Mountainside North Carolina towns have been “forever changed” and cut off from the world by the wrath of Hurricane Helene — with residents calling the destruction “absolutely overwhelming.”
“Chimney Rock is just destroyed, it’s forever changed,” said 59-year-old Brett Johnson, a resident of the small tourist town about an hour southeast of Asheville.
“There were beautiful homes all along here, where now there’s just dirt and rocks,” he told The Post. “Where that bank should be there was a brewery, Mexican restaurants, hotels — they’re all just gone.”
Rather than being flooded with tourists, Chimney Rock has spent the days since Hurricane Helene deluged with cops, clean-up crews and engineers from the North Carolina Department of Transportation mapping the damage wrought by the storm that left at least 232 dead across the Southeast.
“On a beautiful day like this, this place would be packed with tourists — packed, packed — but we’re the only ones here. All our neighbors left,” Johnson said.
And the few those who remain, like Johnson and his wife, have referred to themselves as “the sole survivors.”
“There were a few residents around cleaning up their places and gathering what they could but they looked like they were still traumatized,” said 53-year-old Teddy Cooper, who lives down the road in Lake Lure.
“Even though it’s been a week, they still looked shocked.”
“Chimney Rock is utterly devastated,” Cooper said. “Most everything’s gone. The land’s not even there anymore.”
“It’s crazy, it’s unbelievable, it’s insane… This is a happy town, it’s where people come to have fun. Everybody’s used to seeing everyone happy, not this destruction and devastation.”
Helene’s path of destruction
- Helene slammed into Florida’s Big Bend coastline Thursday night as a Category 4 hurricane, pounding the state with 155-mph gusts and killing at least 13.
- Helene moved northeast into Georgia, where it was downgraded to a tropical storm by Friday morning, but winds and floods left 25 dead in the state.
- By Friday afternoon, Helene had moved over parts of Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, where at least 29 died.
- Relentless rain drenched Appalachia Friday night, sending floodwaters and mudslides crashing through mountain towns.
- In North Carolina, at least 35 people died in the Asheville area, and a tornado injured 15 in Rocky Mount.
- Over the weekend, rescuers struggled to clear roads and recover bodies. The death toll is 192 and counting.
Chimney Rock is just one of numerous small towns across Appalachia left ravaged by Hurricane Helene, which remain largely cut off from the outside world due to washed-away roads and ongoing power outages.
Like many of those mountain towns, Chimney Rock was overwhelmed by historic flooding which tore through the region. As Helene blew through — bringing with it once-in-a-thousand-year rains — the local Broad River swelled to ten times its previous size, swallowing up swaths of the town as its banks expanded.
“You could see houses just dropping into the water, one after the after. They fell like dominos and once they hit the water it just ground them up, just chewed them up into nothingness,” said Johnson, who weathered out the storm up the valley wall in the nearby community of Bat Cave.
But few were spared even well above the river. Rains pouring down the mountainsides brought mudslides and ripped the foundations from homes, or sent trees toppling through rooftops — both of which severely damaged Johnson’s house.
“The storm was just angry,” Johnson said. “Where we live, mid-mountain, it has to have been a tornado because all the monster trees are just twisted.”
The local communities are barely able to even reach one another. Just days ago Bat Cave and Chimney Rock were connected by a 2.4-mile road — now only about 300 yards of that route remains intact. Lake Lure and Chimney Rock have been completely cut off, with police stopping people from attempting the now perilous route.
“For the last three or four days helicopters have been constantly flying up and down the gorge looking for bodies,” Johnson said. “All our food is rapidly, rapidly deteriorating.”
Aside from 2005’s Hurricane Katrina — where over 1,000 died when New Orleans’ levees broke — Helene has become the deadliest hurricane to hit the US in nearly half a century.
The death toll is only expected to rise, as responders continue to comb through the wreckage for hundreds of missing people and communities grapple with ongoing power losses and tainted water supplies.
Once the Johnsons repair their home’s foundation and pull a 150-foot tree out of their living room roof, they intend to spend the next year living in an RV away from Bat Cave and Chimney Rock — and are unsure how long it will be before the communities are able to rebuild even the most basic infrastructure.
“There won’t be a car drive up the road to our house for at least another year,” Johnson said.
