CANTON, N.C. — Doris Towers awoke to the beeping of her husband’s dialysis machine early Friday morning, meaning it had lost power. Her neighbor’s Christmas lights, still up from last year, had gone out. Those were early hints of Helene’s destruction to come. She hadn’t known a storm was on the way.
Across the mountains in Swannanoa, Joe Dancy and Jenna Shaw got up before dawn to walk their dog and saw floodwaters creeping toward their house. An hour later, after climbing out a window and plunging into swelling waters, a National Guard soldier helped them to safety.
Before this scenic, rustic Great Smoky Mountains refuge turned into a trap few residents saw coming, there were signs of Hurricane Helene’s unthinkable potential. Two days before the storm deluged Appalachian hillsides, dire forecasts warned it could bring “life-threatening” floods to the mountains around Asheville after making landfall in Florida. In hindsight, one local emergency manager called the predictions “spot on, terrifyingly so.”
Yet many said the torrential rains and flash floods — which have claimed an untold number of lives — caught them unprepared, and they had little chance for escape even if they had tried.
Treacherous terrain and isolated geography would have made an exodus dangerous and logistically challenging here, disaster experts said. There are few ways in or out of any community, and there are no round blue signs indicating hurricane evacuation routes here as there were where the storm made landfall.
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Besides, residents said they could not have imagined what it would look like for the forecasts to become such a sobering reality, with major highways and whole neighborhoods washed away.
“You just can’t wrap your head around what that means here,” said Allison Richmond, public information officer for Haywood County’s emergency services office.
But that could all change now. Helene, she said, “is going to change how we think about storms in the mountains.”
A hurricane ‘with the fingerprints of climate change’
The storm was unlike any experienced by anyone who has lived in this rugged region for decades. The great flood of 1916 produced mass destruction and killed 80 people after two tropical systems collided — but that was more than a century ago.
More recently, Hurricanes Frances and Ivan brought floods in 2004, and Fred hit Haywood County especially hard three years ago.
But Helene sent western North Carolina river levels several feet higher than any other storm on record.
Before it even arrived, moisture streaming out ahead of the storm poured as much as a foot of rain over the region. When the storm’s center passed over saturated ground Friday, it pushed rain totals as high as 20 to 30 inches — as much rain in less than three days as would typically fall in three to five Septembers.
The air carried higher levels of Gulf moisture than meteorologists had ever seen — something scientists have warned will come with human-caused climate change. Warmer air is capable of holding more moisture, raising potential for heavier downpours.
“This has the fingerprints of climate change on it,” said Kathie Dello, North Carolina’s state climatologist.
But residents didn’t need any meteorology expertise to know how extreme the storm was.
“I was born in these mountains,” 55-year-old Tim Taylor said Saturday at a shelter in Asheville. Of what he saw driving from his home on a fruitless search for food and gas: “It’s unreal.”
A historic storm that exceeded expectations — and preparations
In a special alert Wednesday night, the National Weather Service told residents in the region to “prepare for catastrophic, life-threatening flooding.” That same day, the governor and some local governments issued states of emergency; officials started to warn residents to prepare to leave, especially those living along flood-prone streams and rivers.
“I fear that our friends west of Haywood County may not fully realize the dangers ahead,” Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers wrote on social media on Wednesday, as the forecasts became more ominous.
But the officials did not order them to leave, and they acknowledged there was no way to know how many people saw and heeded the warnings.
The next morning, still a day before the worst of the storm, officials in neighboring Buncombe County — home to Asheville — told residents that some areas were already starting to flood and urged them to take action.
“Our hope is you will take action now to prepare yourselves and your loved ones,” county manager Avril Pinder said in a news conference.
The Weather Service’s warnings of “catastrophic” flooding should be heeded, Pinder said.
Taylor Jones, the county's director of emergency services, told the public that search and rescue teams had already plucked several trapped residents from high waters and again urged residents of low-lying areas to leave.
And he told them that, if necessary, residents cell phones would ping with wireless alerts if the situation became dire.
According to data obtained by The Washington Post, that happened at 6:15 a.m. Friday, when the county sent its first warning via wireless emergency alerts to cellphones: “High water can cause loss of life and property. MOVE to high ground, AWAY from water, do not delay.”
The county sent five similar alerts that day, warning of high waters and of dams at critical levels. None were in Spanish. About 7 percent of Buncombe County’s residents — 19,100 people — are Hispanic or Latino.
In much of this region, Dello said, internet access is limited, and cellphone signals can be poor at best. Of those who received the warnings, many may not have had the resources to flee, a place to go or time off work to do it, she said.
And even in flood- and hurricane-prone areas such as Florida’s Gulf Coast, where emergency management is more dialed and evacuations are well-practiced, the process is still “extremely complicated,” said Samantha Montano, a disaster and emergency management expert.
“I think in this case it very well could have been more deadly if they had called for widespread evacuations and people were stuck on mountain roads,” said Montano, an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy.
Finally getting a sliver of service after making his way into the ransacked town of Black Mountain outside of Asheville, Evan Fisher, a meteorologist who posted warnings about the “worst case scenario” for his home region, told The Post on Monday afternoon that he doesn’t know how much more he and other experts could have done.
“The messaging could have been stronger,” he suggested. “But we have to cut officials some slack because it doesn’t make any sense what happened.”
Around 10 a.m. Friday, the mountains just seemed to burst open; rivers and streams rerouted themselves, and the ground became too saturated to hold the water.
“The water just came from somewhere,” he said. “It just rolled off the mountain.”
Besides, it’s the sort of place where people’s plan is self-sufficiency. Even he did not leave.
For a community of Cherokee people in the mountains west of Asheville, there is even less reason to evacuate — they are there because their ancestors hid from colonists.
“We’ve already been evacuated from here. The Trail of Tears,” said Susie Long, a 73-year-old who has lived on the Cherokee reservation her whole life.
What Helene could mean for the future
Flooding rain was falling the day Scot Collins interviewed to become a school guidance counselor in Haywood County two years ago. So when he and his wife, Terrie, searched for a home here — in a move from Florida that they thought would lessen their hurricane risks — they chose one close to a mountaintop.
In Florida, they kept jugs of water on hand “because that’s what you do”; in North Carolina, they live near a natural spring, where they scooped up water to flush toilets after Helene knocked out the region’s utilities.
Their neighbor here used an ATV to reach help when land started sliding into his home.
“People here get resourceful,” Terrie Collins said.
Will Helene change how the region prepares for disaster? Smathers, a Canton native in his second term as the city’s mayor, said that in his mind, the western North Carolina of the past ceased to exist Friday.
He wonders: Even so far from the coast, is it now in Hurricane Row? Could the next flood be as bad, or worse?
“You have to make decisions and plan, not in the world that you wish that was, but the world that is,” Smathers said. “How can we not?”
And those little blue evacuation signs? “That might be something that we have to start looking at,” he said.
After all, this is the second massive flood to strike North Carolina in as many weeks. A tropical system inundated coastal areas including Carolina Beach with as much as 20 inches of rain Sept. 16. Had that storm strengthened ever so slightly, the National Hurricane Center would have named it Helene.
Allyson Chiu and Dan Stillman contributed to this report.
