suddenly out of work. Many people are now living with friends and relatives as they process the new reality.“My son and his wife, they lost everything. My mother-in-law lost everything,” said Sharon Parton, a motel operator in Asheville, who has several relatives now living with her. “For the first time in years, I have a full house,” she told The Epoch Times.
“[My grandmother’s] house is condemned. It’s got a big ‘X’ on the side,” said Queen, indicating that the property has been declared dangerous and legally uninhabitable.
The region’s homeless population has grown, and they are relying upon temporary shelters, food banks, and clothes drives to survive. The American Red Cross has set up a temporary shelter for the unhoused at Asheville-Buncombe Technical College.
Randy Stay, a Red Cross volunteer from Arizona, told The Epoch Times that high demand has pushed such facilities to the limit of their capacity.
“It’s full. There’s a waiting list,” Stay said of the Red Cross facility. “We’ve got homeless people from encampments [and] people from houses that aren’t, you know, in the best shape.”
Some community leaders are raising concerns about the latter group of people, who have no previous experience with homelessness. Once shelters close, they say the lack of experience by the newly homeless will increase their suffering.
“This is what most people are not thinking about or seeing. There were people who were housed—they weren’t considered homeless—but they were on the fringe and, now, have lost their housing ... those people are now thrust into the unhoused community,” Woods said.
“That creates a whole different segment of people. That comes with a different mindset ... those that [were homeless] understand how to navigate it ... We’re not set up here locally to handle that [new] segment of the population.”
For now, relief efforts are working to ease that adjustment.
“We are distributing 25,000 meals a day,” volunteer with World Central Kitchen Maria Mora, a food relief organization created by celebrity chef José Andrés, told The Epoch Times.
“We’re going out into the communities and serving them,” her colleague, Erica Burke, said.
The Red Cross facility is providing approximately 200 people with cots, meals, and clothes until longer-term living arrangements can be obtained.
“I imagine [we'll be here] for a couple of weeks. They’re working on trying to get us a place to stay,” said Robin Gilstrap, a veteran who lives at the shelter after evacuating a facility for homeless veterans. He spoke positively of the shelter, though reported that some residents had been kicked out for drug use.
Rising Death Toll
Asheville’s homeless population, in particular, has been the worst affected demographic and makes up a sizable share of the deaths. The floods completely destroyed a large homeless encampment along the French Broad River in Asheville, with many corpses being found.“There were bodies here in the trees. There were eight bodies they pulled out the other day,” Brown said. “We had a homeless population who lived along the railroad and along the river, and most people had nowhere to go,” she said.
“They have a lot of mobile morgues in town, and they’re filled with bodies, and they haven’t been able to report those numbers yet. Those numbers are not part of the death toll, and that will go up by thousands,” she said.
“They’re [still] pulling bodies out of the river,” said Jan Brinkley, a relief worker at Woods’s church.
Search and rescue operations are still underway across the region’s rural communities, with many people still unaccounted for by authorities. Those efforts are taking precedence before concerted efforts to rebuild get underway.
“Displaced individuals are in the thousands,” said Queen.
“What [we’ve] worked on for the past three days is making sure all the staff are safe,” said Kim Fink Adams, a volunteer and teacher at an Asheville-area school. “We’re going to start, just like we did in COVID, accounting for our students [and] tracking them down.”
Just as the death toll rises, the full scale of devastation in Asheville—a popular vacation town for visitors to the Blue Ridge Mountains—is yet to be determined. Almost everyone whom The Epoch Times interviewed predicted that rebuilding will cost “billions of dollars,” which must come from federal aid and will likely reshape the region’s identity.
“It’s our Hurricane Katrina,” Brown said. “[We'll] never totally recover.”
