3,000 feet in Elevation and Wiped out by a Hurricane?!?
Hurricane Helene notes
I’ve been in survival mode for the past 5 days as my area was completely wrecked by Hurricane Helene. Our mountain town was completely obliterated by a hurricane, it’s unheard of, we were unprepared, and it’s literally catastrophic.
The road is literally missing beyond this bridge.
Before I go any further, here are ways to donate SPECIFICALLY to my county:
Rebuilding one of the towns that was completely wiped out
As you know if you’ve followed me for any amount of time, I live in the North Carolina Mountains, the Blue Ridge Mountain section of the Appalachian Mountains, in a rural community on the Tennessee/Virginia/North Carolina border.
We’ve gotten smacked with wind and rain from “hurricanes” before (usually by the time they make it to us they’re not hurricanes, of course) but we’re 300+ miles from the coast of North Carolina and over 700 miles from where Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida - AND - we’re over 3,000 feet in elevation. We are the place people come to when they evacuate at the coasts for hurricanes!
This was like nothing I’ve ever seen and will likely be the most catastrophic event in my area…ever?
And, as a footnote, people are MAD that they can’t get here to vacation right now or that their vacation rental is under water.
We were warned that we were going to get lots of rain but it wasn’t like we were advised to evacuate or anything like that because it floods here quite often, we’ve all dealt with low-water bridges being closed and minor mud slides and power outages, so it wasn’t even something we were worried about.
I didn’t stock up on extra water, I didn’t stock up on food, I prepared with some water drawn in the bathtub so we could flush our toilets for MAYBE a few hours without power, but we weren’t that worried about it - nobody was, I’ve not talked to a single person who actually thought anything was going to be out of the normal storm situation.
To be honest, I didn’t even feel like the storm was that bad and that feels really weird to say because CLEARLY it was. It started Thursday night here with rain and wind and the bulk of the rain and wind happened on Friday morning. Our power went out around 7:30am Friday and we played a cut-throat game of Monopoly that my husband won while we watched it rain.
And as we played, the water in our creek rose further and further and further until it “got out” and became a full river, engulfing our driveway which has never happened in the 5+ years we’ve lived there. But still, we were like, “oh wow!” and we were worried because we couldn’t tell if our driveway was washing away or if our culvert was going to be pulled out (aka, we wouldn’t be able to leave our driveway), but we weren’t like OVERLY worried.
My husband standing in our driveway at the end of the storm
An old photo but this is how our driveway NORMALLY looks, in the flood photo my husband is standing in the same point as the bicycles in this photo.
Our cell service got knocked out with the power and, once the storm started to die down, we decided to try and get out to see how other people were doing and we were SHOCKED.
We didn’t make it 1/2 a mile before there were neighbors cutting trees out of the road and we were having to duck under power lines, and that was the case every few feet.
Our entire neighborhood was flooded, houses had water in them, and as we got closer to the river (we live about 3 miles from the river), it got so much worse!
This is the bridge we have to cross to get home and I need to you to understand for a minute that the water level is normally THIRTY FEET below the bridge, like if you would have told me I’d EVER see the river be touching (or in) this bridge even with the most catastrophic flooding, I would have laughed in your face.
But the river had risen THIRTY feet, and that was after it spread out for ACRES into the pastures around it.
We saw a propane tank barreling down the river here, a refrigerator, furniture, buildings, kayaks (there’s still a kayak in a tree about 40 feet high), etc.
I think this was the point when we knew it was bad, like bad bad.
We spent the new few hours dodging downed trees and power lines and mudslides and trying to get to our loved ones to check on them.
It took us FOUR HOURS to get to town to finally get cell signal and get to a part that wasn’t as affect. This is normally a 15 minute drive.
The road leading to my parents was completely gone on one side and everywhere we went we were met with another obstacle. As we saw neighbors and other people trying to get out too we heard that the town right next to us (like, literally a few mins from my house) was completely underwater, that people were having to swim out of buildings, that stores had their windows blown out, that full houses were floating down the streets.
And it was all true.
This is a post office, that dirty line about a foot above the door and boxes was how far the water came in, it was about a foot over my reach and I’m 5’6”.
Full houses were just uprooted from their foundations and were floating down the road.
We know of 20+ houses, just that we KNOW of, that floated away completely, and that many or more that were completely under water.
There’s a bunch of debris in this one part of the road we drive to town that I couldn’t figure out what it was - it was a house, a whole house just floated and broke apart as it was floating down the street. This was NOWHERE near the river BTW, there’s a creek in this area but that’s it.
Actually, MOST of the areas that had damage weren’t insanely close to the river, the creeks were flowing at insanely large sizes and speeds, and Hurricane Helene was just making her own creeks and rivers where there weren’t any before.
Now, 5 days later, we’re left with SO MUCH havoc. I am still without power but, like, whatever, I’m ok. Thankfully none of the roads near our house were completely washed away so I can still get to town and to our family’s houses where there is power, but SO MUCH of the county wasn’t that lucky.
There are people trapped because their roads are just gone.
There are elderly people without medicines or food or water because they can’t get out and people can’t get to them.
My husband has spent the last several days helping dig cars and houses and driveways out so people can try and make it to town to get supplies.
Our volunteer fire departments on my end of the county are literally taking water and food and supplies into people BY HORSE, atvs, on foot, whatever, to get supplies to them.
And we are looking at WEEKS (and maybe a month in some areas) without power for a huge chunk of our county.
We’re RURAL, and I mean RURAL, we don’t have good cell service ANYWAY, we have a lot of roads that are rough to drive on on a good day, and it is quite far from house to house in some places. So the issues that this would cause in normal places is about 10x worse here.
We don’t seem to be getting a lot of help from other power companies either, which is so frustrating to see. 50% of our county is still without power 5 days later and I have literally seen like 1 truck working in the last 5 days and it was a local truck. We should be BOMBARDED by help, I should be seeing trucks everywhere, but I’m not because they’re going other places that are getting more media attention, I guess.
We talked to one of the emergency management workers on Sunday and they had lined up all these electric company crews to come up here and help and TWO showed up.
Asheville and Boone got hit hard too and they need help too, but I feel like we’re getting forgotten about because we’re smaller and more rural and until yesterday, when we got cell service back, most of our county was without any way to communicate with the outside world, which is why I’m trying to share on any forum I can.
We need power companies up here helping, we need phone companies up here helping, we need volunteers to bring in supplies and hike supplies into places, we need people with equipment to come help rebuild roads so people can get out, because we don’t have the infrastructure to get it done on our own.
We don’t have enough state workers here to plow all of the roads in the county when it snows in an appropriate amount of time so we definitely don’t have the people or equipment to rebuild 100+ roads or get people out of their homes.
Most of the road clearing that’s happened (removing trees, etc) have been by our community - boys with trucks and chainsaws, so we need more of that!
Natural disasters are WILD, I don’t have another word for it. They’re especially wild when they take you by surprise, I think. It feels like we were hit by a huge tornado that nobody saw coming, more than a hurricane because we just had no warning.
Most people went to work Friday morning.
Like, school was called off because of potential low-water bridges flooding but that’s not abnormal.
And then our County was just forever changed in a 2 hours time period.
WILD.
Anyway, I’m ok, my family is ok, my house is fine, our animals are fine, but I can’t say the same for so many others - we literally don’t even know a death count because we can’t even get to so many areas.
Please help if you can by donating to the links above, and if you have man-power of any kind and would like to try and get here to help, email me at howdy@jessicastansberry.com and we’ll try and help arrange that. I don’t have power so I’m not checking emails super often, but Bridgette, my operations manager, is in a rental house with power and internet because her roof blew off of our house (😳) so she can help direct you to the right places.
Even sharing this post or my post on Instagram so that people see that there’s a small rural community that nobody’s ever heard of needing help would be extremely helpful.
Sorry so for all the people who are going through this. Made a donation to try to provide a little help.